5-min read · 1025 words
THE BOARD · GOLF’S BIG PICTURE
Golf is having a moment. Not the kind of moment that gets described in corporate press releases or used to justify expensive marketing campaigns — an actual moment, organic and multidimensional, the kind that historians of the sport will look back on and identify as the period when several independent forces converged to make the game more interesting, more accessible, and more culturally relevant than it had been in a generation. New courses are opening at a pace and quality not seen since the 1990s. New fashion brands are making the fairway interesting. New players are arriving with personalities and backstories that the algorithm was practically built to amplify. This is a golden age. It’s happening right now.
The Architecture Renaissance
In 2026, twenty-six brand-new golf courses are expected to open in the United States alone. This is not a routine number. It reflects the confluence of several trends: a pandemic-era boom in golf participation that created demand for new supply, a generation of architects who have spent the last decade perfecting their craft and are now building some of the finest public-access courses in the game’s history, and a new generation of developers — led by the Keiser family but increasingly joined by others — who have understood that the appetite for genuine golf experiences, rather than resort amenities that happen to include a golf course, is large and growing.
Tom Doak is opening Wild Spring Dunes in East Texas. Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw are opening Rodeo Dunes in Colorado. A fifth course is being added at Streamsong in Florida. Old Petty, Doak’s design on the Moray Firth in Scotland, is bringing international architecture enthusiasts to the Highlands. These are not vanity projects. They are serious works of landscape architecture by designers at or near the peak of their powers, opening into a market that is genuinely hungry for them. This does not happen often. It is happening now.
“The quality of new public golf being built right now is as high as it’s ever been in the history of the game. What’s different from the 1990s boom is that the architects have better judgment — they’re making more considered decisions about how to use the land.” — A leading architecture journalist on the current building cycle
The Fashion Turn
Golf fashion was, for most of its history, a category defined by what it wasn’t: not too casual, not too formal, not too colourful, not too plain, not too anything that might draw attention to itself. The safe play was the safe play, season after season, brand after brand, until a series of independently operating forces — streetwear culture, social media, the rise of a new generation of golfers who came to the game through culture rather than country clubs — created a market for something different.
Malbon Golf, growing at 209% year-on-year. Bogey Boys, with 328% more TikTok views. G/FORE, redefining what luxury golf apparel looks like. Eastside Golf, bringing a specifically Black American cultural aesthetic to the sport and creating a community around it. Bad Birdie. Metalwood Studios. The list of brands that are making golf apparel interesting — actually interesting, not interesting by the low standards of a category that defined itself against interest — is longer in 2026 than at any point in the sport’s history. This is not a trend. It is a structural shift in what the golf fashion market is and what it’s for.
The Player Landscape
Scottie Scheffler has 20 PGA Tour wins before 30, joining Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods in that particular bracket of the record books. Rory McIlroy is back-to-back Masters champion and playing the best golf of his life at 36. Jon Rahm is contending at majors while playing LIV, which is a story that contains several other stories. Nelly Korda and Lydia Ko are carrying the women’s game to audiences that hadn’t been watching. Ludvig Åberg is 24 and already in major contention with the kind of composed ball-striking that takes most players a decade to develop. The game has never had a deeper, more watchable, more genuinely talented set of players at the top of its leaderboards than it does right now.
This matters commercially in ways that are still being fully understood. Golf’s TV rights values have been rising. Streaming platforms are investing. Sponsorship categories that had previously ignored the sport — luxury fashion, tech, premium consumer brands — are now in the game in a way that reflects their read of who the sport’s audience actually is and what it values. The demographic shift in golf’s viewership, toward younger and more diverse audiences, is not yet complete but it is clearly underway.
The Risk
Golden ages do not sustain themselves indefinitely. The architecture renaissance requires capital and land — both of which are finite. The fashion moment requires continued cultural relevance, which is a more fragile thing than growth statistics suggest. The player landscape is extraordinary right now, but Scheffler is 29 and McIlroy is 36, and the next generation of truly compelling personalities at the top of the men’s game is not yet fully formed. The LIV-PGA situation remains unresolved and continues to fragment the sport’s narrative at exactly the moment when a unified story would be most commercially valuable.
But these are risks that exist within a moment of genuine expansion. Golf in 2026 is bigger, better designed, better dressed, and better played than at any point in recent memory. The courses being built right now will still be wonderful in fifty years. The players competing this week at Aronimink are creating memories that will be discussed for decades. The fashion brands reshaping what it means to dress for golf are changing a culture in ways that can’t be easily reversed. This is what a golden age looks like. Pay attention to it while it’s here.