ATLANTA — The world of golf, which has spent nine decades perfecting the art of the quiet apology, is now processing a commercial in which a co-founder of the internet’s favorite golf brand shoulder-checks a woman to the ground so she will stop touching his driver.
The ad, a co-branded promotion for a new Callaway driver featuring personalities from Good Good, went up, got a reaction, and was pulled — a lifecycle that, in the new golf, takes roughly the time it used to take to walk from the 18th tee to the clubhouse.
Callaway CEO Chip Brewer said the company approved the video and, in a statement, “sincerely apologize,” adding that the content “does not reflect our values” and that the company is “unequivocally against discrimination, domestic violence, or threatening behavior of any kind,” according to CNN’s coverage of the fallout.
That is a sentence that, in the history of golf marketing, has been written about very few things.
Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark, who appears in the ad, later offered a video apology in which he explained that the concept was supposed to be about obsession — that he was supposed to be so obsessed with his driver that anyone who touched it “became possessed with the obsession” — and then, in the same breath, called it “super dumb,” “the worst ad known to man,” and a concept that made his skin crawl “even just minutes after I saw it get posted.”
That is a man who has watched a commercial in which he shoves a woman to the ground and concluded, in real time, that it is the worst ad known to man, and is now on camera telling you the worst ad known to man is the worst ad known to man.
The PGA Tour, for its part, has a November title partnership with the brand in question — the Good Good Championship in Austin — and CEO Brian Rolapp described the situation, when asked whether the video would affect the tournament, as “a bit of a fluid situation,” a phrase that in tournament management means the lawyers are in a conference room and the room has a window.
What makes this story genuinely strange — and not in the way the ad was strange — is the timing. Golf is, right now, in the middle of a long reconciliation between the old game and the new one. The tour has spent years courting the internet crowd: the loud caps, the loud shirts, the personalities who treat the fairway like a stage. The Good Good Championship was supposed to be the handshake at the finish line.
The shoulder check is what happens when the handshake goes a little too hard.
THE AD, TIMELINE OF EVENTS
- Friday: Ad released. One man shoulder-checks one woman to the ground.
- Saturday: Backlash. Ad pulled. Good Good issues statement about "inclusivity for all."
- Tuesday: Callaway CEO says the company approved it and apologizes. PGA Tour CEO says the initial response was "disappointing" and "a bit defensive and late."
- Wednesday: Good Good co-founder posts video apology calling it "the worst ad known to man."
- November: Good Good Championship, Austin, Texas. Status: "fluid."
The old guard is, to its credit, not having a very good time. There is a specific energy in golf — the khaki, the hushed clubhouse, the belief that the sport’s highest value is the man who can hit a 150-yard 5-iron and say nothing about it — and the new guard’s energy is a man in a bright cap who just explained on national television that his worst-ever idea made his skin crawl.
Both are, in their own way, the most honest things in the sport.
At press time, the ad remains pulled, the apology videos remain up, and one anonymous veteran of the old course, speaking on condition that his khaki not be described as “casual,” offered the only quote in this story that could have been written in 1927: “We had a rule about touching other people’s clubs. It was a quiet one. But it was a rule.”