The Toink! Heard ‘Round the World

When the Master’s Tournament competition begins on April 8, the world’s greatest golfers will be using a tool whose introduction 13 years ago transformed the ancient game in sometimes startling ways. Not a single PGA Tour player today uses the time-tested wooden driver, with which greats such as Ben Hogan and Bobby Jones wrote their names across the sport’s record books. If those legends could walk among the pros who will gather next week at Augusta National, surely they’d be dumbfounded by the high-tech, ogre-headed titanium drivers that now dominate the game.

Oversized metal drivers have affected everything from tee-shot distance to player satisfaction to golf demographics to equipment marketing, though not actual scores. But the distinctly Southern California story behind that transformation--a story of a bold inventor and a larger-than-life entrepreneur; of creative risk and technological innovation; of status, wealth and an appetite for size and power--is described in “POPLORICA: A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore That Shaped Modern America,” by Martin J. Smith and Patrick J. Kiger.

The excerpt that follows, adapted from the chapter “The Toink! Heard ‘Round the World,” describes one of 20 profoundly significant but little appreciated events in the American pop cultural evolution, including such culturally transformative moments as Betty Ford’s intervention and Alfred Kinsey’s honeymoon, as well as such inventions as the solid-body electric guitar, the super-absorbent disposable diaper, pantyhose and the slam dunk.

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Golf has the remarkable ability to reduce even the most accomplished and mature people--OK, usually men--to profane, gibbering club throwers. And those players are never more vulnerable than when they step into a golf course tee box. Their playing partners gather around and fall into hushed silence. The golfer stands alone to be judged, required to demonstrate in a controlled burst of motion a lifetime of accumulated skill and power, or lack of it. Failures can be spectacular. Duffed drives have sent even genial Tiger Woods into volcanic televised tantrums. After an errant drive in the 1992 Los Angeles Open, pro Mark Calcavecchia slammed his driver so hard on a cart path that the head broke off and nearly struck a spectator. The term “golf rage” has crept into the sport’s lexicon because, in their solitary moment of truth, even the world’s best golfers sometimes crash and burn.

For most of the game’s 500-year history, hitting a long, straight drive was especially difficult for the average golfer to do. To strike a golf ball well--to hear the satisfying “tick!” off the sweet spot of a traditional persimmon driver and see the tiny ball soaring toward the horizon--requires a ridiculous series of improbable events. These events must take place in a sequence so precise that, for the 450-millionths of a second when the speeding club head finally meets the stationary ball, every joint in the human body is correctly aligned and every imaginable physical law is harnessed to a single purpose.

Golfers sometimes employ liquor to that end, but it usually doesn’t help.

But in 1991, in the tiny San Diego County town of Carlsbad, an obscure golf-equipment maker, Callaway, began producing a big-headed metal thing called the Big Bertha driver--”A ham on a stick,” observed one convert. Its generous “sweet spot” usually rewarded even an imperfect swing with a reasonably long, reasonably straight tee shot. During the decade that followed, the Big Bertha and its more evolved cousins--including the Great Big Bertha Titanium Driver, the Biggest Bertha Titanium Driver and the Great Big Bertha II 415 Driver--turned Callaway into one of the most astounding success stories of the century-ending boom years. The Big Bertha came along just as aging baby boomers were turning to a pastime second only to bowling in fostering the delusion that overweight, aerobically challenged middle-agers can be elite athletes. They helped Callaway Golf grow from $5 million in annual sales in 1988 to $842.9 million in 1997. In the process, they transformed the quasi-masochistic sport from a predictable exercise in futility into a game that even dilettantes could enjoy.

By the time Tiger Woods became the sport’s Pied Piper in the late 1990s, the United States had 26.4 million golfers--almost 2 million more than it had in 1991, according to the National Golf Foundation. By June 2002, the country also had 4,812 more golf courses than the 13,004 it had when the Big Bertha was introduced 11 years earlier. Golf magazine senior editor Mike Purkey calls the Big Bertha “the defining product for this generation of golfers.”

“Thanks to the Big Bertha--and to all the innovations that came before and after--we don’t have to worry about that uncharted territory in the middle of the clubface anymore,” Purkey wrote in May 1998. “We can hit it on the heel [of the club head] and the ball will go straight. We can hit it on the toe and it’ll go straight. The game is easier and more pleasurable for all of us who don’t play golf for a living.”

While an oversized metal driver can make a golfer feel more virile off the tee--and drives are, in fact, getting longer--the club and its many imitators haven’t had much impact where it counts. What once seemed like Viagra turned out to be Prozac. According to the National Golf Foundation, the average score for all golfers playing a full-size, 18-hole course still hovers around 100, the same as it has been for generations. The old golf axiom “Drive for show, putt for dough” still holds. But thanks to the new breed of wonder drivers, which can make a few of those 100 shots a bit less humiliating, shooting a high score just doesn’t feel as terrible as it used to. The success of the Big Bertha demonstrated how golfers crave self-respect as much as they crave a consistent fairway lie and a few extra yards off the tee. Even though golfers now know that these clubs are nowhere near the technological leap that the one-piece rubber-core ball was when it was introduced in 1900--a leap that practically guaranteed an extra 20 yards off the tee--they’re still paying $500 or more for a Big Bertha or one of its many big-headed rivals. That’s what golfers might have paid for an entire set of high-end clubs in the pre-Bertha era.

And along the way, the Big Bertha and the countless imitators it inspired have created vast fortunes, transformed an industry and forced the stuffy high priests of golf--some of them still struggling with this whole equality thing 40 years after the civil-rights movement--to confront the collision of the game’s grand traditions with new technology that helped open golf to newcomers who aren’t necessarily, you know, Our Type.

There’s no way to separate the Big Bertha phenomenon from the man who created it. Ely Callaway, who died in 2001 at age 82, was a maverick with a televangelist’s knack for converting skeptics into believers. His business philosophy, according to one obituary, was simple: “Develop a product that’s pleasing and demonstrably different, and then merchandise the hell out of it.” (It’s worth noting that Callaway did not claim, in person or in advertising, that the Big Bertha could make one a better golfer. Its initial ad campaign promised only “the world’s friendliest driver,” a claim so vague it could not be challenged on any level.) He’d pursued that philosophy in two vastly different trades before conquering the golf industry, leaving textile giant Burlington Industries as its president and CEO in 1973, and then, against the odds, creating the successful Callaway vineyard in arid Temecula, outside San Diego, hundreds of miles south of the state’s wine center in the Napa Valley. Skeptics predicted disaster, as if Callaway had announced plans to grow cantaloupes on the moon. But when Callaway sold his unlikely wine company in 1981, he pocketed about $9 million in profit--and went looking for something else to do.

In 1984 he paid $400,000 for a small California golf company called Hickory Stick, which was marketing a line of clubs distinguished by their hickory-wrapped steel shafts. The clubs were a nostalgic nod to an earlier generation of golf clubs, which began in the early 1500s with expensive, hand-carved wooden heads and shafts of various hardwoods. (A typical golfer of the time broke a club or two during each round, cementing the sport’s reputation as a pastime for the moneyed classes.) Specific woods proved better for specific purposes, and during the 19th century hickory became the preferred wood for club shafts and persimmon became the choice for club heads.

Among the cast-steel and aluminum equipment of the 1980s, Callaway’s Hickory Sticks stood out like vintage Cadillacs at the Indy 500. They were quite heavy. Even Callaway--”a natural huckster” according to Forbes magazine--couldn’t persuade high-profile golfers to try the clubs, much less use them on the professional tour. The problem was that he was trying to sell nostalgia in an era of innovation.

Leading club makers at the time were experimenting with the metals, metal alloys and graphite composite materials emerging from Southern California’s troubled aerospace industry. Displaced aerospace workers were taking innovative ideas and featherweight materials into the private sector, making everything from tennis rackets to wheelchairs stronger and lighter--a revolutionary combination in the sports-equipment industry.

The metal golf driver was not a new idea. Driving ranges had been renting them for years because they were more difficult for the game’s desperately hacking neophytes to break. In the late 1970s an innovator named Gary Adams noticed that a new breed of golf balls seemed to fly farther when struck by a metal clubface, and in 1979 he founded the Taylor Made Golf Company to make high-end “metalwoods” from what he jokingly called “Pittsburgh persimmon,” after the nation’s onetime steel capital. Those club heads were relatively small, a “standard” 148 cubic centimeters in volume. Adams set up shop in Carlsbad, where land was cheap, workers were plentiful, and the climate was sea-cooled and golf-perfect 12 months a year.

Ely Callaway eventually located his company there as well. He also persuaded the General Electric Pension Fund to invest $10 million in it, and he used that money to develop a competing line of irons and drivers. Those clubs hit the market in the late 1980s. By the end of 1990, Callaway’s $400,000 company was generating nearly $22 million in annual sales. But the big leap came when Callaway convinced Dick Helmstetter, his chief club designer, that increasingly lightweight graphite shafts and metal club heads gave them an opportunity to increase the striking surface of a golf driver and reduce the club’s weight at the same time. With velocity being the critical factor in distance, wouldn’t the lighter weight mean the club head would be traveling faster when it struck the ball? With an inflated club head, wouldn’t a typical golfer have a better chance to hit the ball longer and straighter? Wouldn’t a club like that make the game more satisfying to those long-suffering hookers and slicers? Wouldn’t it entice more people to try the once exclusive sport (and thereby expand the market)?

Callaway wasn’t afraid of commitment. In his personal life, that translated into four marriages. In business, it meant the kind of take-no-prisoners risk taking that can lead to disaster. Callaway believed so strongly in his idea that after judging Helmstetter’s third design ready for market, he ordered 60,000 club heads from the foundry at $20 each--twice the cost of his company’s best driver. He also named that oversized 198-cubic centimeter club head the Big Bertha after a fabled long-range World War I artillery piece, ignoring the warnings of everyone from Helmstetter’s wife to former General Electric CEO Jack Welch that the name was misguided. His final gamble was to price the club at $250, nearly twice the price of a smaller-headed metalwood club from industry leader Taylor Made.

The risk paid off. Callaway’s sales force sold 150,000 Big Bertha drivers the first year, and probably could have sold twice that many. Here, finally, was something to excite golf snobs and wannabes alike. The Big Bertha was both expensive and effective--a club that not only worked but also screamed “status” each time it stuck its fat head out of a golfer’s bag. As club heads grew, golf researchers began to better understand why some oversized metal drivers were so effective in driving a golf ball.

Unlike solid wood drivers, the bloated metal ones are hollow. As the new metals got lighter and stronger, the face of the club heads got wider and thinner. This created a “spring-like effect,” with the clubface acting as a miniature trampoline to give the ball a little extra push during the fraction of a second when they meet. That’s recently become a matter of grave concern to golf’s governing powers, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

As the Bertha’s reputation spread, mostly by word of mouth, buyers began waiting weeks and sometimes months for their Big Berthas to arrive. Because demand far outpaced supply, Callaway began doing something that previously would have been unthinkable in the genteel world of golf-equipment sales: The company began favoring off-course retailers over golf course pro shops. This cheeky decision essentially cut out the PGA middlemen who staff the pro shops by selling the clubs directly to the public, widening availability while making the sport seem less exclusive. It was a shot across the bow of the golf establishment, which could only whimper in protest as Callaway and his intensely popular golf club changed the traditional dynamics of equipment sales. Today, the vast majority of golf equipment is sold through off-course retailers.

Callaway began lining up endorsement deals, some of them traditional (retired 1973 U.S. Open champion-turned-broadcaster Johnny Miller and motor oil-plugging golf god Arnold Palmer, who called oversized drivers “one of the most important things that ever happened to the game”) and some of them not (boa-constrictor toting rock ghoul Alice Cooper, jazz sax somnambulist Kenny G, comedic provocateur Tommy Smothers, impish boxer Sugar Ray Leonard, even Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates appeared in a commercial for the Big Bertha). The club’s reputation was enhanced in 1994 when Miller, whose best years were two decades behind him, won the televised AT&T; Pebble Beach National Pro-Am using Callaway equipment--his first victory in seven years.

By then the Big Bertha driver was the No. 1 driver on the PGA Tour, the LPGA Tour, and the PGA Senior Tour, though not entirely by general acclaim. Callaway was paying some pros generously to use his equipment, certain that the masses would follow their lead. He was right. By 1997, Callaway was boasting that 69.1% of all professional golfers played a Callaway driver, with the last two persimmon-playing holdouts having switched to metal drivers the year before. Callaway’s annual revenue peaked at nearly $843 million that year before a tough economy in Japan, a critical golf market, triggered a downturn that has lasted into the new millennium.

Still, the Big Bertha’s impact continues. It’s most apparent in Carlsbad, which today is known as “Titanium Valley.” Along with Taylor Made and Callaway, Cobra Golf set up shop there. By the late 1990s, the flowers, avocados and strawberries that once covered Carlsbad’s hillsides were being replaced by facilities bearing the logos of other companies whose names became part of the golf-equipment revolution: Odyssey, Lynx, even apparel maker Ashworth and the venerable Titleist.

Big Bertha’s phenomenal success also began a golden era of growth and innovation in the golf-equipment industry. Club sales boomed from $1.3 billion in 1993 to $2.5 billion in 2001, even though the number of golfers rose only slightly during that time, according to the National Sporting Goods Assn. Every equipment maker began promising the Next Big Thing, including Wilson, one of the oldest brands in golf equipment, which at one point was offering something called “Fat Shaft Hyper Carbon .535 Irons.” Golf bags got lighter and easier to carry. Spikes went from metal to plastic. In the mid-1990s, the classic wound-core golf balls gave way to balls featuring solid cores and more responsive covers that practically explode off of metal clubfaces. In the fall of 2000, Titleist introduced its Pro V1 that, by simply spinning less than other balls, is thought to further increase the distance of some drives.

During those years, the complexion of golf began to change. As Tiger Woods began rewriting golf’s record books, he focused a harsh spotlight on the golf establishment’s mostly unspoken but long-standing distaste for nonwhite and female players. Woods, whose father is African American, even established a foundation to entice disadvantaged kids into the game, and a messy public debate erupted about the exclusive rules at certain clubs. In May 2003, Annika Sorenstam, then the reigning queen of the Ladies Professional Golf Assn. tour, accepted a sponsor’s exemption to play in a men’s pro tournament and became the first woman in 58 years to compete in a PGA Tour event.

Along with social change, technological innovation continued uninterrupted. Club heads bloated with each succeeding generation of drivers, and one Canadian club maker now offers a 500cc monster. (The PGA allows players to use drivers no larger than 460ccs.) But in 2001, Callaway introduced a new oversized metal driver called the ERC II that had a particularly thin club face. It put even more distance into drives, but the United States Golf Assn., the governing body for golf gear, put the thin-faced metal wood through a battery of tests and flunked it. The USGA said the ERC II didn’t conform to rules limiting the “spring-like effect” of drivers. Callaway decided to fight the ban, and continued to claim the USGA was stifling innovation right up until the day in July 2001 when he died from pancreatic cancer.

Still, the question remains: are Callaway and golf’s other innovators selling more sizzle than steak?

Despite all these technological advances, the average handicap for the typical golfer nationwide has not dropped, wrote Al Barkow in his 2000 book, “The Golden Era of Golf: How America Rose to Dominate the Old Scots Game” (St. Martin’s Press). It remains about a 16, and even the tour pro’s average score per round has remained steady. The average drive of leading PGA ball-crusher John Daly increased from 288.9 yards to 306.8 between 1991 and 2002, but PGA Tour stroke totals have stayed pretty much the same. Barkow notes that in 1950 Sam Snead won the Vardon Trophy for low-stroke average with 69.23, and that in 1999 Tiger Woods--with better athletic training and playing with state-of-the-art equipment on courses that were far better groomed--had the lowest stroke average on the pro tour at 68.43, less than a one-stroke improvement.

“The real difference,” Barkow wrote, “is that today’s golfer enjoys his mishits more. The clubs are lighter to swing, get the ball airborne more readily and a little farther down the road. The game is no easier than it ever has been, it just seems like it.”

As the Big Bertha so convincingly demonstrated, that’s apparently enough.