Club Maker Hoping Old Name Still Has Allure

The golf business has been mired in a sand trap for the last few years, beset by stagnant participation in the sport and declining equipment sales. So it wouldn’t appear to be the best time to bring out a new line of clubs, especially one named for a golf legend who won his last major tournament 75 years ago.

But that hasn’t deterred Malibu businessman Walter J. Rosenthal, whose Bobby Jones Golf Co. is rolling out a new set of metal woods next week despite modest sales of its first line last year.

Rosenthal hopes to capitalize on the cachet of the name Bobby Jones, the legendary amateur who won all of golf’s major tournaments in the same year and then retired without turning pro. Rosenthal acquired the rights to use the name from Jones’ descendants in 2003.

“I tried to see whether or not there was a niche for something that was well-conceived, well-crafted, aesthetically pleasing and technologically sophisticated,” said Rosenthal, the company’s chairman and chief executive.

Industry observers say he faces a major challenge in trying to market products named for an athlete who is not alive to help pitch them -- Jones died in 1971 -- and in a highly competitive industry suffering from a Tiger Woods-like slump.

The launch of the Bobby Jones Players Series by Jesse Ortiz at the PGA Merchandise Show starting Thursday in Orlando, Fla., comes as the $5-billion retail golf industry is hampered by unusually wet weather, a dearth of breakthrough products and a lack of new players. Rounds of golf played in 2004 were flat nationwide through November, a month in which rounds dropped 6.3% year over year, according to market research firm Golf Datatech.

The stagnant playing numbers have damped equipment sales. U.S. sales of club sets fell nearly 7% in 2003 to $1.46 billion, according to the latest available figures from the National Sporting Goods Assn. Sales of individual clubs slipped nearly 9% to $436 million.

Despite the grim outlook, Bobby Jones Golf last year debuted a limited-edition line of clubs, including a $500 driver, at a couple of dozen prestige courses, including the Riviera Country Club, where Rosenthal, 63, is a member.

Sales were modest. Rosenthal estimated the company sold about 1,000 of the clubs and gave away roughly the same number to influential members of the golf industry, including golf professionals, writers and players.

Rosenthal hopes to do better with the new, more competitively priced line -- drivers will retail for $300, fairway metals for $200 and hybrids for $180. He plans to sell the clubs at as many as 500 golf courses and select retailers by the end of the year.

Industry experts suggest that the clubs’ success will be tied to performance. “If the club works and you have some people saying, ‘Hey, this thing is really good,’ they’ll buy it like mad,” analyst Dennis McAlpine of McAlpine Associates said. “But if it doesn’t work -- and it has to be clearly better than the other things that are out there -- it will languish around like everything else.”

How much Jones’ celebrated moniker will help lift sales remains unclear. Although he is indisputably one of the game’s most legendary players, Jones reached his prime before many of today’s golfers were born.

“The Bobby Jones name will help for some,” said Terry McAndrew, publisher of Web Street Golf Report. “But for others it won’t mean a lot.”

Recent attempts to capitalize on the Jones name have had limited success. Callaway Golf Co. put out a line of Bobby Jones clubs for a year or two in the early 1980s and a line of putters in 1998 and 1999. (Ely Callaway, the company’s late founder, was a distant relative of Jones.)

“They were really a collector’s item more than anything else,” said Callaway spokesman Larry Dorman. “They were beautiful, but they just were not a big seller.”

Callaway returned the licensing rights to Jones’ heirs, he said, because they no longer meshed with a company strategy to focus on its Callaway, Top-Flite and Ben Hogan brands.

Rosenthal has set modest 2005 sales goals of $5 million, mostly from the men’s fairway metal woods, including hybrids. A more extensive women’s line, also to be unveiled next week and available by late spring, will include woods, wedges and irons.

Rosenthal is not relying -- at least initially -- on a big advertising budget or paid-endorsement deals with touring pros to promote his products. He’s hoping their cutting-edge technology and classic design will generate enough buzz on their own.

One believer is Todd Yoshitake, head golf pro at the Riviera Country Club, who carries one of the Jones fairway woods in his bag. “They’re probably the most attractive looking fairway woods in the market that I’ve seen,” he said. “It’s a nice blend of technology and aesthetics.”

Making and selling golf clubs are an entirely new career path for Rosenthal, who had never started a consumer products company from scratch. But he has had experience in acquiring the licensing rights to a well-known name: He was the controlling shareholder in a group of investors who from 1980 to 1998 held licensing rights to the trucking division of Budget Group Inc.

The investor group, which sub-licensed and franchised the trucking rights to independent Budget operators in Central and Southern California, sold the license back to Budget Group in 1998 when Rosenthal was diagnosed with lymphoma.

After his cancer went into remission in 2002, he began to seriously ponder the idea of starting a golf club company, partially because of his love of the sport: “When you reach a certain age and are going to start a new career, you want something that’s going to interest you. Not having enough money to buy the Dodgers, I started looking at the golf industry.”

His key move was partnering with Jesse Ortiz, a former executive with Orlimar Golf, maker of the popular TriMetal woods. That helped win the Bobby Jones licensing rights from Jones’ heirs and Chicago-based Hartmarx Corp., which also owns rights to the name for its Bobby Jones luxury apparel line.

“This guy [Ortiz] was regarded by consumers and retailers as probably the best woods designer in the market,” said Bert Hand, a current director and retired chief executive of Hartmarx, which also produces the Hickey-Freeman apparel line.

Rosenthal hopes Ortiz, the company’s head designer and chief operating officer, will infuse Bobby Jones Golf with instant credibility and a touch of modern glamour just as fashion designer Tom Ford did for Gucci.

“Jesse is my Tom Ford,” Rosenthal said. “That was my vision. We need a Tom Ford to take a tired, rather overly traditional business and give everyone a name they can associate with.”

Rosenthal has invested “several million dollars” in Bobby Jones Golf and is preparing to sell a 40% stake in the company to a group of outside investors. A separate British investor group also has agreed to purchase the rights to the Bobby Jones Golf Co. trademark, allowing it to assemble the clubs in Scotland and sell them in Europe.

Rosenthal said last year’s cabernet-colored Bobby Jones Collection Series of clubs, designed by Ortiz for the 50 and older crowd, were not intended to sell in big numbers. “We designed those clubs to make a statement,” Rosenthal said.

The new line will be emerald-green and targeted at touring pros and golfers in their mid-50s or younger, “who swing a little harder.”

The clubs are assembled at the company’s manufacturing facility in Hayward, Calif., Rosenthal said, using shafts made in Japan and heads that are engineered in Taiwan and manufactured in China.

Ortiz said the clubs were meant to both enhance Jones’ namesake clothing line and reflect his style and grace. Still, he acknowledges that they won’t sell on their looks alone.

“I made sure they were absolutely drop-dead gorgeous, but if they don’t have the technology it doesn’t do us any good,” Ortiz said. “The performance has to equal the beauty of the clubs.”