Welcome to Issue #20
"The sports business is not that hard. Just think like a fan and 9.5 times out of 10 that's probably the right answer”
Brian Rolapp - PGA Tour CEO
What’s on my mind this week
How do I get an invitation from Mark Wahlberg? Gary Woodland’s story is remarkable, Justin Thomas likes a weather app, I’ve also decided not to have an apparel deal this season, is the 17th at TPC Sawgrass the greatest par 3 on earth? I had back problems long before it was fashionable, only 27 days to the Masters.
In the news
Why it matters: Shares of Callaway Golf Company have surged more than 50% over the past six months. After selling Jack Wolfskin and divesting a majority stake in Topgolf to Leonard Green & Partners, the company is refocusing on its core equipment and apparel brands.
Our Take: Investors often penalise companies that mix fundamentally different business models. Equipment and entertainment venues operate on very different economics. By doubling down on high-margin brands like Callaway Golf, Odyssey Golf and TravisMathew, management simplified the story. The market appears to prefer a focused golf equipment company over a hybrid entertainment platform.
Why it matters: The PGA Tour announced plans to split into two tiers by 2028, implementing promotion and relegation whilst reducing fully exempt membership from 125 to 100 players immediately.
Our Take: This addresses what media partners have been saying quietly, there are too many weak fields which dilutes the product value. Two-track promotion and relegation restores meritocracy whilst ensuring star-versus-star competition more frequently. Media buyers pay for compelling matchups, not depth of field. The resistance will be fierce from players losing guaranteed spots and secondary markets facing Track B events, but the commercial logic is sound. If reduced fields improve television ratings, the reform accelerates regardless of political opposition.
Why it matters: Korean simulator leader GolfZon has strengthened its U.S. leadership team, appointing Sean Pyun, former LPGA Chief Business Officer, to lead its American operations and global business initiatives from Virginia.
Our Take: The move highlights where simulator growth is accelerating. The U.S. remains the largest commercial market for off-course golf, spanning entertainment venues, coaching facilities and residential installations. By building leadership closer to key partners like the United States Golf Association and Troon, GolfZon is prioritising proximity to demand rather than manufacturing. The simulator industry is no longer a niche training tool. It is becoming a core growth engine for the sport.
Pic from GolfZon
Worth your time
Read: A good walk spoiled John Feinstein provides a captivating, behind-the-scenes look at the intense psychological pressures of professional golf.
Watch: The Players Championship Island Green from an amateur's perspective A humbling reality check on just how difficult that 137-yard shot at TPC Sawgrass actually is.
Follow: Greg Isenberg on YouTube If you're trying to get your head around AI and the million tools, this guy does the best simple explainers out there.
TV: New Netflix golf comedy starring Will Ferrell. Dying to find out more about this. Due out mid-2026.
Feature story
Golf's new gatekeepers: Why creative direction now matters more than tour sponsorships
Pic from Honma
Golf's creative power has shifted, and most brands haven't noticed yet.
The people now shaping how golf looks, feels, and sells aren't coming from inside the sport. They're arriving from fashion houses, streetwear labels, and creative agencies that had zero relationship with golf a decade ago. The brands that recognised this shift early are winning commercially. They're succeeding because they replaced traditional marketing briefs with authentic cultural direction.
Here's what changed, why it matters, and what it means for anyone investing in or operating golf brands in 2026.
The closed loop has collapsed
For legacy equipment and apparel brands, creative direction traditionally meant tour-approved colourways and maximum logo visibility on global broadcasts. Success was measured by professional adoption, not cultural relevance. This model worked because golf operated as a closed loop. The consumers buying the equipment were the same people watching the tour. Professional validation sold the product.
That loop broke when golf collided with streetwear and luxury fashion.
Younger consumers now choose sports based on identity and community alignment. Golf has evolved beyond a participation activity into a lifestyle category that people wear, post about, and use to signal taste. Publications like Kingdom Magazine and The 19th Hole reach audiences in the millions by focusing on fashion collaborations and cultural tastemakers rather than swing mechanics. The brands meeting this audience succeeded because they prioritised cultural understanding over golf industry experience.
The numbers support this. Direct-to-consumer golf apparel brands have grown significantly faster than traditional wholesale models over the past three years. Brands with strong cultural positioning command pricing premiums that have nothing to do with technical performance specifications.
Pic from Eastside Golf
Malbon Golf's "culture-inward" strategy
Malbon Golf represents the clearest example of this evolution. Founded in 2017 by Stephen and Erica Malbon, the brand didn't approach golf from the inside out. It used what I'd call a "culture-inward" strategy, drawing heavily from streetwear and surf aesthetics.
The creative vision was never handed to a golf industry veteran. Instead, it was built by people who understood how brands earn credibility in modern fashion. Malbon now occupies a position where it sits comfortably in conversations about both sport and luxury, an extraordinarily difficult commercial position to sustain.
This positioning allows the brand to command premium pricing uncoupled from traditional product specifications. A Malbon polo costs more than a tour-endorsed alternative not because it performs better, but because it signals different cultural capital.
The collaborations reinforce this. Malbon x Honma golf clubs, partnerships with luxury hotels, capsule collections with streetwear brands. These aren't standard licensing deals. They're curated partnerships that feel intentional rather than transactional.
The Swingman effect: Eastside Golf and cultural authority
The Eastside Golf story is even more instructive about the power of creative direction divorced from traditional golf industry logic.
Co-founder Olajuwon Ajanaku was a national champion at Morehouse College who spent years trying to secure traditional sponsorships as a professional. When the golf industry remained resistant, he made a decision that would redefine the category.
He developed a logo showing himself mid-swing whilst wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and a gold chain. The Swingman logo functioned as a cultural statement about who golf was for and who it had historically excluded.
When Chris Paul wore an Eastside Golf sweatshirt on national television in 2020, sales surged. This momentum led to something unprecedented: Michael Jordan proposing the first-ever golf shoe collaboration under the Jordan Brand.
Eastside Golf has since grown into a multi-million-dollar operation with major retail partnerships including Adidas and Dick's Sporting Goods. This growth was driven by a specific cultural point of view, not a standard product brief.
Similarly, Blackballed Golf, co-founded by Matt Daniels, has focused on providing an avenue for diverse golfers to express themselves through apparel. These brands aren't just making clothes. They're building channels for self-expression in a sport that previously lacked them.
The commercial implications are significant. These brands prove that cultural authority can substitute for traditional distribution advantages. You don't need tour sponsorships or retail relationships if you control the narrative about who your product is for.
Pic from Yahoo Sports
What creative directors actually do commercially
It's important to be precise about the commercial role these new gatekeepers play. A strong creative director operating in 2026 performs several functions that traditional product teams don't:
Community signalling: They build and signal community long before a product reaches the shelf. The brand becomes a marker of identity, not just a purchase decision.
Selective collaboration: They identify which partnerships carry cultural weight and which are merely transactional. Not every collaboration drives brand value. The wrong partnership actively damages positioning.
Authentic embedding: They understand the difference between a brand genuinely embedded in a culture and one that simply borrows visual language. Consumers, particularly younger ones, recognise the difference immediately.
Legacy brands traditionally think in terms of earned coverage in trade publications. Creative-led brands prioritise cultural conversation. They care about who is talking about the brand and in what context.
This marketing logic compounds differently over time. Brands that have transitioned successfully see stronger direct-to-consumer performance and higher loyalty amongst younger demographics. The value is generated by creative positioning rather than R&D investment alone.
The Fleetwood signal: professionalism unbranded
In early 2026, a revealing signal arrived from the professional ranks.
Tommy Fleetwood arrived at the Dubai Invitational without his Nike apparel for the first time in sixteen years. Rather than signing a new exclusive deal, he appeared in Vuori, a California performance brand with minimal prior presence in professional golf.
Fleetwood has since been spotted in Sun Day Red and Malbon, describing his current phase as a "logo-flexing era." The fact that a player of his stature walked away from a legacy deal to curate his own wardrobe is a significant indicator of shifted power.
He's no longer concerned with which brand has the largest distribution deal. He's thinking as a consumer with genuine aesthetic sensibility. The brands watching Fleetwood aren't calculating the cost to sign him. They're asking why a world-class athlete chooses to wear their product without a financial incentive.
This matters because professional adoption has historically validated product for consumers. But Fleetwood's choices suggest validation now flows in reverse. Consumer brands with cultural credibility can attract professional athletes organically, without paying for endorsements.
The risk of aesthetic appropriation
Not every legacy brand has navigated this shift successfully. The most common error is adopting aesthetics without cultural investment.
A legacy brand commissions a capsule collection that borrows the visual language of streetwear without the community or story behind it. Consumers recognise this as performative. A brand attempting to appear more culturally connected than it actually is can actively damage its reputation with the audience it's trying to reach.
The second mistake involves treating cultural relevance as a temporary campaign rather than fundamental transformation. The brands winning in 2026 have changed who sits in the room when brand decisions are made. They've given creative directors real authority, not decorative titles.
I've watched several legacy golf brands hire "creative directors" who report to product managers trained in traditional golf marketing. The structure guarantees failure. If your creative director can't say no to a bad collaboration or override a decision based on quarterly sales targets, you haven't actually shifted strategy.
What legacy brands are getting right
It's worth noting that not all traditional brands are failing to adapt. Some are responding intelligently.
FootJoy has launched its FJ Sport line with a deliberate move towards lifestyle positioning whilst maintaining its performance heritage. The execution isn't as culturally sharp as Malbon, but it demonstrates awareness that the market has shifted.
Peter Millar has successfully straddled premium performance and lifestyle positioning for years by focusing on quality and understated design rather than chasing trends. Their strategy proves that traditional approaches can still work if execution is excellent and positioning is clear.
Ralph Lauren Golf continues to command premium pricing by leaning into heritage and aspiration rather than competing on cultural edge. They've accepted they won't be the choice for 25-year-old streetwear enthusiasts, and they've optimised for the audience that values what they offer.
The lesson isn't that every brand needs to hire a streetwear creative director. It's that every brand needs to understand which cultural conversation it wants to participate in and staff accordingly.
Solving the identity problem
Golf is currently navigating a genuine challenge regarding its relevance to younger demographics. Whilst participation numbers remain strong, sustaining growth requires the sport to feel welcoming to new participants who have numerous other options for their time and money.
The brands succeeding in this environment aren't merely solving a participation problem. They're solving an identity problem. They make golf feel like a choice someone makes because of who they are, not just what they do on weekends.
Traditional golf marketing sold aspiration through professional performance. Hit it like Rory, dress like the tour. New entrants sell belonging through community and cultural signalling. Wear what your reference group wears. Play because it's part of your lifestyle identity.
Both approaches can work. But the brands struggling are those caught in between, unclear about which conversation they're joining and who they're speaking to.
What this means for brands, operators, and investors
If you're operating in the golf industry, several implications follow from this shift:
For brand operators: Creative direction is now a strategic function. If your creative decisions are made by product managers optimising for quarterly sell-through, you're ceding ground to competitors who've given creative authority real power.
For investors: Brand value increasingly sits in cultural positioning rather than distribution relationships or professional tour sponsorships. When evaluating golf brands, ask who controls creative direction and whether they have authority to refuse partnerships that would dilute positioning.
For retailers: Brands with strong cultural positioning drive higher margins and more loyal customers but require different merchandising approaches. They can't sit alongside commodity competitors. Curation matters.
For tour organisations and governing bodies: Professional golf still validates products, but the mechanism has changed. Players choosing brands organically because they align with their personal aesthetic carries more weight than paid endorsements. Creating space for player expression serves everyone's commercial interests.
The brands that will define golf's next decade aren't the ones with the biggest tour sponsorships. They're the ones giving creative authority to people who understand culture as deeply as they understand the sport.
One thing from history
Nike Golf: When improvisation built a brand
Pic from Instagram
In 1985, Nike was a running shoe company attempting its first serious expansion into golf. Michael Jordan was a rising star in the NBA and Tiger Woods was only eight years old. Nike required a world-class golfer to validate its entry into a traditional sport. They signed Seve Ballesteros.
Nike’s initial marketing featured Ballesteros on a tree branch with an iron in hand and an orange Nike shirt. The poster headline read: "No Problema." This referred to Seve’s reputation for escaping impossible positions such as in car parks and dense woods. The image captured the bold and unconventional identity Nike sought to establish in the sport.
By the 1986 Masters, the brand faced a logistical hurdle. Ballesteros was a leader heading into the final round, which offered maximum television visibility. However, Nike did not yet manufacture golf visors. Ballesteros had worn a standard tournament visor all week, but he wanted the Nike logo visible for the Sunday broadcast.
To solve the problem, the team improvised. They took a standard visor and attached a double Nike swoosh to it. This resulted in an accidental icon. Although Ballesteros didn’t win the tournament, Jack Nicklaus did, the double-swoosh visor became a significant talking point. Nike had no formal product roadmap for headwear at the time. They simply solved a branding challenge in real time.
This approach defined the early years of Nike’s golf business. The company prioritised betting on a player who embodied their brand values and then managed product development as they grew. Decades later, Nike would sign Rory McIlroy to a deal worth over $200 million. That global dominance began with a single player on a tree branch and a modified visor.
Some of the most significant brand moments are not the result of long-term planning. They are the result of agility and a deep understanding of brand identity under pressure.
Have a good week. Until next Friday,
David