The Real Deal: David Abeles, TaylorMade, and the Business Behind the Driver
By Bob Philion
October 29, 2026
Save for later
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.