No Gimmes In This Game Golf Equipment Industry A Hazard To One’s Wealth

A driver in the rack at the MeadowWood pro shop resembles a giant soup ladle.

A $300 soup ladle.

At various golf shops, you can buy a club as a training aid that has a shaft that breaks if you don’t swing it right.

That’s 100 bucks for a club with a hinge.

You can get a battery-operated laser module to clip onto your cap to help your putting. $160.

You can even buy drivers with shafts made from materials salvaged from dismantled Soviet nuclear plants.

Another company puts out a golf bag featuring a cellular-phone attachment, a three-can beverage cooler, a hide-away pouch for valuables and a double umbrella holder. That’s $310.

Didn’t Rodney Dangerfield have one of those in “Caddyshack?”

Graphite, boron, titanium, square grooves, no grooves, anti-vibration grips, sweet spots, flex points, torque, dimple patterns, balata, borata - if you’re not familiar with these terms, you’re probably still batting around your gutta-percha balls with a niblick.

The golf-equipment business has bestowed on eager consumers such a dizzying array of ways to spend their money that the typical golfer has arrived at a common, universal, response to this technological assault:

“Confusion,” said Tom Ratkovich, manager of National Golf in the Spokane Valley.

Golf-shop attendants and club pros will happily help you if you don’t know your hosel from a bubble shaft.

For the most part, though, two points are certain: Your equipment won’t be cheap, and next year, there will probably be something else a little wilder on the shelves to attract you.

“I don’t know if it can go to another level before the USGA steps in,” Ratkovich said. “It’s almost to the limit right now, and now it’s mostly up to marketing to make the difference.”

The magnitude of this booming golf business is staggering.

Golf products account for worldwide retail sales of $2 billion.

Seventeen golf companies spent at least $1 million each last year just in advertising.

Two neighboring Carlsbad, Calif., companies combined for $500 million in sales last year.

Last year, Cobra led all golf stocks with a return of almost 200 percent.

Taylor Made has a reported promotion budget of $16 million in 1995 just to pump its metal woods.

Shop owners report that Calloway, Cobra and Taylor Made are the hottest brands in woods these days, with oversized woods and irons, and graphite shafts the hot items.

The demand? “If you come in and order Tour Irons from Cobra, you’ve got an eight-week wait for delivery,” said Guy Hyatt at Wide World of Golf.

Ken Cook, sales representative for Edwin Watts Golf Shops, one of the nation’s largest catalogue outlets, said the field seems to be narrowing, with Calloway and Cobra accounting for 50 percent of their sales.

“This is a trend that’s been going on for about the past four years, a lot of companies have gone out of business while Cobra sells most of the irons and Calloway sells most of the woods,” Cook said.

That leaves other companies to come up with gimmicks that capture the imagination of the consumer.

“It’s getting to the point where you wonder if they might be running out of things to come up with in terms of technology,” Hyatt said. “But I go to this (golf merchandise) show every year in Orlando that’s at a convention center bigger than Northtown and it is filled with golf equipment.”

What kind of equipment? Certainly, something for everyone.

Graphite shafts, which can provide more whip and distance, are particularly intriguing to seniors.

“I think it’s because the price has gone down and the quality has improved,” said Steve Nelke, Hangman Valley pro. “They absorb shock better and it saves a little wear and tear on your wrists and elbows.”

While clubhead size and composition draws most of the interest from golfers, “90 percent of the golf club is the shaft,” said Gary Lindeblad, Indian Canyon pro and custom club maker. “The feel of the club in your hand and the flight of the ball is largely due to the shaft of the club.

“Manufacturers are becoming a lot more sensitive to custom fitting people,” Lindeblad said. “There’s two real important variables, shaft flex and shaft flex point. What the shaft flex point determines is the trajectory of the shot. If you take somebody who just chronically can’t get the ball airborne, you can put a shaft in there with a low kick point and it will help them launch it up in the air.”

By using a variety of shafts, Lindeblad said, custom club makers can suit the needs of every golfer - junior, senior, male, female.

Putters, too, are evolving. “What you’re seeing is a lot of zero-loft putters with a high center of gravity that create topspin,” Lindeblad said. “That’s what you see in a lot of the mallets that are popular.”

An important part of the industry is fitting clubs to a customer, which often requires more than just gauging a player’s swing characteristics.

“You can help a golfer with his game, but you’ve got to be a listener to his pocketbook,” Ratkovich said. “Once you know what they can spend, then find something to suit them on your wall. But some guys come in saying they want a namebrand set for $250. I tell them to redial, that won’t work.”

The rapid technological shifts have a mixed effect.

Hyatt suggests that it spurs consumerism, but Ratkovich said it can often be tough on the retailer.

“The (club) company is the only one making money on it,” Ratkovich said. “Let’s say Company X comes out with three new shafts in two years. Well, I run it for six months and then have to change and I’m stuck with a lot of expensive inventory.

“This looks like a glamorous business, but it’s really tough,” Ratkovich said. “You sell a huge number of balls, but you’re making very little on balls.”

Golfers sometimes can be tough to figure, Nelke said. “People will spend $300 on a new driver to give them 10 more yards, but will balk at $75 for a putter that they’ll use 30 times every round,” he said.

Or, he questions, would the golfer be better served by spending that $300 on lessons?

“I hope we don’t get carried away with this to the point where people think they can just go out and buy a new game and overlook the fact that the way to get better is to practice it,” Nelke said. “It’s like the guitar or the piano - you can’t just buy a better game, you have to practice it and work on it.”