The Real Deal: David Abeles, TaylorMade and the business behind the driver

I’ve spent more than three decades inside the business of sports, and trust me, the scoreboard almost never tells the whole story. Behind the driver Rory McIlroy pipes down the middle on Sunday sits years of engineering, a global supply chain, a tour van, a factory, a fight over shelf space and a bet somebody made in a boardroom five years earlier. That’s the part of this game I’ve always loved, and it’s why I started The Real Deal podcast.

This episode kicks off a loose collection of interviews we’re calling Kings of Carlsbad, and I couldn’t have scripted a better place to start than David Abeles, the president and CEO of TaylorMade. Full disclosure: DA and I go back a long way, and we’ve stayed friends through all of it, which never once stopped us from trying to beat each other. For years we were neighbors and rivals in California, him running TaylorMade, me running Cobra Puma Golf right down the road. We fought over the same shelf space, the same tour staff and, in the end, the same golfer. A driver and a 9-iron apart, as he likes to put it, Carlsbad is a friendly town. Right up until somebody launches a new driver.

To say David has been on a journey is an understatement. In 2013, he walked out of TaylorMade’s front doors. He’d resigned over where he thought the company and the game were heading, and he told me he honestly hoped he was wrong. He wasn’t. In the two years he was gone, TaylorMade’s revenue fell by half. Yep, 50 percent. The place was burning through $150 million in cash. Then he came back in 2015 and rebuilt it into the No. 1 equipment brand in the world.

Think about that.

The first thing DA will tell you is that the club on the shelf is the smallest part of the story. A driver is the tip of an iceberg made of R&D, athlete partnerships, factories, tariffs, retail relationships and decisions nobody sees the results of for years. When he came back, the company was broke; it was chasing revenue at the expense of margin and launching technology that was eroding equity with golfers instead of building it. So, he did the least glamorous thing imaginable. He got his leaders into a boardroom at The Santaluz Club with a charge—be the best performance golf brand in the world. Budget? Unlimited, which was something, because he’ll be the first to tell you the company didn’t have two nickels to rub together at the time.

At TaylorMade, DA says, words matter, because words drive behavior. He claims all 2,400 of his employees can recite that mission back to you, and having run a company across town trying to beat him, I believe it. The outfits that win in this business aren’t the ones with the cleverest ads. They’re the ones where the whole building is pulling the same rope. Best performance gets validated by the best players choosing your gear, not signing for it—and right now the No. 1 driver, fairway wood, players iron and putter on the planet all say TaylorMade on the sole. A 17-year-old phenom named Miles Russell plays it because he wants to. That’s the moat.

The second takeaway is one I lived a version of myself. Great leadership isn’t dodging change. It’s steering through it. Look at this company’s actual DNA. Gary Adams founded TaylorMade in 1979 on a heresy—that a wood should be made of steel instead of persimmon. From there it passed to a French ski maker in Salomon, then to Adidas for two decades, then to private-equity firm KPS out of New York, then to Centroid out of South Korea. As we speak, it’s running yet another sale process. Five owners and counting.

I know that ride. DA and I both made the pilgrimage to Herzogenaurach more than once, the one little town in Germany that somehow houses both Adidas and Puma, their headquarters staring at each other across the same river. He was making the trip for TaylorMade’s owner; I was making it for Cobra’s. Being the little golf category inside a giant that cares more about World Cups and sneaker drops is its own special flavor of fun. What I admire is how DA keeps his people out of the storm. When I asked how he stops his employees from spiraling every time a “for sale” sign goes up, he barely blinked. The owner technically sells the company, he said, but who do you think’s doing the work? So, he keeps them fixed on the mission instead of the rumor mill.

Nothing shows that steadiness better than Sun Day Red. Picture DA on a 40-degree morning at St Andrews, parked at a picnic table in a Scottish wind over a cold coffee and a frozen bagel, while Tiger Woods’ team floats the idea that the greatest player alive might leave Nike and build a brand of his own. If that premise sounds familiar, it should. I raised Roger Federer walking out on Nike on this very show, and it felt like science fiction right up until it happened. Three weeks later DA pitched Tiger in Jupiter—the logo with 15 stripes for 15 majors, his kids’ initials woven into the cat—and when it was done, Tiger reached across the table and said four words. “DA, you guys get me.” Two years on, Sun Day Red has gone from one employee and one idea to 55, and DA says they’re just getting started. TaylorMade could have written off Tiger leaving Nike as something outside its lane. Instead, DA saw an opportunity right next to the core and had the conviction to act.

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My last takeaway with David is the town itself. When we all landed there, Carlsbad still had bean fields between the business parks. Today it’s a built-out city of more than 110,000, and it’s the Titanium Valley to Silicon Valley’s silicon. Ask DA why every major equipment maker sits a few lots apart, close enough that you mind what you say at lunch, and he doesn’t apologize for it. They thrive on it. They push, and when they get pushed, they push back. California barely enforces non-competes, so the talent sloshes from one brand to the next, and everybody gets a little sharper for it. You could lose an employee to the company down the street and run into them at Starbucks the next morning. When we picked up Cobra for Puma in 2010, believe me, that proximity cut both ways. Great industries grow in clusters. One valley gave us the microchip. This one gave us the modern driver.

My take? This is a kid who turned down a Wall Street desk at 21 because his father, a 97-year-old rocket scientist who once worked on how to get astronauts back through the atmosphere, gave him one important maxim to live by. Make your passion your vocation. Everything after that—the caddie yard at 12, the years behind the retail counter in Hartford, two years in Hong Kong, three ownership groups and a half-frozen bagel with Tiger—was David playing the long game while most of the industry played the next quarter.

He runs the company he loves, in the town competition built, and he is nowhere close to finished.

The golf business is obsessed with distance. DA’s career is a pretty good reminder that the longest game is the one worth playing.

That’s The Real Deal.