Callaway golf advertising blew up after an Aug. 21 ad showed Garrett Clark shoving a woman to the ground, and the company said on Aug. 27 that it was cutting ties with Good Good. The fallout now reaches a planned PGA Tour title sponsorship in Austin, Texas, in November, plus a Golf Channel project that has been canceled.
Clark, a Good Good co-founder and content creator, said in a nearly 9-minute video posted Aug. 26 that the concept was terrible. “Even minutes after I saw it get posted, before this surfaced everywhere online, I thought it was the worst ad known to man,” he said.
Callaway and Good Good
Callaway’s Aug. 27 statement was blunt: “Unequivocally, violence against women is unacceptable and should never be trivialized, normalized, or used as entertainment.” The company also said it would donate $1 million to organizations that work to end domestic violence and provide resources for survivors, turning the dispute into a reputational and financial response rather than a slow-moving internal review.
Good Good’s break from Callaway and Good Good widened after Matt Kendrick posted, “Interesting that @CallawayGolf asks us to make an ad then approves it then asks us to take the fall then drops us in a coordinated media blitz and covers it up by giving a million dollars away thinking everyone will be ok with it.” That accusation goes to the part of the story the public statement does not answer: who signed off on the finished spot before it went live.
November PGA Tour
Good Good said it would no longer be the title sponsor of a PGA Tour event in Austin, Texas, in November. That removes one of the most visible business ties tied to the partnership and leaves the event without the branding arrangement that had been attached to it.
The National Domestic Violence Hotline says 1 in 4 women aged 18 and older have experienced physical violence at the hands of an intimate partner, which gives the ad’s imagery a sharper edge than a standard brand misfire. For Callaway and Good Good, the practical lesson is simple: once a campaign crosses into violence, the business cost can move faster than the apology cycle.
Garrett Clark and the ad
The ad debuted on Aug. 21 and put Clark at the center of the backlash because he appeared in the scene that showed a woman being shoved to the ground. He later said the ad was a terrible concept and a terrible ad, but the damage had already spread across a sponsorship, a media project, and a brand relationship.
What matters now is not another statement. It is whether any approval process can be traced and whether the companies treat this as a one-off mistake or a structural failure in how a campaign reached publication.
