The Good Good Golf-Callaway ad was terrible. The campaign to treat it as evidence that Good Good supports domestic violence is worse.
The commercial showed Good Good co-founder Garrett Clark knocking golfer Alexis Miestowski down as she moved to touch a co-branded Callaway driver. It was a parody of Obsession, a film about irrational fixation. The result was a joke without wit and an image without judgment. It should never have left the edit. Callaway approved it and later admitted that approval should never have happened.
The ad deserved to be pulled, and both companies owed an apology. But a tasteless skit is not a creed. It proves neither that Clark endorses violence against women nor that Good Good despises women in golf. Those threatening Miestowski in women’s safety’s name are merely bullies with a pretext.
Clark’s response should not be waved away as a satisfactory apology. He called the ad “super dumb,” “terrible,” and “not the greatest idea,” and said he does not support domestic violence or abuse. Necessary words.
The revealing part came when he explained how the catastrophe began:
“Good Good marketing team reached out to us, and they said, ‘We have this idea to essentially recreate or do a spinoff of the movie Obsession.’”
There it is. The obligatory escape hatch. The marketing team had an idea. The marketing team created the premise. The marketing team, apparently, is the real protagonist in the story of how Garrett Clark found himself starring in a Good Good advertisement as Garrett Clark.
That is not accountability. It is accountability in costume.
Clark is not a summer intern handed a script five minutes before filming. He is a co-founder and public face of the company. The spot used his persona, bore his company’s name, and cast him as its central figure. Foolish ideas are cheap. The question is who had the standing and obligation to stop it before it became public.
His own words make the evasion worse:
“Once I watched it back and it got posted, my skin was crawling. I was cringing.”
“It got posted.” As if the video were a thunderstorm. As if no human being chose to release it. As if the co-founder who performed in the commercial had no voice until the internet informed him of its existence.
No one needs to pretend Clark personally pressed the upload button to recognize the absurdity of that posture. Senior leaders do not get to be passengers in disasters built around their own faces. If he saw a finished ad and thought it was, in his words, “the worst ad known to man,” the question becomes sharper, not softer: why did he allow the world to see it before the world forced him to regret it?
Clark eventually said, “Good Good messed up by promoting a very poor taste ad that was not good in any way, shape, or fashion.” Correct. But “Good Good” is not a fog bank. It is people, reporting lines, judgment calls, and leaders. His video asks the public to identify a collective failure, then provides an unmistakable hint about which collective should carry the embarrassment.
The first law of leadership is not complicated. Credit rises; blame rises faster. A leader may praise his team when things go well. When they go badly, he does not point to the people beneath him and call it context. He absorbs the blow. He protects the people he leads in public, resolves personnel questions in private, and says plainly: this happened on my watch, I participated, and I failed to stop it.
Clark did not do that. He offered contrition, but he salted it with alibis. He apologized, but he did not fully own the decision. A real apology does not need a culprit waiting in the wings.
Callaway should be judged by the same standard. It approved the ad, let Good Good take much of the first hit, and only later acknowledged its role. More than one adult can fail at once.
Clark should not be treated as a perpetrator of real violence. Good Good should not be run out of golf. Miestowski should not be harassed for appearing in a bad production. Those are obvious truths.
So is this: a company can survive a bad ad. It cannot thrive for long if its leaders treat responsibility as a burden to be divided downward once the cameras start rolling.
Clark’s problem is not that he made one stupid commercial. It is that, when asked to account for it, he sounded like a man trying to explain why the people behind him failed to protect him from himself.
That is not leadership. It is cowardice dressed up as crisis management.
