Despite Slow Market, Show Must Go on in Las Vegas
The word started leaking out in May, though anybody who had already hit a ball down that long, narrow, hazard-fraught par-five called Wall Street had an inkling.
Times were getting tougher for golf club, ball and apparel manufacturers, in part because the industry had hit what LiquidMetal Golf Corp. President John Hoeflich called a “once-in-a-decade kind of bump in the road.”
“It’s the result of not having anything new to sell,” Hoeflich added.
Just about everybody who was going to buy one had a $500 titanium driver. And besides, the companies were afraid of what the USGA was going to do to its golf club standards. So the order of fiscal march was to put technology on hold. And some companies ordered a retreat.
Callaway: prices cut. Spalding: layoffs. Acushnet: wait and see.
The victim is the PGA International Golf Show in Las Vegas Aug. 22-24.
A beneficiary is Grips Golf Gear, an Agoura Hills start-up company with a big idea for selling to little golfers.
“We were something like No. 300 on the waiting list for [display space in] the PGA show,” said Jerry Davis, president of Grips, which intends to sell junior clubs, balls and apparel. “Then one day we got a call from Reed Exhibition Co., and they said we had a spot if we wanted it, but we had to tell them quickly.”
Reed, an international conglomerate based in London, paid the PGA of America a reported $122 million in the spring for a partnership in its two annual shows: the winter PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando, Fla., and the late-summer Las Vegas exhibition.
The two shows have been serious money-makers for the PGA, yielding about $5 million a year between them, and they have been on the must-attend list for both golf industry companies and buyers for many years. Firms stood in line to pay $15.75 a square foot to display in Las Vegas, where the show had outgrown the Sands Expo and Convention Center and this year moved to the Las Vegas Convention Center, and $19.75 for Orlando space.
Big companies, such as Spalding, Callaway and Acushnet, with its Titleist and Footjoy lines, ponied up about $300,000 a show, not only to display their wares, but also to wine and dine those who might buy them for a chain of golf shops. The occasional touring pro might show up to offer an endorsement, as called for in his contract.
But not this time. Not in this economic environment and not this time of year in Las Vegas, where the move to the Convention Center required a change of dates to hot August from more clement September.
All that’s OK with Davis.
“The West Coast companies will still be there, and a lot of others will be there, too,” he says of the reason he had no problem writing a check for $1,575 for a 10- by 10-foot chunk of floor.
“Plus, I want to be in Orlando, and if I’m on the list here, I’ll be on the list there.”
The idea is to see and, more important, be seen. Davis is hoping to capitalize on Tiger Woods’ influence on youth golf without hiring Woods, whom he can’t afford anyway.
“I think Tiger Woods has had a real effect on kids,” Davis says. “And look at the amateurs, like Matt Kuchar [who got a lot of TV time at the Masters and U.S. Open], and that girl who led the U.S. Women’s Open [Jenny Chuasiri-
porn] and Justin Rose in the British Open. The kids are seeing them.”
And, he hopes, wanting to play golf as they do.
Davis is hoping people will come by and look on their way to Nike’s display, which is about as large as the front nine at Riviera and is rumored be showing Beaverton, Ore.’s newest contribution to the $339-million golf ball business.
Davis is hoping those who go past the booths with LiquidMetal’s new $2,700-a-set irons or Orlimar’s new driver might want to go to work for Grips. That’s one of the ideas behind the show: signing up representatives for your wares.
“We’re looking for them all over the country,” David says.
His fondest hope is that at show’s end, everybody knows that he has a product nobody else has--”One of the things I’m worried about is that Callaway and Taylor are coming out with junior clubs, but they’ll be priced at twice mine,” Davis said--that will lead to sales for next March.
Or sooner.
“Ideally, you’d like to have them out there for Christmas,” he said. “But this show is really for the first of the year or next spring.”
That’s when hope, supposedly, springs eternal. But that hope starts in August in an air-conditioned refuge from the merciless sun of Las Vegas, where the show goes on, whether the big boys are there or not.
