The Most Revealing Part of Callaway’s Golf Ad Happened Off Camera
Written by Dr. Pierre Berastaín
The violence in the Callaway and Good Good Golf driver advertisement lasts only seconds. A man chases a woman across a golf course, shoves her to the ground, and warns her not to touch his new club. The scene was staged, but the institutional failure that brought it to our screens was real.
Much of the public response has understandably focused on what the now-removed advertisement depicted. As CEO of The SAFE Alliance, one of the nation’s largest organizations serving survivors of domestic violence, I understand why. Violence against women is not an edgy device or an attention-grabbing joke. It is a public health and public safety crisis that shapes whether millions of people can live, work, parent, and participate fully in their communities.
What continues to nag at me, however, is everything that happened before the advertisement appeared. An idea became a script. The footage was filmed, edited, reviewed, and approved. Good Good created the video, and Callaway has acknowledged approving it before publication. Many people likely encountered the concept along the way, yet somehow the violence at its center never became disqualifying.
That is the alarming warning in this incident. Organizations can profess the right values and still make decisions that violate them. Values do not institutionalize themselves. They are taught through what leaders reward, what colleagues are willing to question, whose judgment carries weight, and what happens when someone says, “Stop. This is wrong.”
Values become durable through hiring, supervision, budgets, approval structures, and the stories an organization tells about itself. A value becomes institutional when it can survive deadlines, lucrative partnerships, new products, and the pressure to attract attention online. If it disappears at precisely those moments, it may be a sincere belief, but it is not yet an organizational safeguard.
The broader digital environment matters, too. It rewards shock, humiliation, and outrage, but those pressures acquire force through human choices. One person develops the concept, another manages the partnership, someone checks legalities, and others review brand placement and production quality. Each person owns a piece of the process while no one feels responsible for the moral coherence of the whole.
We should resist reducing this to one careless employee. The fact that an idea traveled so far is precisely what makes this an institutional question. Who had the authority to stop it? Did anyone raise concerns? Were they heard? Were people most likely to recognize the harm present, and did they have real influence? An organization cannot learn if its investigation ends with the last person who clicked “approve.”
Callaway has taken several important steps. Its CEO acknowledged that the company approved the video rather than placing responsibility entirely on its partner. The company ended the partnership, announced changes to its approval process, and committed $1 million to organizations working to prevent violence against women and support survivors. That money can do real good, but it cannot purchase closure or erase the advertisement. Its value will lie in the safety it helps create and the longer practice of accountability it accompanies.
That practice should extend from services survivors need after violence to prevention that helps keep violence from taking hold. At SAFE, that continuum stretches from crisis response, shelter, and housing to work in schools where young people learn about respect, consent, and healthy relationships. Supporting survivors today and changing the conditions that shape tomorrow are part of the same work.
Accountability also asks what an institution will create after confronting what went wrong. That question has particular resonance in Austin, where Good Good had planned to serve as title sponsor of a new PGA Tour event this November. The company has now withdrawn, although the event will continue. Yet golf can carry a very different story. Each year, SAFE’s Fore the Children tournament brings people together to compete, connect, and raise resources for SAFE’s work in this community. Sport becomes a catalyst for community and shared purpose.
Imagine the same driver used to make the winning shot in a campaign that unlocked support for children and survivors. The club would be unchanged. The story surrounding it would reveal something entirely different about what a company believes deserves attention. Advertising sells more than products. It helps make some stories culturally familiar and others newly imaginable.
Values shape what an organization imagines, approves, and rewards. They influence whether sport amplifies humiliation or brings people together around a good worth pursuing. Values must carry enough authority to interrupt a harmful idea before public outrage has to do it.
Callaway has said it opposes violence against women. I believe it does. The deeper opportunity is to make that conviction operational, carrying it from a public statement into the ordinary decisions and partnerships of the institution.
What happened off camera brought us this advertisement. What happens off camera next will tell us whether the institution has changed and what kind of culture it is prepared to help create. The same is true for all of us. Our values become credible through the choices no audience sees: what we imagine, what we approve, what we reward, what we refuse, and what we have the courage to stop.
About the Author:
Dr. Pierre Berastaín is Chief Executive Officer of The SAFE Alliance, one of the nation’s largest organizations serving survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, sex trafficking, and child abuse. He has nearly 20 years of experience working to end violence and support survivors through direct service, advocacy, prevention, housing, and systems change. Dr. Berastaín holds a Doctor of Public Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has authored more than 40 articles on domestic violence, sexual assault, and violence prevention. He lives in Austin, Texas.
