What every golf brand can learn from Manors

“There are no shortcuts on the quest for perfection”

Ben Hogan

What’s on my mind this week

The RBC Canadian Open is one of the best national opens, discuss. Scott O’Neill earning his wages this week, watching 17-year-olds qualify for the US Open while I'm still working on breaking 90, Phil Mickelson is OB again, St Andrew’s thinks it’s winter, Malbon x Jackson Koivun, maybe?, Rick Shiels reaching 1 billion views on YouTube is insane.

Cohen joins Blank and Ohanian as WTGL founding owners

Why it matters: TMRW Sports announced on 9 June that Steve Cohen and Cohen Private Ventures will own the New York franchise in WTGL, the women's team golf league launching this autumn at SoFi Center, joining Arthur Blank's Atlanta franchise and Alexis Ohanian's Los Angeles Golf Club as founding ownership groups.

Our Take: This isn't a one-off. It's a pattern. The same ownership groups that bet on TGL men's are now committing capital to the women's counterpart before WTGL has played a single match. Cohen already owns TGL's New York Golf Club and a stake in PGA Tour Enterprises, so this is portfolio extension rather than a new bet on the category. TGL franchise valuations sit in the $50 million range, and WTGL ownership groups are implicitly betting that women's team golf can develop into a meaningful franchise asset over time rather than a sponsorship-led exhibition product. Like TGL before it, WTGL is using franchise scarcity as a value-creation mechanism, asking investors to buy a limited number of assets before the market has established what those assets are worth. The player roster (Brooke Henderson, Charley Hull, Lydia Ko, Lexi Thompson, Celine Boutier among 14 committed) gives the league a credible product. The harder question is whether women's golf can sustain primetime broadcast economics on its own, or whether WTGL becomes a derivative asset whose value depends on the TGL platform around it.