Welcome to Issue #39
“I honestly didn’t think I’d ever wear the European Ryder Cup logo again”
Padraig Harrington
What’s on my mind this week
Jackson Koivun deciding there are worse places to celebrate than by a lake in summer, Lucas Glover proving shoes can start as much debate as slow play, Si Woo Kim discovering Google Maps doesn't account for international borders when chasing Korean BBQ, Brian Harman bringing a different kind of birdie to the scoring room, rookie Michael Brennan finding out eight straight birdies still isn't enough, the PGA Tour wondering whether silence really is golden, Charley Hull's caddie already plotting his revenge, Aaron Rai with another win. This time, the inaugural Rory Award.
In the news
Why it matters: Multiple reports indicate LIV Golf is expected to cancel its Michigan Team Championship while delaying an official announcement amid investor talks. If confirmed, the move would reduce the 2026 schedule from 14 events to 12.
Our Take: If confirmed, the cancellation would be more damaging than the numbers suggest. The Team Championship is the centrepiece of LIV's team-league product, the event designed to produce the season-defining narrative and crown an annual team champion. Its cancellation would mean LIV finishes 2026 without crowning a team champion, undermining the entire team-league value proposition the league has been selling to investors and sponsors since 2022. Vendor payment lawsuits, contractor cancellations, and Detroit News reporting that no infrastructure buildout had taken place at the host course are consistent with mounting cash flow pressure. The investor pitch for a 10-event schedule reaching profitability in three years now has to explain how a league that couldn't deliver 14 events on PIF funding will achieve profitability on a 10-event model using $250-350 million of external capital.
Why it matters: Between the 27h and 30th of July, the PGA Tour formally confirmed four events for its 2028 Championship Series: the Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands, the Sompo-sponsored event at Silverado, The Sentry at Torrey Pines, and the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill, filling four of the roughly 15 non-major elevated-tier slots.
Our Take: The pace of confirmations is the story. The Tour is compressing what could have been a 12-month formalisation process into a single week, which suggests sponsor competitive pressure rather than simply internal urgency. Each confirmed slot removes a piece of uncertainty for the sponsors still watching, and the announcement cadence itself creates commercial FOMO among mid-tier title sponsors who have not yet been named. The pattern reveals the Tour's hierarchy of priorities. Existing high quality signature events with long tenure sponsors get locked in first. Venue transfers involving sponsor continuity get formalised early. New sponsor entries get accommodated through bespoke two-year commercial pathways. Read together, the four confirmations describe a Tour that is rewarding legacy sponsor investment first, absorbing new capital through custom structures second, and using the announcement cadence to accelerate commitments from the sponsors still deliberating. The next question is which of the current signature events get named next, and which quietly do not.
Why it matters: Providence Equity Partners confirmed on the 28th of July that it will acquire founder Casey Wasserman's remaining stake in THE TEAM (formerly Wasserman) at approximately $3.4 billion.
Our Take: Providence beat multiple rounds of bids from United Talent Agency (backed by EQT), Excel Sports Management (acquired by Goldman Sachs in November 2025), Primera and Partners Group. The failed Excel combination is the sharpest strategic detail. Goldman had assembled Excel with the intent to build an athlete representation rollup, and Providence outbidding Goldman effectively blocks that path. The more interesting angle sits inside Providence's existing portfolio. Alongside THE TEAM, Providence owns Populous (the world's leading sports architecture firm) and stakes in Superstruct, TAIT and d&b audiotechnik across live entertainment infrastructure. The strategy suggests the next phase of sports investment is less about owning teams and more about owning the infrastructure that every team, venue and rights holder depends on.
Pic from Golf Monthly
Worth your time
Read: What happens when an amateur decides to treat golf like a full-time job? A funny and surprisingly honest account of chasing the impossible
Listen: Great podcast from NoLayingUp previewing the AIG Women's Open. Their knowledge on women’s golf is second to none
Feature Story
Why the PGA of America believes golf retail needed better infrastructure
Pic from RepSpark
A member walks into the pro shop and asks for a custom polo with the club logo. Two days later, it's ready. A decade ago, that same order would have taken weeks.
The difference is the infrastructure now sitting behind golf retail.
Recently, the PGA of America formally recognised something that has been quietly changing beneath the game. The modern pro shop increasingly depends on technology as much as retail expertise.
The PGA's strategic alignment with RepSpark recognises a broader shift. Digital commerce has become part of how modern golf retail operates, helping PGA Professionals run better businesses while improving the experience for golfers.
The game has never been bigger, or more demanding
The timing reflects broader changes in golf.
According to the National Golf Foundation, U.S. on-course participation exceeded 29 million golfers in 2025, the eighth consecutive year of growth. Total golf engagement, including off-course formats such as simulators and entertainment venues, has reached 48 million participants, while women now account for a record share of on-course golfers and younger players continue to drive participation and spending.
Those golfers arrive with expectations shaped by every other consumer experience they have. They expect convenience, personalisation and digital tools. Waiting three weeks for a custom polo no longer feels normal.
PGA Professionals see those expectations every day. The PGA of America's strategic alignment with RepSpark suggests it sees them too.
RepSpark Founder: Meghann Butcher
Golf retail is a service business, not a transaction business
Most retail is about inventory management. A customer wants black size large. Is it in stock? If yes, they buy it. If no, they don't.
Golf retail is different.
A member walks in on Saturday morning and wants a quarter zip with the club logo embroidered on the left chest. Not the right chest. The left. The logo needs to be in the correct colour, not the standard option. They need it by next Friday for a member-guest tournament.
Ten years ago, here's how that worked:
The professional writes it down. Finds the sales rep. Tells them what the member needs. The rep calls the manufacturer. The manufacturer makes it. It ships. Eventually, it arrives.
Two, three, four weeks later, the member gets their shirt.
Yet golf professionals do this every single day. Because that's what service looks like in golf.
"What I've learned from our customers is that green grass retail isn't a margin business, it's really a relationship business," said Meghann Butcher, the founder of RepSpark.
Butcher puts it more simply:
"The shirt isn't the product. The member experience is."
She continued, "The PGA Professionals who are winning understand that every touchpoint with a member is an opportunity to deepen that relationship. Our job at RepSpark is to make sure the operational side, the ordering, the custom merchandise, the tournament programs, runs so efficiently that professionals can focus on what actually drives their business: the people wearing the shirt, not just the shirt itself."
That realisation, that golf retail is fundamentally a service business, not a transaction business, is what separates golf from every other retail vertical. It's also what the PGA's alignment with RepSpark signals to the industry.
When software becomes strategic
For most of the last two decades, golf professionals solved this problem the way they'd always solved it: relationships and phone calls.
A good sales rep knew which manufacturers could turn custom orders quickly. A good professional had built trust with multiple brands. A good manufacturer prioritised their repeat customers. The whole system ran on personal relationships and the willingness of everyone involved to go the extra mile.
It still works.
But Butcher recognised something: it shouldn't have to be that difficult.
She started RepSpark nearly two decades ago by approaching the problem as an operator, not a technologist. Her father had built multiple clothing brands. She grew up at trade shows understanding the pain points that existed between manufacturers and their sales teams. She knew what a sales rep needed to see to sell effectively. She knew what a manufacturer needed to manage without turning each custom order into a loss.
"I came at this from the business side, not the software side," she explained. "I knew the workflows, the relationships, the places where brands and retailers were losing time and money."
The critical insight came when she recognised golf's complexity was also golf's opportunity.
Most ecommerce platforms weren't built to handle that level of customisation. In golf, it's central to almost every order. An embroidered logo placed one inch to the left instead of the right renders the product worthless. If the manufacturer gets it wrong, the goods can't be restocked.
That complexity also explains why generic retail software never quite fitted golf.
Education mattered too. When you're trying to get thousands of PGA Professionals and facility merchandisers comfortable with new technology, teaching them to use it effectively is everything. Partnerships with industry organisations like the Association of Golf Merchandisers (AGM) were critical to building adoption at scale.
The result is that processes which once took weeks can now be completed in days, sometimes minutes.
RepSpark brands
What the PGA's recognition signals
For years, digital commerce platforms were largely viewed as suppliers to the golf industry. The PGA's decision changes that perception.
It suggests commerce software has become part of the industry's infrastructure, in much the same way that tee booking systems, handicap management, and tournament software already are.
For PGA Professionals, the benefits are immediate and concrete.
Fewer operational headaches. Tighter inventory control. Faster reorders. Stronger member-facing assortments. That's time not spent wrestling with systems.
"They don't necessarily want to be stocking shelves or merchandising," Butcher noted. "They want to be out teaching. They want to be out playing the game."
Instead of wrestling with systems, PGA Professionals can spend more time coaching, running tournaments and serving members.
"We go to the PGA Show," Butcher said, "and green grass buyers come up to us and say, 'We won't stock a brand anymore that's not on RepSpark. You guys make it so easy.'"
When software becomes embedded in how an industry operates, it starts to look less like another supplier and more like part of the industry's infrastructure.
The member experience
Technology changes more than the ordering process. It changes what members experience.
Members and guests can now choose their items before the event. They arrive at the tournament, and their custom order is already waiting.
Personalisation begins before the first tee shot. The experience starts long before anyone walks into the pro shop.
The importance of what this protects
Golf has always celebrated great professional teachers, great operators, and great service.
What has changed is the technology supporting them.
For decades, being a great pro shop operator meant doing something no software could do: making it possible for a member to get exactly what they wanted, even when that meant weeks of phone calls, favours called in, and a willingness to treat one custom order as if it were the most important transaction in the business.
That was heroic.
Today's systems allow that same level of service to be delivered far more efficiently.
When PGA Professionals spend less time chasing custom orders and more time coaching, running tournaments and serving members, technology isn't replacing what makes golf special. It's helping protect it.
That's what the PGA's strategic alignment with RepSpark ultimately recognises. Golf has never lacked great professionals or great retailers. What it lacked was infrastructure designed around the way they work.
That infrastructure is now becoming a competitive advantage for the clubs and professionals who embrace it.
One thing from history
The caddie who wasn't allowed to smile
Pic from Belfast Telegraph
For four days at Royal Lytham in August 2018, he followed her around one of the most demanding links courses in Britain and said almost nothing. His job was to carry the bag, read the greens, and keep his face completely still. She had made that clear before the first round: no emotion, whatever happens. If he looked happy, it might unsettle her. If he looked anxious, worse. He wore the same socks for all four days because she told him to.
Wayne Hall had been taking his daughter Georgia to golf courses since she was seven years old. He had named her after a place in Georgia, in honour of Nick Faldo's victory at the 1996 Masters. An Englishman winning golf's biggest tournament. He had spent fifteen years watching her practice, travel, compete, and fall short. When she turned professional and joined the LPGA Tour, she asked him to caddie. He said yes.
On the final hole of the 2018 Women's British Open, Georgia Hall tapped in for bogey to win by two shots. She was 22 years old, an LPGA rookie, and a major champion. She hugged her playing partner. Then Wayne lifted her off her feet.
The Women's Open returns to Royal Lytham this week for the first time since that Sunday afternoon. Georgia Hall is in the field. Wayne Hall is not on the bag.
For four days he wasn't allowed to smile. On the eighteenth green, he finally could.
Have a good week. Until next Friday,
David