Good Good Golf is being stripped of retail shelf space, a PGA Tour title sponsorship, and a Golf Channel reality series over an advertisement it made with Callaway Golf, while Callaway, which co-created and approved the same ad, has not lost a shelf spot. The asymmetry is the story.
The ad promoted Callaway's Quantum Max Driver under Good Good branding. Co-founder Garrett Clark is seen shoving a woman who reaches for the driver in his bag, then standing over her as she lies on the ground and telling her not to touch it. Clark said in a nine-minute Instagram video that the concept borrowed from the horror film "Obsession," in which a character becomes violently overprotective under a magic spell, and that no actual shoving occurred because it was acting. The explanation did not slow the institutional response. Golf Galaxy, Dick's Sporting Goods, Target, and the PGA Superstore pulled Good Good merchandise from shelves and online. Golf Channel cancelled the latest season of "Big Break," the reality series it produced with Good Good. Good Good then announced it was stepping away from the Good Good Championship, its title-sponsored PGA Tour event in Austin, Texas.
Callaway ended the partnership, stated that violence against women should never be trivialized or used as entertainment, and announced a $1 million donation to organizations working to prevent such violence. Its products stayed on shelves. The PGA Tour has taken no equivalent action against Callaway.
The counterargument is not nothing. The ad did show a man physically overpowering a woman, and enough viewers took it at face value to generate real complaints. Clark himself called the execution "cringe." Callaway said it heard from individuals with personal experiences related to violence against women, and those accounts were real whatever the creative intent was. Poor judgment in execution is a fair charge.
The risk is that what reads as accountability is corporate liability management with a better press release. Good Good CEO Matt Kendrick wrote on X that Callaway asked them to create the ad, approved it, then coordinated a withdrawal that left Good Good absorbing the public fallout while Callaway cushioned its own exit with a seven-figure donation. On balance, Kendrick's account of the approval chain is the specific claim neither Callaway nor the PGA Tour has publicly disputed, and the line to watch is whether either changes that.