The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Good Good Golf Ad Debacle Reveals More Than Corporate Missteps

By Christine Scartz, University of Georgia School of Law’s Jane W. Wilson Family Justice Clinic Director and Marsy’s Law for Georgia Advisory Board Member

The fallout continues around the recent Good Good Golf advertisement for its co-branded Callaway driver. The PGA Tour, retail stores, and Callaway Golf quickly distanced themselves from Good Good Golf, and they continue to denounce the ad as contrary to their corporate goals and ethos. Callaway Golf has taken an additional step and committed to donating $1 million to domestic violence charities. These are important first steps.

The focus of the ongoing conversation around the ad thus far has been on corporate process — how did this ad make it through approvals, can the entities associated with the ad recover, and perhaps the most confounding question - ‘where were the women in the room?’ — as if men left alone should not be held responsible for failing to understand the effect that their violence has on others.

What we need to be talking about is much more fundamental to society than corporate profits and sponsorships. We need to acknowledge that the mindset that allowed this ad to be released harms not only victims of violence, but all of us.

According to the most recent Georgia Commission on Family Violence (GCFV) Fact Sheet, in 2024 there were 42,184 reported incidents of domestic violence in Georgia. This was a 23% increase in reported incidents from the previous year. GCFV documented 113 fatal domestic violence incidents in Georgia in 2024, taking the lives of 159 of our friends, family members, neighbors, and co-workers.

As the director of the University of Georgia School of Law Jane W. Wilson Family Justice Clinic and a Marsy’s Law for Georgia advisory board member, I hear hundreds of stories of abuse from domestic violence survivors every year. These include stories of physical violence like that depicted in the ad, and abuse by legal, corporate, and social systems that fail to understand the ongoing and wide-ranging impact of violent incidents.

Victims of domestic violence include more than those who’ve been pushed to the ground like the woman in the Good Good Golf ad. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, nearly a third of the domestic violence incidents in 2024 occurred in the presence of a child. We have a responsibility to these children not to use the platforms we have to confirm that the violence they see in their homes is normal. In a state where nearly three-quarters of victims of reported domestic violence incidents were women, it’s especially critical for all of us to challenge the mindset that the normal consequence for a woman touching a man’s property is physical aggression.

Denouncing the depiction of domestic violence in advertising and reevaluating corporate processes that allow these ads to be released are good first steps. Victims deserve more from us, however. I call on those with influence and all those with voices to challenge the normalization of violence wherever we encounter it.