Golfer Sergio Garcia has made more than $24 million since 1999 just with his golfing skills, so he doesn’t exactly need the extra money from endorsements, but it would be a very public slap in the face (and dent in his wallet) if his main sponsor, TaylorMade-Adidas, decided to dump him due to an insensitive remark he made earlier this week.

Garcia and Tiger Woods have been known to not enjoy each other’s company very much and have been engaged in a bit of a spat since the two had an encounter at the Players Championships. While playing on the same hole, Woods pulled a club from his bag just as Garcia was taking a swing. Tiger’s actions and the crowd’s response distracted Garcia and his shot went a bit off course, CNN reports. Verbal jabbing on the course followed, and Woods went on to win the tourney.

In the leadup to this weekend’s European Tour matchup, Garcia was asked at a press conference Tuesday if he would invite Woods over to his place. "We'll have him 'round every night,” he said, according to ESPN. “We will serve fried chicken." The comment earned him a load of recrimination, an outraged tweet from Woods, and the threat of his main sponsor pulling the plug: "Sergio Garcia's recent comment was offensive and in no way aligns with TaylorMade-Adidas Golf's values and corporate culture," said a statement released by the company. "We have spoken with Sergio directly and he clearly has regret for his statement and we believe he is sincere.”Continue reading...

The 2013 Masters Golf Tournament—one of the few golf tourneys that the world outside of the golf community actually cares about—kicked off Thursday morning as brands watch helplessly, hoping and praying that one of thier golfers is the one pulling on the famed green jacket by weekend's end. 

As Forbes points out, last year’s winner, Bubba Watson, wasn’t a big name outside of the golf world before the Masters got underway last year. Though by the end of the tournament, his main sponsor, Ping, had generated $14.2 million in media value, according to brand analyst and research firm Repucon. That's triple what the next brand, TaylorMade, got out with at $4.5 million. 

The reason the numbers vary so much is because he Masters only allows four minutes of commercials each hour and limits the amount of branding on the course so the majority of brand exposure comes from the golfers themselves and whatever airtime they get. That means sponsors of the world’s top-ranked golfers—Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and Justin Rose— along with such big names as Phil Mickelson (No. 9) and Watson (No. 14) will be enjoying the sight of their products far more than those who supply gear to Richard Sterne (No. 49). Unless, of course, Sterne pulls out the game of his life and ends up in or near the winner's circle.Continue reading...

Volkswagen Golf was in some pretty intriguing company at the New York International Auto Show with fellow winners of the World Car of the Year Awards: Porsche Boxster as Performance Car of the Year, Jaguar F-Type as Car Design of the Year and Tesla S as Green Car of the Year.

But Volkswagen executives were more excited about the prospects of the seventh-generation Golf in the US market than about the North American debut of Golf 7 winning the World Car of the Year designation. The New York Auto Show award recognized the Golf, VW's best-selling car worldwide, as the "car for everyman."

Yet in America, Golf—while it's been a workhorse for the Volkswagen brand for decades—isn't accorded nearly the respect that it is globally. Volkswagen has begun a major push toward higher sales volumes in the US, but it has achieved significant gains already with new versions of its three other primary cars: Passat, Jetta and the Beetle.Continue reading...

Winning takes care of everything. Or so says Nike. 

The sporting goods giant posted a quickly contentious image on its Nike Golf Facebook and Twitter accounts this week in the wake of Tiger Woods’ record-tying eighth victory at the Arnold Palmer Invitational showing the newly-(re)crowned world No. 1-ranked golfer sizing up a putt. The slogan, “Winning takes care of everything,” a favorite saying of Woods since 2009, is front and center. At the bottom, of course, is Nike’s famous swoosh—alongside the word, “Victory.”

Nike says the statement references Woods’ perseverance to return to the top of his sport and is a salute to his athletic performance. But everything? Please. Sports fans weren’t the only ones who devoured every titillating detail of Woods’ personal life when it was exposed following his late 2009 admission of multiple extra-marital affairs.Continue reading...

World War II and 9/11 are the only things that have kept the best European and American golfers from squaring off against each other every two years since the late 1920s in the Ryder Cup.

Though it has such big names as Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Nick Faldo, Tiger Woods and Colin Montgomerie involved and been around for 85 years, the Ryder Cup has never had a worldwide sponsor—until now.

Scotland’s Standard Life Investments has signed on to fill that spot for the next two Cups, Reuters reports. "This announcement follows the launch of the unified Ryder Cup global brand identity and the stated aim of Ryder Cup Europe and the PGA of America to secure global partnerships going forward," said Pete Bevacqua, chief executive officer of the PGA of America. The tournament is one of the sport's biggest, reaching up to 500 million daily TV viewers in 183 countries. Continue reading...

Nike has routinely shelled out millions to athletes to wear its swoosh and use its equipment during competition. On Monday, the company made its next big play. Following months of rumors, the global athletic brand announced it has signed the world's No. 1 player, Rory McIlroy, to carry Nike forward.

The deal is reported to be worth up to $250 million for McIlroy, 23, over a decade.

The first opportunity McIlroy will have to show off his new Nike duds in a tournament will come on Thursday as he joins fellow Nike big-bucks endorser Tiger Woods to kick off the Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship.Continue reading...

Somebody at AT&T likes to see the company's logo around town. Dallas was named as the location for its new headquarters in 2008 and, since then, the telecommunications giant has put its name on the AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic and the AT&T Performing Arts Center there. Now, they are adding another local sponsorship: the AT&T Byron Nelson golf tourney, which serves as a fundraiser for both Salesmanship Club Youth and Family Centers as well as the pocketbooks of a few big-name pro golfers.

This will actually be the second PGA tournament that AT&T will sponsor, having signed on with the inaugural big-bucks National event held in the D.C. area every Fourth of July weekend since 2007. AT&T will have to wait till 2015 to get its name on Byron Nelson, though, since HP has its name there till then (and has had it there since 2003), according to PGATour.com.Continue reading...

It’s not cheap to put on a big-name golf tournament, especially when it’s the Tiger Woods World Challenge, which pays out $1 million to whoever finishes first (this year, it was Graeme McDowell, above) and $120,000 to the golfer who finishes in last place.

Eighteen of the top players in the world take part in the event which started in 1999, a decade before he banged his Cadillac Escalade into a fire hydrant and a tree outside his Florida home at 2:30 in the morning and his life began to unravel as news of his many mistresses began to spill out. Woods has since had his personal life opened up for pretty much everybody to see and gone through a divorce. Many of his endorsement deals disappeared (see ya, Accenture, AT&T, Gatorade, and GM) and a few stuck with him (Nike, Electronic Arts). Tiger did his best to lay low for a bit.

And even though it appears that Woods has gotten his golf game back in action and he’s moving forward with his life, there is still some fallout from the scandal. Chevron pulled out as the title sponsor of the World Challenge, which benefits the Tiger Woods Foundation, after last year’s event and “a deal with a major company unexpectedly fell through at the last minute in early September,” according to the Associated Press.Continue reading...