Welcome to Issue #23
"Golf is the ultimate game where it's on you and nobody else”.
Rory McIlroy
What’s on my mind this week
I wonder, did everyone enjoy Rory's mammy's bacon-wrapped dates at the Champions Dinner?, the elephant not in the room this week is Tiger, Faldo saying what a lot of people were thinking, Scottie teeing it up less than two weeks after becoming a dad again, alcohol cut off at 5pm Augusta (who agreed to that?), Fitzpatrick in the form of his life and quietly everyone's dark horse, can Rory do what very few have done and go back-to-back?, Bubba Watson still dreaming of being the oldest Masters champion at 47 (respect the optimism), a new Player Services Building appearing overnight like Augusta just willed it into existence, pimento cheese sandwich still $1.50 (the last inflation-proof item on earth).
In the news
Why it matters: Woods was arrested on suspicion of DUI on 27 March, pleaded not guilty, and announced on 1 April he is stepping away to seek treatment, missing the Masters and leaving his commercial future unresolved at the worst possible moment.
Our Take: The timing could not be more damaging. Days before his arrest, Woods drew nearly one million viewers for his TGL Finals appearance, the league's largest audience of the season. That number now represents a ceiling his partners cannot rely on. TMRW Sports, his and McIlroy's company behind TGL, notably left his name out of a recent NFL-related announcement, signalling early distancing. His role as PGA Tour Future Competition Committee chair remains unresolved. Sponsors and rights holders are not abandoning Woods, they are quietly repricing the asset. The question now is whether the commercial infrastructure built around Tiger can survive another extended absence with so much now contingent on his participation.
Why it matters: Source Media Group launched Source Golf on 6 April, a YouTube-based network aggregating content from Bryson DeChambeau, Grant Horvat, and The Bryan Bros into a single, television-style advertising buy, backed by David Blitzer of Blackstone.
Our Take: YouTube golf viewership is large but fragmented across individual creator channels, making it difficult for brands to buy at scale. Source Golf consolidates that inventory into a network-level proposition, one media buy, multiple creators, combined reach. More than 60% of viewing already occurs on television screens with session lengths of 25 to 45 minutes, positioning this as lean-back living room content rather than short-form social video. Blitzer's backing signals this is being treated as media infrastructure, not influencer marketing. For brands currently allocating golf budgets, this is the aggregation layer that has been missing from the creator economy. For the established tours, it is further evidence that the most engaged younger audiences are being reached through channels they do not control and cannot replicate simply by partnering with individual creators.
Why it matters: BMW South Africa CEO Peter van Binsbergen publicly confirmed the brand is evaluating LIV Golf sponsorship after attending its Steyn City event, saying it would be "stupid not to be evaluating it", the first time a senior BMW executive has openly acknowledged the possibility.
Our Take: BMW has sponsored professional golf for nearly 40 years across the PGA Tour, DP World Tour, and LPGA. It is not a brand that chases novelty. When an executive of this seniority says publicly that LIV's demographics are "very interesting" and that the format is attracting younger customers the brand needs, that is a considered signal, not a casual observation. Van Binsbergen was careful, he acknowledged friction with existing tour partners and stressed long-term commitment as BMW's core philosophy. But the direction of travel is clear. Premium automotive brands are watching LIV's audience data and asking questions they were not asking two years ago. For golf's established tours, the more pressing concern is not whether BMW jumps to LIV. It is whether the brand eventually concludes it can do both.
Pic from Yahoo Sports
Worth your time
Read: "Rory: The Heartache and Triumph of Golf's Most Human Superstar" Alan Shipnuck's unvarnished biography of Rory McIlroy drops just as he returns to Augusta. One for the list.
Watch: Par 3 Contest highlights from the 2026 Masters Keegan Bradley made history as the first player to record a hole-in-one in consecutive years at the Par 3 Contest.
Follow: Brian Rolapp (@brianrolapp) PGA Tour's first-ever CEO (ex NFL). With potential changes ahead for the PGA Tour, I’m keeping an eye on this account.
Tech: Black Hole Golf + Lucra partnership cool startup bringing real-money golf competitions to your back garden.
Founder’s Diary
Building Hanna Golf from a garage in Iowa
Jared Doerfler is the founder of Hanna Golf, a direct-to-consumer putter company that launched in July 2024. The putters are milled in-house in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
Hanna Golf represents a new wave of golf manufacturing: founder-operated, digitally native, and built without traditional retail distribution or equipment industry connections. No venture capital. No industry connections. Just a guy who decided to compete against established brands with hundred-million-dollar R&D budgets.
Over the coming months, Jared will share the reality of building Hanna Golf.
This isn't polished business strategy. It's real-time entrepreneurship. In his first update, Jared shared the founding story. This month, he tackles the challenges of bringing new products to market.
March was a fun month for Hanna Golf. We launched a new putter - the Salt Lake Zip.
This is the second new product we have introduced to the market since we launched the company in July of 2024.
• Salt Lake (April of 2025)
• Salt Lake Zip (March of 2026)
Bringing a new product to market is far more challenging than I originally anticipated. And if I had to give ourselves a grade of doing it - it would be a C-.
We have struggled to launch new products. The primary reason being is we simply do not have enough time to prototype. The Salt Lake Zip presented another challenge - it has a challenging feature to mill.
We originally had the V1 of the Salt Lake Zip in CAD in March of 2025. It took us a full year to get the product to market.
We originally had planned to launch last summer. But we ran into two machining challenges that we couldn’t find the time to address. We overcame one of the challenges last summer, and made good progress on the other. But I wasn’t satisfied with the finish of the putter. So we went back to the drawing board.
What got us back on track?
A highly specialized lollipop ball end mill.
The finish is great - but the tradeoff is we have to run slower than we’d like. We aren’t as efficient making the Salt Lake Zip as our other putters. It has five setups vs four setups for our other putters, and our tool paths are a little slower.
To try and understand the demand of the Salt Lake Zip, we built a few email lists. Using the data from the Salt Lake launch a year prior, we were able to get a pretty good understanding of how many we would sell on release day.
It was important for us to get this correct. Bringing in raw material for this launch cost us around $10,000 - a good amount of cash for us. Just to provide some context - we sold 650 putters last year (you can do the math!).
We had to bring in raw 303 SS, head covers, grips, and shafts.
We also needed to bring in these specialized end mills we are using. They aren’t what I would consider readily available, and they are expensive - $65 per end mill.
We had projected that we would sell 42 putters on launch day - we sold 47. Not too far off!
Pre-marketing is important to us - and we try our best to build up interest organically. We don’t use a PR firm to issue a press release the day of the launch, we don’t use ads on Meta or Google. Interest is driven off social media organically, and the email list we have built over the last 20 months.
Here are some interesting stats for launch day.
• 43% of orders had initials milled on the bottom
• 38% of orders selected a black finish
• 32% of orders added a SuperStroke grip
These numbers are generally in line with what we see in our standard ordering process.
One thing that I am really excited about with the Salt Lake Zip (it is a Zero Torque). Is the options and value we are providing to the customer.
• Three lie angle options
• Four sight line options
• Ten sight line color options
• Two finish options
• Two shaft options
• Four grip options
You can build the Salt Lake Zip to your specs, your way for the base price of $330.
We aren’t on a set schedule to launch products. We do it when it feels right, based on customer feedback on what they would like us to release. Once we see enough of that, we start pushing to make it happen internally.
We have another putter that is done. We’d love to launch it in the next month or two, but it really depends on machine time for us. Hanna Golf is completely bootstrapped and self-funded. We are scrappy and only have two machines (hoping to continue to add to that number).
We will see you next month!
Jared
Behind the business
Why the Masters is the greatest brand in sport
Every April, Augusta National does something no other sports property manages to pull off. It leaves hundreds of millions of dollars on the table, deliberately, and somehow becomes more valuable because of it.
Pic from ESPN
The numbers first
The 2025 Masters final round drew 12.7 million average viewers on CBS, peaking at 19.5 million. A 33% increase on 2024 and the most-watched Masters Sunday since 2018.
The city of Augusta, population 200k, absorbed an estimated $120 million in economic impact across one week.
Merchandise alone generated around $70 million, roughly $1 million per hour, with the average patron spending close to $1,000 on Masters gear alone.
And yet analysts estimate Augusta foregoes $250 to $300 million in potential revenue every single year.
What the model actually looks like
Broadcast rights are given away free. CBS and ESPN produce the Masters at their own cost, in exchange for Augusta retaining complete editorial control.
Advertising runs at approximately four minutes per hour, against an industry norm of 18 to 22.
Tickets are priced at $100 to $140 per day in a market where secondary prices run into five figures.
Food and drink prices haven't moved in decades.
There are no phones on the grounds.
Every one of those decisions costs money. Together, they protect something worth considerably more.
Why it works
Control over experience became the product. Augusta controls every camera angle, every broadcast minute, every ad slot. By giving the rights away, it owns the experience entirely. What you see, hear and feel at the Masters is authored, not assembled. The broadcast isn't a commercial arrangement. It's a creative one, on Augusta's terms.
Scarcity is the strategy. Badges have been held for generations. You cannot simply buy your way in, and that inaccessibility isn't a barrier. It's the brand. The people who do get in spend close to $1,000 on merchandise alone, willingly. Scarcity, protected consistently over time, turns access into something people feel compelled to commemorate.
Consistency became competitive advantage. Same course. Same week. Same colours. Same analog leaderboards. While other events chase relevance by changing, Augusta changes almost nothing and still feels distinct every single year. There is no rebranding exercise here, no refresh, no pivot. Just the same thing, done with the same care, year after year. That consistency isn't nostalgia. It's protection.
Restraint signals value. Four minutes of ads per hour doesn't just respect the viewer. It signals that Augusta doesn't need the money. That signal, held across decades, is what makes the brand feel untouchable. When you don't sell everything, what you do sell carries weight.
The merchandise paradox. $70 million in a week from an audience capped by design. Patrons aren't buying a product. They're buying proof they were there. That's not just retail, it's a relic market, and Augusta created it by making access rare enough to be worth commemorating.
Pic from Sky Sports
The bigger lesson
Most sports events ask: what can we charge for? It's a reasonable question. Revenue funds operations, pays athletes, satisfies stakeholders. The logic of monetisation is hard to argue with.
But Augusta has spent 80 years asking something different. What should we never sell?
That question sounds simple. In practice, it requires a level of institutional discipline that almost no organisation sustains. It means turning down money that is genuinely on the table. It means resisting pressure from partners, broadcasters and sponsors who would pay handsomely for what Augusta consistently declines to offer. It means trusting that the thing you are protecting, the feeling, the mystique, the sense that what happens at Augusta couldn't happen anywhere else, is worth more than the short-term revenue you are walking away from.
Most brands understand scarcity in theory. Very few practice it with conviction. Fewer still hold that conviction across decades, through changing markets, changing media landscapes and changing consumer behaviour. Augusta has. And the compounding effect of that discipline is what you see reflected in the numbers every April.
The green jacket means something because Augusta decided, a long time ago, that some things should never be for sale. That decision, repeated consistently across 80 years, is not just a brand strategy. It is the brand.
One thing from history
The story behind the green jacket
Pic from Getty
In 1930, Bobby Jones attended The Open Championship at Royal Liverpool. Sitting beside him at dinner was the club captain, Kenneth Stoker, wearing a red jacket. Jones asked about it. Stoker explained that all club captains wore matching coats so members of the public could identify who to approach for help.
Jones won the tournament that week. Stoker gave him the jacket.
Seven years later, when Augusta National introduced green jackets for its members, the idea was exactly the same. Practical, unglamorous, almost administrative. Members wore them during the Masters so that patrons could identify who to ask for directions around the course. The jacket also served a secondary purpose: it told the waiters who got the bill at dinner.
For twelve years, the green jacket meant nothing beyond that. It was a member's uniform, bought from a uniform company in New York. Members complained it was too thick for Georgia's spring heat.
Then in 1949, Sam Snead won the Masters and someone decided he should be given one. Augusta retroactively awarded jackets to every previous champion. The ceremony followed. Then the rules, one year off the grounds, then back to Augusta forever. Then the vault with humidity controls. Then the most recognisable garment in sport.
The jacket costs around $250 to make. It is now the most coveted prize in golf.
Have a good week. Until next Friday,
David