Golf Equipment Business Enjoys Another Renaissance
Three golf equipment geniuses ignited a boom in American golf, which began in the mid-1960s and reached its height in the mid- to late 1980s.
First, PING Golf founder, the late Karsten Solheim, introduced his heel-toe weighted putter and perimeter-weighted easy-to-hit irons. Then, in the late ‘70s, Gary Adams, who died earlier this year, started Taylor Made and quickly mass-marketed his stainless steel driver with revolutionary success.
Circa 1990, Ely Callaway--a cousin of Bobby Jones--combined the ideas of perimeter weighting and metal wood construction to produce Callaway Golf’s oversized Big Bertha driver, which sent the company soaring.
The innovations made golf easier to play, especially for beginners and, consequently, the game boomed.
By the mid-’90s, stainless steel woods began to give way to stronger, lighter, larger and more expensive titanium club heads, and the coffers of the equipment companies continued to expand. Then the golf industry slowed down.
The problem, in part, was burned-out club designers, engineers and marketers, who had maximized the size of their products and thought they had found the ultimate golf club material in titanium. The industry didn’t know where to go from there.
Recently, however, manufactures have again begun to stock golf shop shelves--and Internet shopping sites--with a new generation of high-tech products. Many represent logical evolution from earlier technologies, while others reach back, tinker with, and improve time-tested designs.
Industry stalwarts Callaway and Taylor Made not only have new titanium drivers, but each company has introduced vastly improved and lower-priced stainless steel drivers and fairway metals--not long ago written off by the industry itself as dead.
Callaway’s Great Big Bertha Hawk Eye, and Taylor Made’s FireSole drivers have weighted tungsten plugs in their titanium club heads to help golfers hit their drives higher and farther.
This combination of multi-metal technology constitutes a major trend in contemporary metal wood and iron design.
PING’s TiSI titanium driver, one of the industry’s largest, enjoys growing use on the professional tours and among top amateur players. Tiger Woods launches the Titleist 975 D titanium driver, and whatever the maestro plays, so do golf’s legions of aspiring players. Mizuno’s T-Zoid forged titanium driver received a boost when this year’s Masters champion, Vijay Singh, used it so skillfully at Augusta National.
Drivers exhibiting technical innovation and excellent performance have also emerged from somewhat surprising places. Porsche Design, for example, with its office in Huntington Beach, plays on the word “driver” in its stunning new titanium driver. Caltech scientists alloyed zirconium, titanium, nickel, copper and beryllium, then built a driver out of this high-tech stew and called it Liquid metal. The company claims its driver absorbs less energy at impact, which results in more energy transferred to the ball for longer drives.
A few manufacturers might recently have taken this transfer-of-energy business a little too far. By making drivers with exceptionally thin yet strong titanium club faces, club makers have created a springlike trampoline effect of ball-against-club. Unfortunately, these clubs catapult the ball beyond the U.S. Golf Assn.’s limit for initial velocity of the ball off the club face.
A couple of years ago, two companies challenged industry wisdom that bigger is better by designing smaller fairway metals. Using Adams Golf’s Tight-lies and Orlimar Golf’s TriMetal fairway metals, golfers delighted in their capacity to hit higher and longer shots onto the green than with their larger titanium fairway clubs.
This week at the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, Orlimar will introduce what it calls the Scoring Set. With as many as eight of the company’s new TriMetal Plus fairway metals, the Scoring Set allows golfers to replace as many of their hard-to-hit long irons, or even middle irons, as they choose.
Speaking of irons, the trend has moved away from oversized club heads back to smaller irons that employ advanced perimeter weighting for greater forgiveness. Many less-skilled players simply found the bigger irons too difficult to hit well from the rough. The once-declared-dead forged muscle-back, blade-style iron has also enjoyed a comeback, with Orlimar, Precept, Cleveland, Hogan, Porsche Design and others making new high-performance and classically figured sets. “Hybrid” irons, such as Titleist’s 990s, Tommy Armour’s V-25s, Cleveland Golf’s Ta-3s, or Ben Hogan’s Apex Pluses combine a blade and slight cavity-back design. These clubs allow golfers to work the ball, while still giving them perimeter-weighted forgiveness.
Most club manufacturers today have taken their lead from club-fitting innovators Henry-Griffitts and PING, and offer extensive club-fitting sessions--for irons and metal woods--to their prospective customers.
In this garden of delights, we find new wedges exhibiting a wide range of playability features--lofts and sole bounces--as well as a variety of face inserts for increased ball spin. Wedges from Cleveland Golf, Carbite, Odyssey, Titleist (Tiger’s Vokey-designed wedges) and PureSpin (which also makes a new diamond-treated titanium-faced driver for added distance potential) are leading the way. Putter makers also have made strides in fine-tuning face insert technologies that Odyssey Golf introduced in the early 1990s. PING, Odyssey--now owned by Callaway--Never Compromise Golf, Taylor Made, Titleist and Carbite Golf, among others, have elevated putter insert construction to a virtual art form. Big spenders can go as high as $1,000 for a Robert Bettinardi masterly milled putter.
Last but not least, today’s golf balls have made leaps in design and performance equal to those of clubs. Indeed, golf ball gossip has filled the air at the Open, as Tiger Woods announced he will “permanently” switch from a Titleist Professional ball to a prototype of Nike’s new Tour Accuracy ball. Woods says the Nike ball spins less and flies at a trajectory he prefers.
In years past, a soft-covered ball meant one that had a high spin rate and offered superb control. A hard-covered, solid-core ball meant greater distance and reduced control. Today all of the established golf ball companies offer new models: Titleist (HP Tour, HP Eclipse, Professional Prestige, DT Spin and others), Top-Flite (Strata), Cobra (Dista HSS-95) Maxfli (Elite, Tour Patriot, Revolution) Wilson (Staff Smart-Core, Spin Distance, Straight Distance) and Precept (MC Spin, MC Tour Premium, MC TourAdvantage). All have applied new technologies in developing balls that respond like a hardball for distance when hit with a driver, and like a softball for spin and control when hit with middle or short irons. Top-Flite’s new “pure distance” ball, the XL 2000, offers a soft, pleasant feel at impact and did more than $70 million in sales its first year on the market.
Joining Nike, Callaway and Taylor Made are the new big boys in ball manufacturing. Callaway’s “Rule 35” ball and Taylor Made’s “InerGel Pro” and the “InerGel Pro Distance” perform well and have received rave reviews from golfers of all skill levels.
Just how do golfers select the right stuff for their games? They need to spend time with teaching professionals, who know their games and can recommend the appropriate equipment. If players don’t have a teaching pro, they should find one.
