BIG DEAL

2020’s Hottest Club Is Golf

Golf, like anime, is something you either never really watch, or love so much it ends up defining your whole personality. I lean more towards the latter, and, as data from this year suggests, so do more Americans. 

We’re in the middle of a golf boom

In September, 25.5% more golf rounds were played than last year, which capped off a wildly popular summer for the sport.

• Why? It’s the perfect quarantine activity. Socially distanced? Check. Dose of nature? You betcha. Anxiety reliever? Sometimes. 

The backstory: As stay-at-home orders swept the nation in March and April, people began looking for a “corrective to stress” as the Financial Times’s Andrew Martin called it. And golf rose to the occasion:

• We Are Golf, a coalition of golf organizations, collaborated closely with the federal government and the CDC to draw up guidelines to make the game safer. These included eliminating bunker rakes, leaving flagsticks in the holes, and limiting players to one per cart. 
• And in June, the PGA Tour became the first major U.S. sports league (besides UFC) to return to action. 

Golf’s sudden appeal has benefited the business side of the game, too.  

Money is flowing in from all angles

Callaway Golf brought in $476 million in Q3 sales, the best third quarter in the company’s 38-year history. Online apparel sales grew 108% as part of the broader e-commerce wave. 

But it’s not just salmon pants and collared shirts flying off the shelves. Golf equipment sales were up 42% year-over-year in Q3, and in May, golf bag accessories were the No. 1 trending retail category on Google.

• Tom Stine, a partner at Golf DataTech, thinks travel restrictions have helped. “People have money to spend on golf equipment because they are not spending it on vacations,” he told Front Office Sports. 

One golf accessory in particular drew Peloton-esque demand: the humble pushcart. As more golfers switched to walking (instead of riding) to maintain social distancing measures, pushcarts came close to hoard-status. “It’s not unlike grocery stores with hand sanitizers and toilet paper,” one distributor told the WSJ during the height of the pushcart shortages in the spring. 

Will the good times last?

As fun as the boom has been for fans of the game, when a vaccine trickles down the pipeline and more leisure activities become available, you have to wonder: Will golf be able to maintain its pandemic bump? 

• One promising sign: There’s a lot of new blood in the game. The number of junior golfers (ages 6–17) could increase by as many as 500,000 by the end of 2020, according to the National Golf Foundation. 

Bottom line: As a young golf nerd, my advice to people who want to grow the game is to make it more accessible. Less of the “tuck your shirt in, never play music” energy. More of “welcome to the game, here’s how to stop slicing the ball.” And for people who’ve never understood the appeal of golf, watch the final round of The Masters today. I promise you’ll be Googling “driving ranges near me” in no time.

SPONSORED BY E*TRADE

Sundays Are for Football Finance

As self-professed football-heads, we typically spend our Sundays on the couch yelling, “Get a touchdown, please!”

But today we’re yelling about something different. Because we just found out E*TRADE does more than just trading; we’re talking banking, investing, retirement, and general guidance, too.

It’s like scoring a touchdown and going for two. 

E*TRADE makes it easy for you to set yourself up for long-term financial success using their platform and tools. So whether you’re a football-head or a finance-head, E*TRADE has plenty of ways for you to put your money to work.

Learn all about E*TRADE’s offerings today.

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LONG READS

Top 10

10 of our favorite reads from the week.

1. You’ve probably read enough about Elon Musk to last a lifetime, but here’s one more profile for good measure. (Vanity Fair) 
2. Dams don’t just go up. Sometimes they come down...and give a river new life. (BBC)
3. Disassembling a $100 counterfeit iPhone X is wild. (Vice)
4. What it was like for Microsoft to release a gaming console in a pandemic. (Bloomberg)  
5. Virgin Hyperloop finally carried its first test passengers. (The Verge)
6. How do you know when society is about to fall apart? (NYT Magazine)
7. The inspiration behind the iconic “America the Beautiful” poem. (Nat Geo)
8. Why triumphing in the realm of time is the obsession of entertainment companies. (Virtual Elena)
9. A satisfying renovation of a 1968 split-level house in Hudson, NY. (Curbed)
10. Everyone is reading books about cannibals. (Lit Hub)

MAIL BAG

Reader Q from Amy in Tampa, FL: What is your typical production schedule for weekday Brews? Seems like there must be some late nights and super early mornings.

Toby’s A: Great question Amy. Before I started working at the Brew this spring, I thought the exact same thing; but because we cover business news (most of which occurs during market hours) it’s not as many late nights as you might think. 

Here is the typical production schedule:

• 8:30am–12pm: Read the news, work on other longer-term projects, various meetings, read more news
• 12pm–4pm: Whoever is writing the next day’s newsletter (usually 2–3 people) discusses over Slack which storylines are emerging as the most important. Each writer then picks a story that’s calling their name and goes off into a writing hole to crank out a first draft. 
• 4pm–4:30pm: Our managing editor Neal looks at the drafts and makes any comments (we do this in Google Docs). Once a story has been polished, it’s ready for fact-checking.
• 4:30pm–6:30pm: Stories go through two rounds of fact-checking from a freelance copyeditor (shoutout Holly) before we’re ready to send test emails. Two writers read the tests, making any last tweaks before the newsletter is ready to be sent out at 6am the next morning.
• 6:30pm–whenever: We have push notifications turned on to pounce on any big stories, like when Elon Musk or President Trump will tweet out some big market-moving news late at night. 

Have any other questions for us? Ask them here. 

SPONSORED BY E*TRADE

We’re calling “timeout” on the newsletter to tell you again that E*TRADE can offer you a full team of investing tools. See, E*TRADE does so much more than trading; we’re talking banking, investing, retirement, and general guidance, too. So this Sunday, set aside a little non-football time to learn about all of the ways E*TRADE can help you with your financial goals.

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