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When Tradition
Meets Transformation
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“A tradition unlike any other.” There really is no better way to describe The Masters. Often referred to as the Super Bowl of golf, the tournament—and Augusta National itself—is the purest expression of the game's heritage. It’s the only one of the four majors played on the same course every year, a place where every hole has a name and every slope and shadow carries a story. The traditions run deep: the Champions Dinner, the iconic green jackets, the strict no-phones policy. Augusta isn’t just a venue—it’s a living monument to golf’s rich history, preserved with almost religious intent.
Growing up in Augusta, in the shadow of this temple, golf wasn’t just a game; it was the town’s identity. And because of that, I didn’t really have much of a choice: I was going to play golf whether I liked it or not. Luckily for me, I fell in love from the start.
What I didn’t always love were the rules: the constant reminders to take off my hat, tuck in my shirt, not run on the green, stay off my phone. My father said these rules weren’t about control but about respect. But even then, it felt like golf sometimes hid behind that ‘tradition’ to justify outdated rituals designed to keep a certain type of person out. There was a stiffness to the culture, a sense that things had to be done a certain way simply because they’d always been done that way. I loved the game, but not always the insistence on conformity and exclusivity that surrounded it.
With time, I’ve come to appreciate how much golf shaped the way I carry myself. But even as a kid, I wondered why so many traditions had to be frozen in time. Why did the sport need to operate the same way it did a hundred years ago? Why did respecting the game have to look only one way?
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The Changing Face of Golf
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In the last few years, those questions have become bigger than me. Since COVID, golf has seen one of the largest participation jumps in its history—with more than 47 million Americans now playing, a 38% increase since 2019, and a surge of younger, more diverse players entering the sport. Nearly 2 million new golfers of color and over 2 million new female golfers have joined since the pandemic began, reshaping the culture almost overnight. With this influx came new ideas about what golf could be: YouTube creators such as Erik Anders Lang or Paige Spirinac who turned golf into entertainment and celebrities such as Josh Allen, Steph Curry, or ScHoolboy Q who gave the game a refreshed cultural relevance.
That shift didn’t stop with players—it spread into how the game looked and felt. A wave of apparel and lifestyle brands, like Malbon and Metalwood, emerged to strip away the sport’s stuffiness, inject personality, and welcome people who never saw themselves in Peter Millar pastels or country club khakis. And, for a moment, it worked. Golf looked younger, fresher, and more fun. The clothes reflected a culture finally expanding beyond its old boundaries.
Cultural reinvention wasn’t happening only in the apparel world or in amateur spaces—it hit the professional scene, too. LIV Golf burst onto the stage in 2022 offering a stark alternative to the PGA Tour: 54-hole tournaments instead of 72, guaranteed contracts instead of performance-based earnings, and a team format in place of traditional individual stroke play. It layered on a festival-like atmosphere—concerts, louder crowds, and fan zones—creating an experience that felt younger, faster, and far less buttoned-up than the PGA’s long-standing “quiet please” culture. LIV didn’t invent frustration with the Tour; it simply packaged a more modern, more entertaining version of professional golf for players and fans who felt the PGA had been slow to evolve.
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But for all this progress, many of golf’s old problems have simply evolved, not diminished. In trying to break so sharply from the past, some of the sport’s newcomers, from brands to leagues, have lost sight of the very values that made golf meaningful in the first place.
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The Irony Nobody Planned For
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Many of the brands that helped make golf feel more culturally connected have started to recreate the same exclusivity they rebelled against. Limited drops that sell out in minutes, resale markups, and $1,000 golf shoes born from high-profile collaborations—it’s a different aesthetic, but the same barrier to entry. Instead of democratizing golf style, the model veers into streetwear gatekeeping, swapping one status symbol (the old-money aesthetic) for another (the hypebeast uniform).
It’s a new kind of “you can’t sit with us.”
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The irony is present in professional leagues, too. In pushing so hard to differentiate itself, LIV often crossed the line into pure spectacle—entertainment without the structure, continuity, or competitive integrity that makes golf compelling in the first place. On the PGA Tour, you have to earn your spot every week, beat the strongest fields in golf, and contend for titles with decades of history behind them. LIV replaced that with guaranteed money, no cuts, shallow fields, and team events that carry no real consequence or legacy.
As Sir Nick Faldo put it, “The Sport is bloody tough. The fear of failure is just as powerful as the quest to win. And I think when you’re on a fail-free tour, it makes you go soft. I think some of those players have gone soft.”
Suddenly the sport found itself caught between two extremes: a PGA Tour too rooted in tradition to evolve, and a disruptive upstart so focused on noise and novelty that it abandoned the essence of the game. Instead of solving the problem, professional golf fractured into two versions, both missing something essential.
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Finding the Middle Ground
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Golf’s recent boom wasn’t just about more people picking up clubs, it was about the sport feeling more accessible. When the world shut down, golf became one of the few constants—a pathway back to normalcy and a sport millions fell in love with for the first time. As new identities and ideas poured in, the game felt more open in a way it never had before.
But that openness is fragile. When brands or leagues push too far in the name of disruption, trading one form of gatekeeping for another, they risk alienating the very audiences that gave the sport new life. If there’s a lesson in all this chaos, it’s that the goal shouldn’t be to maintain a museum for tradition’s sake, nor to create a circus for spectacle—it’s to create something that feels familiar enough to trust and fresh enough to care about.
Here are a few things all brands can learn from golf’s reinvention:
Let your heritage be a foundation, not a straitjacket.
Golf’s heritage teaches respect, discipline, and care—all things worth preserving. But heritage is most powerful when it evolves with culture, not when it demands culture stay unchanged. You can see this in programs like First Tee, which uses golf’s heritage values to empower kids from every background and give them greater opportunities on and off the green. Tradition isn’t the barrier; it’s the foundation that makes the experience meaningful.
Know what’s sacred and what’s just habit.
The PGA treated every tradition like scripture and ignored the parts fans and players actually wanted updated. Great companies distinguish the values worth protecting from the rituals that no longer serve anyone. Look at Augusta National and EA Sports’ “Road to the Masters” Invitational. It’s still Augusta—the course, the history, the reverence—but with a modern video game twist that invites younger, more diverse participants into its storied legacy.
Make “new” feel inviting, not exclusionary.
Disruptor brands tried to open the sport up, then pivoted to hype drops and artificial scarcity. Reinvention should lower the barrier to entry, not swap old gatekeeping for a newer, Instagrammable version of it. Erik Anders Lang channels this idea through Random Golf Club, which unites golfers of all backgrounds in a community built on openness, not exclusion.
Modernize the experience, not the essence.
LIV added concerts, team formats, and guaranteed money, proving fans do want fresh ideas, but they did it without any of golf’s integrity. Innovation works when it adds meaning, not when it replaces it with noise. Look at “The Match,” which proves you can add entertainment, mic’d-up players, personality-driven storytelling, and celebrity pairings, without sacrificing the identity or competitive spirit of the sport.
The sweet spot for golf, and for any company or industry navigating change, is carrying history forward without letting it weigh you down: taking the character and craft that brought soul and pairing it with the creativity and openness that new audiences expect.
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Chandler is a Senior Strategist at SYLVAIN, based in the NYC office. He has led and supported projects for major clients including American Express, Resy, Amazon, and The New York Times, with a focus on positioning, brand architecture, and qual and quant research. Raised across Georgia and South Carolina, Chandler brings a background in business and a passion for sport and the outdoors to his work, frequently traveling across the country and the globe to play golf, snowboard, and explore the backcountry.
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Progress Report is a bi-weekly newsletter of business considerations, cultural conversations, and fun recommendations from around the world and web.
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