Welcome to Issue #38
"I don't think he could find the fairway today if he was standing in the middle of it with a map and a flashlight”
David Feherty
What’s on my mind this week
Jake Knapp with as close to an ace (without being an ace) as possible at the 3M, Ryan Fox challenging Aaron Rai for the nice-guy major winner of the year award, DP World Tour’s phone is hopping this week, ‘de-greened’ is definitely a thing, the rules of golf have never been a hotter topic this week, maybe all my game is missing is a Miguel style warm-up, my stowaway strategy is underway for the €17k Ryder Cup cruise liner.
In the news
Why it matters: The Asian Tour, PGA Tour and DP World Tour announced a multi-year strategic partnership on the 21st of July, formally integrating the Asian Tour into the mainstream professional golf ecosystem after five years of alignment with LIV Golf, which had funded the Asian Tour's International Series and used its top-two-player pathway as a development pipeline into LIV.
Our Take: The governance implications for LIV are significant. The International Series, launched in 2022 with $300 million of PIF funding, was structured as a Chapter One qualifying tier for LIV Golf, with the top two players each season earning promotion to the main league. That pathway is no longer under LIV's control. Under the new arrangement, the Asian Tour retains its schedule but reorients its development route through the DP World Tour and PGA Tour cross-eligibility framework, which materially reduces the Asian Tour's dependency on Saudi capital. The strategic calculation for the three tours is straightforward. Rolapp and Kinnings gain a formal Asia-Pacific development pipeline into their unified system at the exact moment LIV is under fundraising pressure. For LIV, the loss is not just the pathway itself but the credibility of running a self-contained golf ecosystem. A disruptor tour with no feeder league and no viable promotion mechanism reverts to being an exhibition product with 54 salaried players. The next question is what the Asian Tour's existing International Series contracts look like from 2027 onwards, and whether LIV retains any operational tie to the schedule.
Why it matters: Ryder Cup Europe and the PGA of America announced that Stripe has signed a multi-year agreement to become a Worldwide Partner and Official Payment Solutions Partner of the Ryder Cup, covering the 2027 match at Adare Manor and the 2029 match at Hazeltine, joining Rolex, DP World, Capgemini, SAP and Smurfit Westrock in the top-tier partner roster.
Our Take: The interesting shift is category expansion. Payment infrastructure has historically been treated as an operational vendor decision at major sporting events, procured through commercial tender rather than sold as premium sponsorship inventory. Stripe becoming a Worldwide Partner reframes that dynamic. The Ryder Cup is treating payments as a strategic sponsorship category alongside logistics (DP World), timekeeping (Rolex) and technology consulting (Capgemini, SAP). The economics work for both sides. For the Ryder Cup, the deal deepens an existing PGA of America partnership Stripe signed in 2023 for financial infrastructure modernisation and monetises payment technology as a discrete sponsorship revenue stream. For Stripe, the deal delivers proof-point exposure at a global sporting event where 70,000 square feet of merchandise space at Bethpage 2025 signals the operational scale involved. The broader implication is that payment infrastructure is now a sponsorship category in its own right, one other fintech companies are likely to watch closely.
Why it matters: Graham Sports & Entertainment Partners and Bolt Ventures have jointly invested in MyGolfSpy, the independent equipment testing and consumer platform that reaches approximately 17 million unique readers annually. The deal adds MyGolfSpy to David Blitzer's growing Bolt Ventures golf portfolio, which now includes the Hurricane Junior Golf Tour, the Texas Junior Golf Tour, Source Golf and stakes in TMRW Sports and TGL.
Our Take: The investment case rests on infrastructure ownership. Blitzer, co-founder of Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment (which owns the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils), has spent 2026 systematically acquiring or backing golf assets across four distinct layers. Junior development pathways at HJGT and Texas Junior. Creator content distribution at Source Golf. Team-format competition at TGL. And now independent consumer media at MyGolfSpy. Read individually, each deal looks like a standalone golf bet. Read together, the pattern describes an operator building the vertically integrated infrastructure that determines how new golfers enter the game, what content they consume, what equipment they buy, and where they eventually compete. MyGolfSpy is the most strategically interesting piece because it sits closest to purchase decisions. Independent equipment testing shapes consumer buying behaviour in a category where OEMs spend hundreds of millions on marketing. Ownership of that testing layer creates strategic leverage with both consumers and manufacturers. Expect further consolidation as institutional capital recognises that golf's most valuable assets are increasingly the ones that sit above the tours rather than inside them.
Pic from DP World Tour
Worth your time
Read: When Agents Go Shopping: Marketing In The Age Of AI. An interesting Forbes article which is worth 5 mins if you sell anything online
Follow: For interesting and funny golf content on Instagram, give Tyler Williams a follow
Watch: The story of Ryan Fox, Champion Golfer of the Year told by DP World Tour, brilliant watch
Feature Story
How one forgotten part of the golf experience became the launchpad for a national brand
Bryce Rech was bored.
He'd built companies before. He'd sold companies before. He had financial flexibility and the experience to do almost anything. But sitting around wondering what came next wasn't his style. So, he decided to do something simpler, dive headfirst into his passion, golf.
That lasted about six weeks.
"I wanted to play golf every day and just live that lifestyle," he said. "But I quickly realised I was wasting a lot of potential sitting around on a golf course not doing anything productive."
One afternoon, he was playing at a nice course. He walked into the turn house halfway through his round and ordered a hotdog. It was forgettable. Not terrible. Just unmemorable. The kind of experience nobody thinks about twice.
Bryce couldn't stop thinking about it.
He woke up one morning and told his wife he was going to start a hotdog company. She thought he was crazy. He wasn't entirely sure she was wrong. But he'd learned something in his previous businesses: the best opportunities often start as a small observation that won't leave you alone. Something broken that everyone else has accepted.
So, he decided to understand the problem before he solved it. He rang thousands of golf courses and players and asked a simple question: What hotdog do you serve or eat at the turn?
The answers were remarkable. Eighty-five percent of those asked didn't know. They couldn't name the brand. They didn't know the supplier. Most couldn't even tell him if it was beef or pork. At thousands of courses across America, in the middle of the round, when members were thirsty and hungry and focused on their game, the turn house was serving one of the most consumed products on the property.
And nobody had stopped to think about it strategically.
Every course sold thousands of hotdogs. Almost nobody knew whose they were. Bryce had discovered one of golf's most purchased products was also one of its least differentiated.
What he'd found
Bryce understood something most founders never figure out.
He hadn't just found a better hotdog.
He'd found a better way to enter a market.
A concentrated group of passionate consumers. A distribution problem waiting to be solved. Instead of trying to sell everywhere, Bryce chose a different route: own one community, build credibility there, then let adjacent markets come to you.
Launch came in October 2024. The strategy was unconventional. No paid advertising. No influencer campaigns. Just a genuinely good product placed in golf clubs where passionate consumers would notice it and talk about it.
Within six months, they had placement at the PGA Championship. That should have been a year three milestone. The fact that it happened in month six was the moment Bryce understood the strategy was working faster than he'd projected. Golfers were already becoming his best advocates.
The moment it clicked
There's a story Bryce tells about the Ryder Cup. He was wearing a Gleezy hat. A golf fan approached him and offered to buy it off his head. Right then. Right there. He wanted the hat that badly.
That was the moment Bryce realised something had shifted. People didn't just like the product. People cared about the brand.
It's a small moment. But it's also the moment when a founder understands that they've built something beyond a commodity. Something that carries meaning in a community.
Why golf became a platform
Golf wasn't a horizontal market to penetrate. It was a concentrated community with specific advantages.
First: obsessive consumers. Golfers spend hours on a single course. They return repeatedly. They build relationships with staff. They notice when something changes. This isn't casual retail. This is a community that pays attention.
Second: distribution without friction. Unlike retail stores scattered across cities, a golf club is a gathering point. A golfer plays the course, walks into the turn house, sees the product, tries it. Then they go to their home club and ask for it. Then they expect it at PGA events. Bryce removed every barrier to supply. US Foods and Sysco became distribution partners from day one. Any club could order alongside everything else.
Third: earned credibility. When a product shows up at the PGA Championship, when it becomes visible at tour events, when club members start requesting it, that's cultural credibility earned through presence and quality, not purchased through marketing spend.
"Golf created the demand," Bryce explained. "Then distribution made adoption frictionless. Then retailers started calling us."
How the philosophy travelled
"We want to meet you at life's best moments."
That philosophy explained everything that came next. Golf wasn't the destination. It was where the strategy proved itself. Once it worked there, the logic became transferable. Football stadiums. Hockey arenas. Movie theatres. Amusement parks. They weren't different markets. They were different contexts where people gathered to have fun.
But there was something deeper happening. Gleezy wasn't trying to become another premium food brand. Bryce wanted to build something people wanted to belong to. Great taste got customers through the door. Brand gave them a reason to come back. If hotdogs had spent a century as commodities, Gleezy wanted to turn them into something people talked about, wore and identified with.
Building the right team
Bryce also understood something else. Loving golf wasn't enough. He knew there were gaps in his own capability. So he assembled a team specifically to fill them.
He brought in a creative director from PGA Tour 2K. He recruited executives who'd helped build billion-dollar food businesses. Gary Williams joined as co-founder. The advisory board brought golf expertise, brand expertise, operational knowledge.
Bryce wasn't trying to become an expert in everything. He built a team that already was.
What happened when the market noticed
By month six, something unexpected occurred. Gleezy wasn't pursuing retail. Retail was pursuing them.
"Football teams calling and saying, we think hotdogs stink too. We want a good hotdog. Can we buy it? And we're like, of course," Bryce said. "Within the first six months, we had to shift to all of those things, or we were going to leave behind the NFL, NBA, hockey, movie theatres, amusement parks."
Success wasn't universal. Bryce assumed his own club, part of a 15-course ownership group, would be an easy win. They placed Gleezy in one course. Fourteen said no.
"Kick in the nuts," he called it later. It was also an important reminder. Even with a better product and a clear strategy, not every course was going to be the right fit.
The acceleration was remarkable. By early 2026, they'd scaled from 250 stores to tracking 4,000 stores, with potentially 15,000 by the end of 2027.
Retailers no longer needed much convincing. Golfers had already started making the case, and that momentum was opening doors with some of America's biggest retail chains.
The lesson
Looking back, Bryce's biggest insight wasn't that golf needed a better hotdog. It was that one passionate community can teach you everything you need to know before taking on the rest of the market.
Of course, strategy alone wasn't enough. None of it would have mattered if the product disappointed. But a good product gave the strategy something worth amplifying.
Golf was never the end game.
It was the launchpad.
One thing from history
The Frenchman who broke Britain's hold on The Open
Pic from Golf Compendium
In June 1907, Arnaud Massy stood on the final green at Royal Liverpool and became the first person from outside Britain to win The Open Championship. It had taken forty-seven editions and forty-seven years for the Claret Jug to leave the British Isles. For nearly half a century, nobody had managed it.
Massy was an unlikely pioneer. He had grown up in Biarritz, the son of a sheep farmer, and left school to work as a sardine fisherman before finding his way onto the local golf course as a caddie. The only clubs available were left-handed. He learned the game that way, then moved to North Berwick at twenty-one, married a Scottish woman, and switched himself round to play right-handed.
By 1907 he was good enough to begin the final round two shots behind J.H. Taylor, a three-time champion and overwhelming favourite. Taylor stumbled to an 80. Massy shot 77 and became the first overseas winner in Open history.
He collected £50. His daughter, born four days before the championship began, was christened Hoylake Massy in honour of the victory.
The significance of what he had done took decades to fully register. When Massy died in 1950, no other continental European had won The Open. It took until 1979, seventy-two years after Massy, for Seve Ballesteros to become the second.
Last week, Ryan Fox of New Zealand lifted the Claret Jug at Royal Birkdale. Overseas winners are now so routine that nobody remarks on the nationality. In 1907, Arnaud Massy was the first to prove the Claret Jug didn't have to stay at home.
A note from us.
We are building something new under The Business of Golf and we are keeping the details close for now.
What we can say: it is designed for this industry, it recognises what is happening in the golf business right now, and it will matter to the people you want to reach.
Founding partner and sponsor spots are available. If that sounds interesting, get in touch before we go public.
Have a good week. Until next Friday,
David