Good Good CEO Matt Kendrick says the company has “removed people responsible” for its disastrous Callaway driver ad.
He also told Front Office Sports that he didn’t see the ad before it went out on socials.
In case you’ve somehow missed all of this, a quick tl;dr: Good Good, one of YouTube’s most well-known golf channels, collabed with golf equipment company Callaway to create and distribute its own official driver. But the ad Good Good produced (and Callaway approved) to promote the driver featured Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark shoving former pro golfer/influencer Alexis Miestowski to the ground and then leaning over her, telling her to never touch his driver.
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The ad received immediate backlash, with critics saying it promoted violence against women. Good Good deleted it, but the damage was done: Callaway dissolved their three-year deal, shops pulled Good Good merch, Good Good pulled out of a splashy $6 million PGA Tour sponsorship, and the Golf Channel cancelled Big Break x Good Good, a fully filmed season that was supposed to reboot the channel’s iconic reality show with Good Good as stars.
In the wake of the ad’s deletion, Clark said its premise was inspired by Curry Barker‘s blockbuster Obsession. The implication was supposed to be that anyone who touched the driver became zealously possessive of and devoted to it, Christine-style.
That clearly did not come across to the majority of viewers, and now Good Good–which has 2.1 million subscribers and gets around ~15 million views a month–is getting pummeled with fallout.
It’s not clear if Clark is one of the people Kendrick was referring to when he said employees responsible have been dismissed from Good Good. Clark, as we mentioned above, co-founded Good Good in 2020 alongside Kendrick, Stephen Castaneda, and Matt Scharff.
Kendrick also lashed out at Callaway on X. “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. 30 for 39 will be legendary.”
Dan Katz, a Barstool Sports personality, responded to Kendrick, saying the backlash was an “outrage fest.”
“The sponsors with no backbone pull out and then everyone moves on to the next thing and you guys rebuild and probably come back stronger long term,” he said.
“I’m with you on that. We’re ready for the next phase,” Kendrick replied.
Kendrick’s Front Office Sports interview was more PR polished. He issued another apology for the ad, and said that “at the end of the day, we wanted to make sure that everyone knew that we understood that we made a mistake, and we weren’t going to deny that. That’s what we wanted to have portrayed.”
As for the “next phase,” he told FOS that Good Good has “realized we have to put better processes in place and we’re doing that. We’re looking at the right people in the right places.”
He added that this incident “gave us a good opportunity to really reflect on what all it is that we need to do inside of our organization to be successful for the long run. And I think we’re making the right steps to do that.”
Good Good was perhaps the biggest mover in terms of uniting YouTube golf with the legacy institutions of pro golf. It’s possible that now orgs and outlets like the PGA Tour and the Golf Channel will hesitate to team up with content creators for at least the near future–a shame, but understandable.
