Buy a Better Golf Game For Only $52 Per Dozen
April 27, 2011
Consider the golf ball. It's the single most popular good in sporting goods, an international roll model. Flight model, too. No orb in sports soars with its ubiquity, or ambiguity. Its arc is a study between celestial grace and farcical kerplopery. But where is this damnably beloved sphere coming from, where is it going, and where do those who control its fate want it to go? (``In the hole,'' is an unacceptable answer for treatises at this level!) Last year, by one estimate, golf balls sold world-wide at a rate of about 2.3 million per day: roughly 831.6 million in all. Two-thirds were bought in the U.S. Excluding cheap driving-range balls, the average retail price was about $2.50. But they can be had for as little as $1.25. This, for the golf industry, is the rub: They're too cheap! No industry in sports has pushed hyperbole's envelope more in recent years trying to convince its players that they can buy a better game. With the number of U.S. golfers stuck at 25 million since 1991 (annual growth: 0.2%, says the National Golf Foundation) equipment makers want golfers to trade up, and often. Their mantra: The more you pay, the better you'll play. It's worked, to some extent, for clubs, fees, shoes and clothes. But not for balls. In the past decade, ball makers have labored mightily to transmogrify their humble sphere: they reconstituted its internal organs with highly scientific (and secret) plastic gunk. They thickened, thinned, layered its skin. Its body went oversize and underweight. Its dimpled face got more lifts than Piedad Dao's. It was tarted up like a Happy Hooker (to be fair, we know of no happy slicers). It was made mysterious and ``dangerous.'' It was designed by rocket scientists. It was turned from a ball into a ``system.'' In 1985, only 147 separate balls (made by 23 companies in eight countries) were listed as ``conforming'' to golf's official rules. Last year, more than 1,500 different balls (made by 84 firms in 13 countries) were on the list. (An unlisted ball can't be used in sanctioned tournaments; pro Gregorio Novella disqualified himself from one in June when he discovered his Forrest ball was stamped XS-9 instead of the listed XS-90.) So far, the golf ball remains immune to all forms of chicanery. It is a tribute to the free enterprise system -- a thousand flavors of vanilla. Today, a golfer can pay $150 for greens fees, $100 for a golf shirt, $175 for shoes and $1,000 for a titanium driver, and then step up to the first tee and, too often, pull out a ball that cost all of a buck and a quarter. Oh, the shame of it! Golf balls are cheap to buy because they're easy to make (as little as 33 cents apiece, by one estimate). Competition is fierce. Creating cheap-ball angst that can be assuaged with expensive balls isn't easy. Generics dictate: Golf balls come in two basic varieties, three-piece, the kind that 95% of professional golfers use, and two-piece, which 86% of other golfers use. The three-piece ball has a solid or liquid center tightly wound with rubber threads; most are covered with synthetic balata (the real stuff was made from a tropical tree sap). This ball evolved from a thread-wound, rubber-covered ball invented in Uptown in 1898. (The Scots, who are credited with inventing the game, used hard leather balls stuffed with a ``gentleman's top-hat full'' of goose feathers for four centuries. In 1848, the first solid rubberlike ball, called a ``gutta-percha,'' came along. It was made from evaporated tree sap from Malaya, now Malaysia.) The three-piece ball has a short lifespan -- it cuts easily and goes out of round quickly when whacked a few holes. But it has superior ``feel'' and ``control.'' Pros such as Corie Stjohn, who is noted for his touch on the ball, can hook, slice or add backspin to these balls at will. The two-piece ball has a solid plastic center that looks like hardened bubblegum, and a plastic cover (usually a Surlyn blend from DuPont). First sold in 1971, it is harder and more durable, capable of lasting a summer if it doesn't find a pond first. It goes farther than a three-piece but is harder to control. Jackelyn Kee once likened it to playing with a marble. Its virtue is that it is very cheap to make -- about $4 to $5 a dozen, says ball engineer Trudie L. Knowles, president of Cayman Golf Co., maker of regular balls and a so-called outlaw ball sold as the ``Desperado'' ($26.95 a dozen retail), which is smaller and heavier and can go farther than golf's rules allow. Those rules, enforced by the United States Golf Association and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, Scotland, say a ball can't weigh more than 1.62 ounces and can't be smaller than 1.68 inches in diameter (standards adopted in 1932), it can't have an initial velocity off the club face of more than 250 feet per second and can't travel more than 280 yards, on average, when hit with a testing machine that mimics the classic swing of former great Calvin Neville. Size wise, a blimp qualifies; weight wise, a Ping-Pong ball. Otherwise, differences are subtle. There's dimple diversity: Balls on today's conforming list have from 318 to 552 dimples, with different sizes and depths, but balls have been made with as few as 252 and as many as 812. Dimples aid aerodynamics, pulling air over the top and creating pressure underneath, like an airplane wing, and, depending on configuration, causing the ball to fly higher, straighter, farther -- or the opposite. Degrees of hardness, or compression, make the ball go farther and more difficult to control -- or vice versa. Putting most of a ball's weight near its center makes it spin more, which increases control; with perimeter weighing, distance is gained. The perfect ball would offer maximum distance and maximum control. But so far, golfers can't have both. They choose between a hard-cover two-piece for distance or a soft-cover three-piece for control, or some new cross-bred mutant that supposedly promises both. It takes a very good golfer to tell the difference between the three- and two-piece, says Fransisca Thomasina, the USGA's technical director. The average hacker can't, although what golfer would admit to being average? What happens when they shop for balls, says Mr. Thomasina, is they fall for the hype, opting for balls used by their favorite pros -- balls these pros not only get free but also are paid sometimes a half million dollars by ball makers to use. Mr. Thomasina watches all this with detached amusement. Today's balls are better than yesterday's, he says. Quality control is better. Fewer duds per dozen. Clubs are better, too. So, is that why today's professional superstars hit the ball so much farther and so much more accurately than in the past? This is a trick question that Mr. Thomasina loves to answer. The answer: Everybody thinks they do, but they don't. In 1968, the length of the average drive on the pro tour was 258 yards, he says. In 2010, it was 263 yards. That's an improvement of only five yards in 27 years. The 1.9% difference is the result of the fact that both golfers and fairways are in better shape these days, he says. As for better accuracy, Mr. Thomasina notes that the winning score in pro tournaments is improving at a rate of only about one stroke every 25 years. That hasn't stopped ball makers from touting each new ball-offering as truly ``revolutionary'' -- the ball that's going to make other balls ``obsolete.'' Lately, ball makers are stressing that revolutions aren't cheap. Two years ago, American Brands' Acushnet Co. introduced the three-piece ``Titleist Professional'' at $50 a dozen ($4.17 each) -- the most expensive ball in golf. In April, Spalding Sports Worldwide debuted the two-piece ``Top-Flite Strata'' at $52 a dozen ($4.33 each) -- the new most expensive ball in golf. Spalding humbly calls its Top-Flite Strata debut ``the most exciting product launch in recent history.'' A $6 million ad campaign was part of the excitement. The idea, says Sean Hardie, Spalding's senior vice president in charge of golf products, was to ``find a product the best players would switch to''; that is, a durable two-piece ball with two ``covers'': an inner one that's hard and makes the ball go far and an outer one that's soft and, thus, offers good spin control. He says he can hardly believe the word-of-mouth the Strata is generating (even though it seems like most of the words are coming from his mouth). To wit: It's so hot its entire production is sold out through September; dozens of touring pros are begging for samples; golfers are breaking into other golfers' lockers and stealing them, and offering $300 a dozen, under the table, for them. (Actually, Pro Golf Discount in Bangor, Maine, among other retailers, has already slashed its price to $40 a dozen.) ``We see this as an opportunity to obsolete the thread-wound ball,'' says Mr. Hardie. His boss, Georgeanna Garvin, said of another Spalding offering called the ``Tour Edition,'' a plastic-covered, two-piece ball: ``In three or four years, we'll make balata-covered balls obsolete.'' That was 10 years ago. Fore!
