by When you open the PGA Tour app this week, you’ll be welcomed by big, bold PLAYERS Championship branding and a photo of the island green. At the bottom, a note that the app is “Presented by Taylormade.”
Equipment manufacturers have long been deeply involved in professional golf. Sponsorship of their player stables has served as tremendous marketing fodder for decades. But in recent years, instead of being advertisers that took advantage of a good marketing opportunity, manufacturers are now sewn into the fabric of the PGA Tour itself. They sponsor the Tour’s app on a rotating basis, and social posts featuring OEMs are sent from the Tour’s official accounts, all before you get to the actual advertising done throughout the television product. They are, without question, the straw that stirs the golf advertising drink.
At last week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational, the NBC broadcast noted that Rory McIlroy made changes to his bag before the final round. But he didn’t just replace a club. Rory swapped out his driver, 3 wood, and 5 wood, removed a long iron, and added a wedge before the final round. In the top 10 of a signature event heading into the final round, a top-three player in the world changed the four longest clubs in his bag. He was asked whether the change was because of how the ball was spinning, and his response didn’t exactly inspire confidence in his current setup.
“Yeah, there was a little bit of that,” McIlroy said. “Also just, you know, trying to get into the new stuff. There’s pros and cons to it, and it’s a blessing and a curse at the same time that we sort of have to go through these 12-month club cycles.”
Without saying so directly, Rory made it pretty clear that, for one reason or another, he isn’t all that impressed with the 2025 versions of the clubs he’s supposed to play under his Taylormade deal. Instead, when in contention on Sunday at a big event, he chose to go back to older models, clubs he was comfortable with. On Wednesday, he noted that he’s keeping the same setup at The Players and plans to keep it the same at Augusta National.
Rory McIlroy at the U.S. Open. (Fried Egg Golf)
McIlroy’s change probably went unnoticed by most golf fans. But the switch seems particularly notable in that it’s almost commonplace in 2025. A couple weeks ago, Ryan Barath realized that he wasn’t seeing the latest driver models in play for recent Tour winners and he dove into the numbers. Looking at winners and top-five finishers of the first seven events of the PGA Tour season, Ryan found that a whopping zero winners and just 19 of 42 top-five finishers had the most recent driver of their equipment manufacturer. Golf club engineers are incredibly good at their jobs and have undoubtedly made improvements over the last few years. But as Ryan noted in his piece, the consistent quality of clubs made in recent years makes the idea of an upgrade less compelling.
“It goes to show that products from the last five years have been mostly exceptional across the board,” Barath noted. “Once players are dialed in, they are becoming more reluctant than ever to switch.”
While I wouldn’t consider myself an equipment industry skeptic, these results are a pretty damning indictment of the current ecosystem. At least so far in 2025, Tour numbers are not serving up evidence that the average consumer should go spend $599 plus tax on a single club (before fitting) and expect any sort of benefit over their current model. There is a chance this data will change as we get a larger sample size throughout the PGA Tour season, but it’s also quite possible that the improvements in recent equipment don’t justify a switch. Not for Tour players, and not for amateurs. The fact of the matter is that if you want to play what the pros play, you no longer need the latest equipment.
PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan said a lot of words in his press conference on Tuesday. None of them were “rollback,” a hot-button topic given that the USGA and R&A announced that they are implementing one in the not-so-distant future. Monahan has bigger, Saudi PIF shaped problems on his plate at the moment, but since he already told players that the Tour doesn’t intend to abide by a rollback, sent out an official statement saying that they don’t agree with the new regulations, and Tour players are actively spouting off about how early tests of a rolled back ball are going, it seems as though the commissioner should at least address the issue on a yearly basis. Alas, while Monahan didn’t find time for the word rollback and no one in the media asked about it, the commish did find time to slip the word “partner” or “partners” into his press conference a whopping 25 times, narrowly beating out the word “listen.”
Equipment manufacturers do not qualify as partners in this sense, but they certainly qualify as partners of the players themselves. Some of those players have said what the USGA and R&A are doing is “monstrous,” and more recently, we’ve seen reports that the Tour’s Player Advisory Council is united in their opposition. Brian Harman is especially concerned about the poor R&D departments. Players are understandably concerned with their own well-being, but it’d be naive to think they aren’t being impacted by the equipment they’re currently using and by the people at those companies sending them information.
The lack of player enthusiasm surrounding new equipment, combined with their complete writing off of the rollback, has equipment companies in an interesting position. How do you keep marketing more expensive clubs to the public when your top players aren’t raving about them? How do you create excitement around new products that adhere to revised standards when it appears that your top players are committed to hysterics and end-of-days language? At least for this week, those questions are a non-issue for equipment manufacturers. In the backyard of the PGA Tour, an organization in which they’ve become increasingly prominent, manufacturers can have peace of mind knowing that their opinions are some of the most influential in the game.
