CEO and President of Good Good no longer with company after weekslong ad scandal

It appears that the Good Good Golf saga is circling towards a conclusion.

On Wednesday, a report from Lucia Moses at Business Insider revealed an internal memo that was shared to Good Good employees which noted that co-founder and CEO Matt Kendrick “decided to step down,” and relatively new Good Good president Joe Flannery “has chosen to part ways as well.”

For those who have been blessedly, relatively unaware of this story until now, a quick recap. Good Good Golf is a YouTube channel turned all-around golf brand that was one of the biggest success stories in the sport’s social media space. Good Good had partnerships across golf brands, sold plenty of merch, and had even was set to sponsor a PGA Tour this fall.

Two weeks ago, an ad produced by Good Good for a new driver cobranded with Callaway was released over Callaway’s social channels. That ad depicted Garrett Clark, one of the founders of Good Good, tackling a woman who dared to touch his driver. The reaction to the ad was immediate and obvious, as none of the brands working alongside Good Good wanted to be associated with violence against women in defense of a golf club. Callaway quickly pulled the ad.

An initial apology missed the mark, and crucially, did not break down just where in the chain of command things fell apart to allow such a bad idea to go public. From there, more apologies followed. Clark posted an eight-minute long front-facing video apology to social media explaining that the ad was meant to be a parody of the film Obsession.

“Once I watched it back and it got posted, my skin was crawling. I was cringing,” Clark said in the video. “I thought it was the worst ad known to man.”

It wasn’t enough to stem the bleeding of partners and sponsorships, as many of the brands tied to Good Good decided it was better to part ways than stick with the brand through the struggle. Those departures were followed by a late-night social media post from Kendrick, in which he said that Callaway had approved the ad and then dropped them in “a coordinated media blitz.”

Since then, people have been fired at both Callaway and Good Good in relation to the ad’s release, but the departures of Kendrick and Flannery are the clearest signs yet that Good Good is looking to truly move past the situation and turn the page.

As Matt Yoder wrote for us earlier this week, the downfall of Good Good is a case study in how not to handle a crisis that will be studied for quite some time.

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