LA Golf and Bryson DeChambeau. Sounds like a match made in golfing heaven, doesn’t it?
Turns out, the parties needed a pre-nup.
The restless Bryson DeChambeau is in yet another period in which he’s evaluating every aspect of his golf and business life. His future with LIV Golf is an unknown. Already, as a result of this review, a report of collateral damage is in: Bryson DeChambeau and LA Golf are parting company.
In a phone interview Monday afternoon, Reed Dickens, speaking from his home in Newport Beach, Calif., said that DeChambeau made a pitch, through a new-to-the-team Bryson business advisor, to become LA Golf’s majority owner. Dickens, a 48-year-old native Louisianan and a former CEO of the baseball equipment company Marucci Sports, was not down with that. Turns out, in golf as in life, breaking up is hard to do.
“Bryson and I actually have some of the same tendencies, and I have nothing but respect for him,” Dickens said during a 90-minute interview. You could not miss an intensiveness in Dickens that brought to mind DeChambeau. Dickens is a long-hitting 10-handicap golfer at Bel-Air Country Club in Los Angeles, and a scratch talker up and down Southern California’s 405 Freeway. “But he has this new consultant, a McKinsey-consulting type guy, and this guy says to me that Bryson is gonna walk unless he gets 51 percent. Bryson’s got 2 percent of the company. And I think the guy doesn’t realize that he’s dealing with a redneck. And I say, ‘There’s no path for that.’ They played chicken with me, and now we’re going to graciously part ways.”
Dickens has seen high-stakes chess before. Horseshoes, too. In his 20s, he worked in the George W. Bush White House for four years as an assistant press secretary and campaign spokesman. More than once he went to Kennebunkport, Maine, with 43 and 41 both on the scene. The senior Bush was a first baseman at Yale. The younger was an owner of the Rangers. Dickens is not a baseball guy or political but has found himself enmeshed in both in his adult life.
“Bryson needs someone serving him 24 hours a day, he needs somebody to build him his own clubs, and that’s not scalable for us,” Dickens said. In other words, you can’t have a small, almost artisanal manufacturing business where a single customer demands and gets vast amounts of attention. Dickens said his goal for LA Golf is to make high-end equipment for golfers who want clubs that perform better off mishits, because of their bulge-and-roll face designs. All the while he wants to simplify the shaft-fitting process. The LA Golf website comprises a single page, a moody black-and-white golf photo with single box to enter your email address. Callaway this is not.
Dickens said that LA Golf had a “head count” of 75 employees but that he has more recently terminated 25 staffers as the company shifts from trying to be a premium wholesaler with high-end retail accounts to a direct-to-the-golfer company making exclusive products exclusively in the United States. He described his years with DeChambeau as one long R&D project, with DeChambeau making vast design contributions. “He challenges everything you do, and he makes you test your every assumption,” Dickens said.
Dickens was asked if Nike Golf’s experience with Tiger Woods had been instructive for him.
“I think what’s instructive about Tiger and Nike is this: The most difficult and expensive thing to do in consumer product sales is unaided name recognition, to use a phrase of politics,” Dickens said. Nike, he said, already enjoyed vast name recognition without Tiger Woods and had slightly more with Tiger Woods. What Nike Golf didn’t have, Dickens said, was a line of products that ordinary golfers wanted to buy in large quantities. An issue for Nike, he said, was that the public never really believed that the clubs Woods played were essentially the same clubs that ordinary golfers could buy.
For the last half-decade or more, LA Golf faced different issues. “We partnered with the golfer who is more active than any golfer on social media and I’m very grateful for that,” Dickens said. “Tiger gave Nike some magical moments, like that ball sitting on the edge of the hole before falling in.” Sunday at the 2005 Masters, par-3 16th hole, Woods’s second shot, his ball’s Nike swoosh available for all to see until it wasn’t. Woods won his fourth Masters that year. “But I don’t think any of that helped with Nike’s return on their investment,” Dickens said.
By 2016, Nike was out of the golf-manufacturing business. That same year, DeChambeau turned pro. Within a few years, he was helping LA Golf get into the golf business at its highest level. For ubiquitousness, LA Golf was nothing like TaylorMade or Titleist, but DeChambeau helped get the LA Golf name known to innumerable gearhead golfers, no question about that. You always have to start with a base, with your constituents. Every student of politics knows that, and every marketing executive does, too.
Dickens believes the company has an innovative product line (and he notes that Sergio Garcia is playing LA Golf clubs this year). But what LA Golf will do now is go forward without its Tiger Woods, without arguably the most influential golfer in the world. He knows it won’t be easier.
In the meantime, DeChambeau’s 4.3 million Instagram followers, among others, will be itching to know about Bryson’s next move, what with spring not even a month away and Bryson DeChambeau broadly enjoying the title, with a wink or not, as the Most Interesting Man in Golf.
Yo, Bryson: What gives, dude?
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II. SPRINGTIME FOR BRYSON
Your fill-in gear correspondent sent a text Tuesday morning at 9:15 to DeChambeau’s longtime agent, Mr. Brett Falkoff, senior vice president of GSE Worldwide, noting that Reed Dickens had outlined the state of affairs between LA Golf and the golfer. Would Bryson like to discuss their years together and his equipment future? (Not that he needs this GOLF.com megaphone, what with the millions who follow him on the Instagram, the X, the YouTube, the TikTok.) Seventy minutes later, a response from Falkoff landed:
