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Brian Rolapp gave Bloomberg five words that reprice half of professional golf: “There’s no merger, no conversations.” He said them two days after LIV’s chief executive stood at Bedminster announcing a board-approved term sheet from an investor he would not name. So the league holds signed paper from a backer it cannot identify, and the one natural acquirer just said, in public, that it is not looking. What LIV’s equity is worth with that door shut is the week’s biggest open question.
The week’s other pole is two purchases. Ryman Hospitality, the Nashville REIT built on convention hotels, agreed on Monday to pay $1.38 billion for Grande Lakes Orlando — 409 acres, two Marriott flags and a Greg Norman course — at 12.5 times trailing earnings, the largest non-gaming resort sale ever recorded in the United States. The same Monday, Fenway Sports Group took the fifth and final founding team in WTGL, the LPGA’s new indoor league, which means every franchise in women’s team golf now belongs to an owner who already holds the men’s version.
Plus: the thread running through this edition is public authority reaching inside golf’s assets. Ealing Council has voted to take back the ground under a 135-year-old London club, cutting its lease from 75 years to a tenancy that runs out in September 2027. Sydney is carving a third out of Moore Park’s public course, the case Bloomberg’s CityLab takes up below. North Carolina’s legislature has voted $10 million for Greensboro’s tournament with $30 million more behind it, every dollar conditional on a PGA Tour calendar decision. And in Washington, 47 House Democrats are still demanding the fine print on East Potomac, the oversight fight covered in Friday’s edition.
Straight into it. Enjoy!
M&A & EARNINGS
Two scoreboards from Asia: Osaka reports the best quarter in Mizuno’s history, and in Seoul the founder’s family pays the same 6,700 won twice to take golf’s holding company dark.
MIZUNO CLOSED ITS FISCAL FIRST QUARTER WITH RECORD SALES AND RECORD PROFIT, AND GOLF DID THE PULLING. Revenue rose 12.6% to ¥71.5 billion, around $450 million, with net profit up 23.5% to ¥6.0 billion in the three months to June 30, per the figures Mizuno reported through SGB Online. The Americas grew 15.8% to a record of their own, golf up to ¥6.9 billion from ¥5.6 billion a year earlier, while Korea stayed soft and tariffs cost a manageable ¥0.6 billion. Guidance held at ¥280 billion for the year — a clean demand reading next to the refund-flattered quarters Acushnet and Callaway posted, covered in Friday’s edition.
SJ INVESTMENT HOLDINGS TOOK 62.9% OF THE GOLFZON HOLDINGS SHARES IT BID FOR, THEN WENT BACK FOR THE REST. The first tender, covered in Friday’s edition, closed on August 5 with 9.74 million shares in, lifting Kim Won-il’s vehicle and its related parties to 85.2% of voting rights, according to filings on Korea’s DART disclosure system; Seoul Economic Daily’s report on the original June offer sets out the structure it was launched under, including the stake in course operator Golfzon County that sits inside the holding. Terton Capital refused to sell and has filed a complaint with the Financial Supervisory Service over what it calls withheld information on Golfzon County’s value and sale process. A second tender opened Monday at the same 6,700 won for the remaining 13.41%, running to September 2, with the company’s 9.83% treasury block outside both rounds; full take-up puts the family at 90.17% of issued shares, everything except that treasury, then delisting — the same 57% premium, offered twice, to finish what round one could not.
TOURS & POWER
Consolidation in plain sight: the Tour’s next commissioner prices a LIV deal at zero, Fenway closes out a league’s ownership map, an NFL rights specialist takes the media brief, and a state legislature votes money into the 2028 calendar.
NO MERGER, NO CONVERSATIONS — ROLAPP SHUTS THE ONLY EXIT LIV’S NEW OWNERS HAD LEFT
Two days after LIV Golf announced a signed term sheet from a lead investor it declined to name, the PGA Tour’s incoming commissioner told Bloomberg exactly where reunification stands. “There’s no merger, no conversations, we’ve been really concentrated on the PGA Tour,” Brian Rolapp said in an interview Bloomberg published Friday. The 2023 framework agreement gets no funeral, just an empty chair. For the first time since that June, the man running the Tour is telling the market that LIV’s assets carry no strategic value to the buyer everyone had priced in.
The paperwork on the other side is thin by design. LIV’s own announcement confirms a board-approved term sheet, a backer Scott O’Neil describes only as “one of weight,” more than a dozen minority candidates and a close targeted for September, with players set to become majority equity holders. No amount is disclosed. The scale of the ask does have a number, up to $350 million, per the Today’s Golfer interview with Martin Kaymer carried in the July 28 edition; Friday’s edition reported the term sheet itself and the BC Partners credit talks around it.
The sharper collision came from inside LIV’s locker room. Bryson DeChambeau spent the same news cycle saying he hopes to play both tours one day and that golf works better with the circuits alongside each other, golf.com reports, which lands the “no conversations” line on a specific cap table. Under LIV 2.0 the players are the majority owners. A door the talent assumed stayed ajar has been shut by the counterparty, and the people holding the equity are the ones who wanted through it. Rolapp, for his part, credited the last four years of disruption with forcing changes the Tour would not have made in calm conditions, and pointed to the 2028 Championship and Challenger reset as the product answer.
For anyone with 2027 commercial exposure to either side, the reunification discount just left the model. Two products, two sponsor books, priced apart from here. LIV aims to close its transaction in September at ten events and purses near $10 million; the Tour takes its own rights to market in late 2028. If your golf budget was written assuming one converged sport, which of those two calendars is it actually buying? Golf Digest’s report frames the other clock, the contract cliff, with DeChambeau’s own deal among those expiring before the new money lands.
FENWAY TAKES THE FIFTH WTGL TEAM — WOMEN’S TEAM GOLF LAUNCHES WITH ITS OWNERSHIP ALREADY INSTITUTIONAL
TMRW Sports and Fenway Sports Group announced on Monday that FSG has acquired the fifth and final founding franchise in WTGL, the women’s league TMRW is building with the LPGA for a debut this fall at SoFi Center in Palm Beach Gardens. The team plays as Boston Common Golf, the name FSG has run in the men’s TGL since 2025, and no purchase price was disclosed, per the joint announcement. Fourteen players are committed so far, six of them inside the world’s top 13, carrying 95 LPGA Tour wins between them.
Arthur Blank holds Atlanta Drive. Alexis Ohanian has Los Angeles, Steve Cohen New York, the Hamp family with Kevin Kelleher Motor City, and now FSG Boston, and every one of those groups already owns the matching men’s TGL team. A league that first played in January 2025 has sold out its women’s franchises to the same five buyers before a single match.
For FSG the position stacks. Fenway Sports Management partnered with the LPGA in 2023 to help grow the tour’s sponsorship and marketing business, the group sat among TGL’s original six owners and holds early TMRW equity, and Linda Henry, the FSG partner who fronted Monday’s statement, runs Boston Globe Media; the Globe’s report adds Massachusetts native Megan Khang among the committed players, with rosters still to come.
The read for sponsors is a portfolio one. In each of five markets, one office now sells men’s and women’s indoor golf inventory as a pair, on the same venue, under the same brand. Boston’s version starts selling immediately, and the roster that sets its price lands in the coming weeks, per TMRW, ahead of the first season at SoFi Center this fall.
THE PGA TOUR HAS HIRED WILL DENG FROM THE NFL AS ITS SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF MEDIA STRATEGY. Deng spent eleven years at the league, arriving in 2015 to work on media strategy and business development and moving up to run corporate strategy in 2023, with Goldman Sachs before that. He takes over the file that matters most in Ponte Vedra: the Tour’s CBS and NBC broadcast deals and ESPN’s digital package all expire after 2030, and the plan is to take those rights to market in late 2028, per Sportcal’s account of an appointment first reported by Josh Carpenter and Ben Fischer at Sports Business Journal — Rolapp keeps staffing the Tour’s front office from the shop he left.
NORTH CAROLINA’S GENERAL ASSEMBLY HAS VOTED $10 MILLION FOR GREENSBORO’S PGA TOUR EVENT, WITH $30 MILLION MORE CONDITIONED ON A CALENDAR DECISION THE TOUR HAS NOT MADE. The appropriation, reported by Business North Carolina, carries a stated intent to add $30 million over the next three years provided the tournament wins Championship Series status for 2028, and now awaits Governor Josh Stein’s signature. The frame around the money is the sponsor churn. Wyndham is ending its 20-year title run rather than renew, and Sports Business Journal reports, on unnamed sources, that Raymond James is lined up as the likely successor with a top-tier slot expected; none of that carries a signature yet, and Raymond James had no immediate comment. The legislature’s move does, or will, and it prices the tier, with sponsorship asks of at least $30 million a year for a Championship Series title, the level Cadillac joined at, covered in last Tuesday’s edition. Public money, tied by statute to a private league’s 2028 schedule — Sedgefield has hosted since 2008, and whether Raleigh’s $40 million ever leaves the building rests on a calendar the Tour has not published.
COURSES & REAL ESTATE
What golf land is worth depends on who is counting: a Nashville REIT pays a record for 409 resort acres in Orlando, and a west London council takes back 130 from a club that has held them since 1891.
RYMAN PAYS $1.38 BILLION FOR GRANDE LAKES — WHAT A CONVENTION REIT THINKS A GOLF RESORT IS FOR
Ryman Hospitality Properties agreed on Monday to buy Grande Lakes Orlando for $1.38 billion, per the REIT’s announcement: 409 acres, the 1,010-room JW Marriott and the 582-room Ritz-Carlton, 320,000 square feet of meeting space and an 18-hole Greg Norman course, all staying under Marriott management. Trinity’s release calls it the largest non-gaming resort transaction on record in the United States. The price makes the headline. What travels is the multiple, 12.5 times trailing EBITDAre through June 30, which puts the property’s yearly earnings a shade above $110 million by our arithmetic.
The buyer’s playbook is fourteen months old. Ryman closed on Trinity’s JW Marriott Phoenix Desert Ridge in June 2025 at $865 million, a deal struck at 12.7 times the resort’s 2024 earnings; Grande Lakes is the second Trinity asset it has bought since, at two-tenths of a turn tighter and 60% more money. This one is funded with a 5.1 million-share equity offering priced this week plus cash and debt, a $50 million deposit already in escrow per the SEC filing reported by GrowthSpotter, and a close expected in the third quarter. BofA Securities and J.P. Morgan advised. Ryman expects the deal accretive to adjusted funds from operations per share from 2027.
On the sell side, this is Trinity’s exit slide. The Trinity and Elliott joint venture bought the resort from Blackstone affiliates in December 2018 at $870 million and leaves at $1.38 billion, a 59% mark-up over nearly eight years, our numbers again, with a Michelin Key added to the Ritz-Carlton along the way. The golf sits inside that as group-calendar equipment; the Norman course hosts the PNC Championship, a detail Connect CRE’s coverage picks out. Ryman’s model runs on meetings booked years ahead, and a championship course is part of what keeps the group rate honest.
For anyone holding golf-anchored resort assets, a listed REIT just printed the comp: 12.5 times, fee simple, course included, from a buyer whose entire thesis is group business. Bankers will carry that multiple into marketing decks this autumn. If your course sits on the books as an amenity cost, this deal prices it as earnings. What would your own trailing twelve months fetch at 12.5 times? The close comes in the third quarter, in Orlando.
ONE YEAR WHERE THERE WERE 75 — EALING’S EXCLUDED LEASE PUTS A 135-YEAR-OLD CLUB ON A CLOCK
West Middlesex Golf Club has played on the same Southall ground since 1893 and now holds it until September 30, 2027. Under a three-way settlement Ealing Council’s cabinet approved on July 9, reported by The Golf Business, the club surrenders a lease with roughly 75 years left to run across some 130 acres and takes back an “excluded” tenancy, the kind with no renewal right, while the council sells a 2.27-acre plot to the company that debt-funded the club out of administration in 2022 and wants its money back. Management says memberships cannot be renewed past April 2027 on those terms, which points at insolvency within a year and 27 jobs at risk.
The numbers on the club’s side of the ledger belong to a working business: 400-plus members, around 8,000 visitor rounds a year, a James Braid redesign from 1910, the oldest club in Middlesex. A cross-party call-in backed by 23 Liberal Democrat, Conservative and Green councillors lost 7-4 at scrutiny on July 23, all seven Labour votes upholding the decision. The members’ petition stands just under 5,000 signatures and is addressed to the council and the Greater London Authority both.
The council’s framing is commercial. Councillor Steve Donnelly called the vote a narrow decision about recouping the lease, said the dispute is with the funder rather than the golfing community, and argued no statutory duty to consult golfers arises when the counterparty is a private limited company. Then read the instrument. An excluded lease settles the litigation officers had called costly and uncertain, and extinguishes the club’s security in the same clause. Campaigners believe the land is bound for the already-funded West London Regional Park; the council says no decision has been taken. A legal challenge is live as a threat, resident David Thomas telling the scrutiny meeting the arrangement conflicts with the club’s articles of association. Perivale, the club next door, closed in 2024 and reopened as Pear Tree Park.
The exposure this case prices is tenancy, and the clause is portable well beyond west London. Every operator on leased ground answers to two documents that outrank the P&L, the head lease and whatever the freeholder plans next. West Middlesex hosts a world-ranking amateur event and still lost 74 of its 75 years in one cabinet vote. If your course sits on somebody else’s freehold, the date that matters is written into your lease, and Ealing has shown how fast it can be rewritten; this one runs out on September 30, 2027.
BRANDS & PLAYERS
Two routes to the customer this week: Trackman bolts women’s team golf onto its broadcast-data franchise, and a direct-to-consumer shoe brand pays for shelf space where feet can try it on.
TRACKMAN WILL SUPPLY BALL TRACKING AND SIMULATORS TO THE 2026 SOLHEIM CUP. The Danish company joins PING, Skyscanner, Rolex, John Deere and adidas on the partner roster for Bernardus, September 11-13, the event’s first staging in the Netherlands, per the announcement from Trackman and the organizers. Its release restates the incumbency worth watching, official club-and-ball tracking provider to PGA Tour, DP World Tour and LIV broadcasts with 1,000-plus tour players on its launch monitors — the data layer under golf’s television product keeps adding events, and the women’s team calendar was the open square.
SQAIRZ GOLF SHOES ARE NOW ON SALE AT SCHEELS, THE BRAND’S FIRST NATIONAL RETAIL SHELF. Select stores in Eden Prairie, Tulsa, Wichita and Cedar Park carry the range from this month, with the full collection on SCHEELS.com nationwide and baseball and softball lines to follow in January 2027, per SQAIRZ’s announcement. Founder Bob Winskowicz is direct about the reason, that no digital platform replicates putting the shoe on a foot — a DTC performance brand buying the try-on moment, which in footwear is where the sale happens.
THE DEMAND SIDE
One market, one reading: Britain’s first half held on to nearly all of a record year’s gains.
ROUNDS PLAYED IN GREAT BRITAIN THROUGH JUNE BEAT EVERY YEAR THIS DECADE EXCEPT 2025. The half-year count of nine- and 18-hole rounds runs 9% below last year’s record, with the second quarter down 7%, and Sporting Insights reads that as strength given that 2023 and 2024 were themselves strong, closure-free years, per The Golf Business. England Golf’s survey work finds near-universal appetite to keep playing and a widespread wish to play more often — the same shape as the US record pace covered in last Tuesday’s edition, demand holding its ground on both sides of the Atlantic.
WHAT WE ARE READING
Bloomberg’s CityLab Weekly takes this edition’s land fight global from Sydney, where the government plans to carve 20 hectares of parkland out of Moore Park’s historic public course and shrink it by a third over the golfing community’s objection. Linda Poon writes it as a pattern piece, land-hungry cities eyeing fairways from Australia outward, and with Ealing three sections up, the pattern already has a fresh London data point.
Golf Monthly’s count of who dresses the world’s top 100 puts numbers on the walking-billboard market: 44 apparel brands inside the ranking, FootJoy on 36 pairs of feet, Adidas leading clothing with 12 players, and only four clothing free agents left. Anyone negotiating a player deal, on either side of the table, gets a market map for ten minutes’ reading.
The Daily Drive asks whether Greensboro fits the new PGA Tour at all, setting eight decades of history against Championship Series economics that start at $30 million a year: Sam Snead’s eight wins, Charlie Sifford’s 1961 breakthrough as the first Black player in a PGA-sanctioned event in the South, 34 champions with majors on the honor board. Useful before the state money above turns into a signature, because the piece explains what North Carolina believes it is buying