Callaway ends Good Good partnership and donates $1m after advert showing violence against woman

By Jack Shaw · London · Published: 11:25 BST

• Callaway has ended its partnership with YouTube brand Good Good Golf with immediate effect.
• The manufacturer is donating $1m (£735,725) to organisations working to prevent violence against women.
• Good Good has also stepped away from sponsoring a PGA Tour event in Austin, Texas, in November.

Callaway has cut ties with Good Good Golf with immediate effect, ending a commercial relationship that began in 2023, after an advert showing co-founder Garrett Clark pushing content creator Alexis Miestowski to the ground triggered a week of backlash across golf.

The video was posted on 21 August to promote a driver Good Good had produced alongside Callaway. In it, Clark shoves Miestowski – a professional golfer and regular Good Good contributor – as she reaches for the club in his bag, then stands over her and says: “Do not touch my new driver.” Both companies deleted the advert and apologised, Good Good on the Saturday and Clark personally in a video on Wednesday night, in which he described the skit as being in poor taste.

Callaway, which had reposted the advert to its own channels, conceded on Thursday that its content review process “was not comprehensive enough” and said it had taken “appropriate internal corrective actions”. The Guardian reports that retailers have pulled Good Good products from shelves, while chief executive Matt Kendrick said the company “remain committed to earning back” the PGA Tour’s trust after withdrawing as a sponsor of its Austin tournament. For the full chronological timeline of the fallout, see the running coverage at ReadGolf.

Why Callaway and Good Good could not survive the same news cycle

Here is the uncomfortable truth for golf: this was never a small mistake by a small channel. Good Good launched on YouTube in 2020, carries 2.13 million subscribers and has been widely credited with dragging the sport in front of the younger audience the traditional tours have spent a decade chasing. That reach is precisely why Callaway’s exit is so severe. When a brand buys a creator, it is not buying an advert – it is buying that creator’s editorial judgement, at speed, with almost no meaningful sign-off. Callaway has effectively admitted as much.

The $1m donation is the tell. Sponsors normally issue a holding statement and let a story die over a weekend. Instead Callaway put money behind a line that leaves no wiggle room, saying violence against women should never be “trivialised, normalised, or used as entertainment”. That is a company that has read the room and concluded a clean break costs less than a slow one. Expect every major equipment manufacturer to be quietly rewriting its creator contracts this week – approval rights, kill clauses, the lot. Golf’s creator boom has just met its first serious governance test, and the sport’s biggest brands will not be the last to be asked who was actually watching the edit.

So does golf need tighter rules on what sponsored creators can publish, or is the market punishment already enough? While that argument rumbles on off the course, the golf continues at East Lake: Min Woo Lee leads the Tour Championship with Tommy Fleetwood in contention.