EQUIPMENT | NEW GEAR
Game
Changers
Golf wouldn’t be the same without these equipment breakthroughs, writes Charlie Schroeder. PING Anser Putter
The original Anser was a heel-toe weighted blade that increased the sweetspot and produced a ‘ping’ sound at impact. 62
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Frustrated by the selection of available putters on the market, Karsten Solheim, a Norwegian-born engineer for General Electric, decided to design one of his own. The result? A heeltoe weighted blade that increased the sweet spot and produced a “ping” sound at impact. Called the PING 1-A, the blade debuted in 1959 and was his fledgling company’s first product. Seven years later Solheim had his first big hit. Originally sketched on a record sleeve (with the hole used as a golf cup reference), the PING Anser putter was designed as a literal answer to the putters PGA Tour players were using at the time. Finding a name for it proved to be a bit more difficult. “The night before the putter was due at the engraver, he still needed a name,” John A Solheim, Karsten’s son and PING’s current Chairman and CEO has said. “[My mother] suggested ‘Answer.’” The word ‘Answer’ didn’t fit on the back of the blade, so Solheim omitted the “w” and golf’s most influential putter was born. Still, players didn’t gravitate to it overnight. Julius Boros used it to win the 1967 Phoenix Open but things really took off after 1969 Masters champ George Archer triumphed at Augusta with one in the bag. Forty-four years later the Anser is golf’s most successful putter, with over 500 tournament wins. Solheim’s patent expired in 1984, and dozens (if not hundreds) of Anser-style putters have flooded the market, most notably Scotty Cameron’s premium designs. Tiger Woods has used the PING model, a Cameron homage and currently plays with a Nike Method look-a-like. Have an old Anser lying around? It’s a collector’s item. Early versions can fetch anywhere between US$1,500-4,000.
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The Modern Sand Wedge Golfers have been using specially designed clubs to blast out of the sand since the 19th century. At one point Walter Hagen, who notched 75 professional wins over his long career, used a woodenshafted club with a smooth concave face, lots of loft and nearly eight ounces of weight in its flange to help him escape from bunkers. But it was Gene Sarazen who designed what would become the modern sand wedge. It had a steel shaft, markings on its face and the type of flange common on sand wedges today. According to his daughter Mary Ann, who wrote an article in 2010 about the club’s origins, Sarazen was inspired by a flight he took with movie producer (and scratch golfer) Howard Hughes. As she put it, “When Hughes’s plane took off, the flaps on the wings came down and my father made a connection between the flaps and the flange.” A flange added to the back of the club, would “allow it to slide through the sand and help the ball pop up.” Sarazen was a tinkerer, “soldering flanges to his niblicks, which were similar to a modern pitching wedge,” his daughter wrote. Sarazen sent those prototypes to Wilson in the early 1930’s and from them they manufactured the first modern sand wedge. Structurally not a whole lot has changed since Sarazen’s prototypes. Lofts have increased from 50° to the standard 56°, but sand wedges still have about ten degrees of bounce. Of note, Sarazen also added a “reminder” grip on his clubs so he knew where to place his thumbs. Wilson incorporated those on his early models too.
Titleist Pro V1 Golf Ball First introduced in 2000, Titleist’s Pro V1 transformed the game by offering a durable golf ball that produced both distance gains and spin control. Until that time, better golfers played balata-covered balls that had a small, liquid-filled center that was tightly wrapped by elastic strands. They spun like crazy, but the covers were easily damaged, especially on miss-hits. Meanwhile casual golfers used surlyncovered balls that were more durable and featured a solid rubber
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core. These, while harder to compress and spin, went farther and could last an entire round even if you made poor contact. Golfers couldn’t have both of the benefits in one ball. Titleist changed that. They constructed a ball with a solid core and a thin urethane cover which spun less off the tee while delivering great feel and spin on shorter shots. Better players, who had already seen big distance gains with metal woods, now hit the ball even farther while still managing to retain feel. Amateurs saw distance gains too and now and then spun approach shots like the pros. Courses, tournaments and golf associations took notice. Suddenly holes were being lengthened and talk turned to standardizing the golf ball. Dozens of pros switched to the ball, and with Tour validation came consumer demand, despite the fact that Pro V1s were priced considerably higher (two to three times the price in some cases) than competitors’ balls. They were so popular that Titleist had to start a rationing programme to golf shops. Since its debut 13 years ago, Titleist has released seven versions of the three-piece Pro V1. There have been six versions of the four-piece Pro V1x, which debuted in 2003. Competitors have released similar models, but so far none has dethroned the “#1 ball in golf.”
PING Eye 2 Irons First introduced in 1982, PING’s Eye 2 perimeter-weighted cavity-backs are considered golf’s best-selling iron. Karsten Solheim – him again! – came up with the idea of perimeter weighting by studying how tennis racquets were constructed, with the weight on the frame, or perimeter. As Solheim’s grandson John K Solheim, put it recently, “With the weight on the perimeter, the club’s moment of inertia was increased so at impact the head didn’t twist as much. For the first time, golf shots that were miss-hit had a better chance of going where the golfer intended.” Widely embraced by pros and amateurs for their aesthetics and forgiveness on off-centre strikes, customers also gravitated to the Eye 2 custom-fit colour coding. “Karsten knew that if golfers had the proper lie angle, shaft length and grip size they would play
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better and enjoy the game more,” says his son, John A Solheim. “With the colour code he personalised the process of buying clubs. The colour code told the golfer ‘This is your club made just for you.’” It was also a savvy business move, limiting inventory by specially building each set rather than mass producing a standard set of clubs. The clubs were the source of controversy in 1984 when the USGA banned square grooves found on Eye 2s, and yet again in 2010 when Phil Mickelson wanted to put an old (now technically legal) Eye 2 wedge into play after yet another USGA groove ruling. After fellow Tour player Scott McCarron said that “it’s cheating” to play the old Eye 2 Mickelson took the club out of his bag.
TaylorMade Metal Wood
In 1982 TaylorMade 1-wood sales topped US$12 million – the era of persimmon woods was all but over.
In 1979, Gary Adams took out a US$24,000 loan on his McHenry, Illinois house and invested that money into building his dream golf club, a metal wood. At the time, metalwoods, made from aluminum magnesium, were commonly used as rental clubs on driving ranges, built more for durability than performance. But Adams, who discovered that two-piece balls flew farther when struck with them, thought that golfers might like to actually use them on the course. Adams started his company, called TaylorMade, in a leased 6,000 square foot warehouse. He had three employees and one product, a 12° stainless steel driver which cost US$39. Shortly after launching his company, PGA Tour player Ron Streck put a TaylorMade 1-wood into play. Later that year, at a Tournament of Champions event, Jim Simons used one as well. Despite the fact that many in attendance at the 1979 PGA Merchandise Show laughed at the club, it wasn’t a total bust for the startup. Sales hit a modest US$47,000 for the year. But things really boomed in 1982 when Simons won the Bing Crosby Pro-Am at Pebble Beach. That year sales topped $12 million and the era of persimmon woods was all but over. The following year, more professionals played a TaylorMade driver than any other brand, averaging 60 players per week on the PGA Tour. After leaving TaylorMade, Adams went on to start two other companies, Founders Club and McHenry Metals. He died of cancer in 2000 at the age of 56. In 2012, TaylorMade captured 47 cents of every dollar spent on woods in the United States.
SPIKES: THE MOVE FROM STEEL TO SOFT In 1924 Walter Hagen donned the first pair of steel-spiked golf shoes. We can only wonder how greenskeepers reacted. It took another 67 years before those metal spikes started to disappear. We know that greenskeepers rejoiced. The idea for plastic “spikes” came from a man named Ernie Deacon. In 1991 he wanted to develop an alternative winter cleat that wouldn’t damage the roots of the Idaho course he managed. He asked local inventor Faris McMullin to work on the idea. A fortnight later, McMullin handed Deacon a prototype of the original swirled cleat. The two men thought it would be used only on Deacon’s Warm Springs Golf Course, a muni located in Southeast Boise. Not so. Softspikes was founded and, with an aggressive campaign targeting course superintendents looking to save money on maintenance fees, the trend, from metal to plastic, took off quickly. The rest as they say, is history.
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