Good Good's 3 a.m. Confession: We Took the Fall for Callaway

Matt Kendrick, CEO of Good Good Golf, has apparently decided that the traditional playbook of crisis management—the one that involves actual management and actual crisis prevention—is for people who sleep. At 3:38 a.m. ET on Friday, August 28, he posted to X for the first time in 11 years to announce, with the precision of a man who has given up on both optics and counsel, that his company had been asked by Callaway Golf to produce an advertisement, that Callaway approved said advertisement, and that Callaway then asked Good Good to absorb the reputational damage when the ad—which featured Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark shoving female golfer Alexis Miestowski to the ground—predictably detonated across social media.

The tweet, which read in full: "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," is the sort of statement that makes in-house counsel wake up in a cold sweat. It is, in other words, exactly what you get when a CEO decides that the concept of attorney-client privilege is merely a suggestion and that strategic ambiguity has become actively hostile to the truth.

Callaway's position, articulated by CEO Chip Brewer, was refreshingly simple: the ad was approved before posting, mistakes were made, the approval never should have happened. It is the kind of mea culpa that ordinarily closes files. It did not close this one, because Kendrick had already opened the file at 3 a.m. and started writing in it with a Sharpie.

The fallout has been methodical. Callaway announced $1 million in donations to charities focused on preventing domestic violence—a gesture that Kendrick's X missive suggests was less about conscience and more about narrative control. Good Good Golf elected to step away from its sponsorship agreement for a PGA Tour event in Austin scheduled for November. The Golf Channel canceled "Big Break x Good," the rebooted reality show that had presumably seemed like a good idea before it became radioactive.

But the real tell came when someone on X suggested that Good Good Golf should "sue Callaway for every single penny they're owed plus damages." Kendrick's response was characteristically terse: "Not opposed." This is not a man engaged in settlement negotiations. This is a man documenting, for purposes of litigation and posterity, the precise moment his company became the contractual patsy in someone else's PR crisis.

There is a school of thought in crisis management that holds that transparency, even at 3 a.m., beats whatever alternative the spin doctors would have produced by daylight. Kendrick may yet be proven right. But there is also a school of thought that holds that your first move in a dispute with a former partner should not be a detailed public accounting of how that partner asked you to shoulder their liability. That school of thought is generally taught in business school courses that Kendrick may have decided were overrated.

What we are witnessing, in other words, is not damage control. It is damage documentation. It is the corporate equivalent of a man pulling out his phone at 3 a.m. to explain, in meticulous detail, why his wife was wrong about him during the dinner party. It may all be true. It may all be legally justified. But it is certainly the kind of crisis management that suggests someone's corporate counsel has, at minimum, stepped away from the phone.