If you’re a fan of golf, you probably spent at least some time the last few days watching the 2016 Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. If you watched the last few holes during the final round on Sunday, you saw Danny Willett win the Masters.
Interestingly, Danny Willett uses a .Golf domain name for his professional website: DannyWillett.golf. I first learned about this after seeing Donuts Co-Founder and EVP Dan Schindler’s tweet following Willett’s victory (Donuts operates the .Golf extension):
.GOLF wins the Masters with the fabulous https://t.co/PVRzJxy9gu#Masters2016
— danielschindler (@danielschindler) April 10, 2016
If you have a look at Willett’s Twitter page, you can see him link to DannyWillett.golf, which confirms that this is his official domain name. Whois registration information shows that the domain name is registered to International Sports Management Ltd., which is “a sports management agency based in Cheshire, England that represents leading figures from the sports of golf and cricket.” Interestingly, the company uses ISM.golf for its website.
I asked Dan Schindler if there is any marketing deal between Donuts and Willett, and he said there is not. He also told me that Willett is one of “about 50 professional golfers in the world who have switched to .GOLF.” Some of the other top golfers who use .Golf domain names for their websites include Lee Westwood (runner up at the Masters tournament yesterday, Darren Clarke who is Captain of the European Ryder Cup team, and Louis Oosthuizen who had a hole-in-one at the 16th hole yesterday. I was told that the registry does not pay for celebrity endorsers or for professionals to use their .Golf domain names.
Donuts had a tradeshow booth at this year’s PGA Show, a major tradeshow for golfing professionals and people who sell golf equipment and gear. Dan told me that these golfers switched to their .Golf domain names prior to the show. At the time I wrote an article about the tradeshow back at the end of January, there were about 4,300 registered .Golf domain names. A little over a month and a half later, there are now more than 5,300 registered .Golf domain names, according to nTLDStats.com.
Dan also shared a special message from him and the team at Donuts to Danny Willett: “We offer hearty congratulations to Danny Willet, a proud .GOLF registrant, on his monumental and life-changing win at The Masters, Augusta. Special congratulations also, to him and his wife Nicole on the birth of their first child.“
The Master Golf Game Sunday was AMAZING…
My favorite moment was when one players ball
hit anothers ball and then veered into the hole…
That was one of the most beautiful golf courses I’ve seen…
~Patricia
That was Louis Oosthuizen and it was awesome! http://louis57.golf/
Once in a very blue moon if I’m in the mood and it happens to be on someone’s TV, otherwise watching golf is like watching paint dry and I wonder if people who like to do that are a bit crazy. I’ll make an allowance for those who also play, however.
That said, .golf is one of the few new TLDs I think is great.