Give the green jacket to Augusta National

By Bob Spear
Reprinted with permission from The State (Columbia, S.C.)
AUGUSTA, Ga. - Put the textile factory on overtime. Tell the tailor to get his needles sharp, bring in an extra supply of thread and prepare for a rush order. There's work to be done.
Required will be a green jacket, size 365 extra large
What could be more appropriate after this sparkling Sunday in April?
Phil Mickelson gets first call on the treasured coat, symbolic of the Masters' champion, but the course spread over Augusta National Golf Club's 365 acres deserves a piece of the swag.
The layout that some of golf's treasured champions claimed had been ruined with its added length joined the winner in sharing the spotlight in the 70th Masters.
After these past four days, the claims from Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer sound absurd.
Remember the rhetoric? With the changes, thrilling finishes would be passe, run-away winners would be more likely and only the longest hitters need apply for contention.
Those statements sound silly now, in the wake of a Sunday afternoon that featured an all-star leader board, a mixture of bombers and bunter striving for first place and nail-biting battles until the late stages. The struggle did not go to the final green, but the number in the chase and their varying strengths scream for attention.
Historians insist the Masters does not begin until the back nine on Sunday, but they're wrong. The tournament "started" long before - thanks to the changes that both challenged the world's best golfers and also yielded to quality play.
Competition heated up. Mickelson tapped in his final putt from a couple of inches to post a 72nd hole bogey and still won by two strokes. But do not be fooled; this tournament featured everything anyone could want in terms of competition.
Rain that delayed play Saturday and forced the leaders to spend a grueling Sunday in search of the year's first major golf championship did indeed prove to be a blessing. The game's best took their place among the leaders, some feisty upstarts joined the chase and an old-timer named Fred Couples gave them a battle to the very end.
Mark this down: At 4:10 p.m., 17 players stood within three strokes of the lead.
That's not incredible. That's impossible.
Yet there they were, and drama like that does not unfold on just any old golf course. The layout that can produce a bunched field like that is very special.
"Look at the leader board; most of the best players in the world are there," said former Masters champion Ben Crenshaw, now 54 and the tournament's feel-good story for two days. "Every part of your game is examined."
The guy who passed the final exam donned the green jacket for the second time in three years. Before he did, however, the tournament "got pretty exciting out there," Couples said. "For a player to win on this course now, (every part of his game) has to click."
Intentionally or not, he described what a major championship test should be, and perhaps now more than ever, Augusta National fit the definition.
A busy leader board. To understand how special this Sunday afternoon developed, consider the start. Only four strokes separated golf's Big Five - Mickelson, Tiger Woods, Retief Goosen, Vijay Singh and Ernie Els - and four of them finished in the top 10.
Although Els fell back, players within four strokes of the lead at 5:10 p.m. owned 20 major championships. At one point, four golfers shared the lead, before Chad Campbell boosted the number to five.
Eventually, Mickelson pulled away and Couples, his playing partner, said, "I watched a great player win his second Masters."
Still, the theory a lengthened Augusta National would eliminate wild leader board changes took a beating Sunday.
Tournament officials moved some tees forward a bit, and names danced up and down the leaderboard. Mickelson never was worse than tied for first in the afternoon, but Jose Maria Olazabal came from nowhere, then suffered a crippling bogey. Miguel Angel Jimenez soared and sank. Woods never harnessed his putting stroke and a couple of short putts that got away cost Couples.
Every player could point to what might have been. Woods outdrove partner Tim Clark by 30 or more yards on every hole, yet Clark finished second and Woods tied for third.
"You just have to play your own game," said Clark, who, like Olazabal, found ways to offset their lack of distance off the tee.
Playing with the biggest names in golf on one of the game's grandest stages inspired Clark.
"Obviously, people see my name up there and they either think I'm Darren Clarke or, you know, wonder what I'm doing up there," he said laughing.
All afternoon, the course challenged them all - the bombers and bunters, the big names and those not so well known - and competition to appreciate unfolded.
Augusta National has lost its charm? Perish the thought. Sunday emphatically proved otherwise.

The Great Golf Ball Debate

The Great Golf Ball Debate
By Melanie Hauser
Writer, The GolfObserver.com
You can't open a magazine, you can't turn on a golf telecast, you can't sit down with your golfaholic friends without being subjected to endless stories on it or be asked weigh in with your own opinion on it. And technology. And the rules of golf. And . . . well, you get the picture.

But has anyone stopped to consider this:
Tiger would be kicking butt and taking names with a gutta percha or a featherie. Same goes for Vijay. And Retief. And Ernie. And Annika.

And, well, you get the picture.

It's not just about the ball. It's about players who have pushed themselves farther than technology has taken equipment. It's about the endless hours in the weight room, long runs and stretching. About balance in your diet. About a new generation of focus that's often hard to fathom.

Put persimmon drivers in their bags. Ask them to play with forged blades from the ?40s and '50s. Put a vintage putter and an old Wilson staff in their hands or Gene Sarazen's old cleek or mashie.

Guarantee you they'll still dominate.

These players, after all, are the best in the world. Give them enough time with whatever situation is in front of them and whatever club and ball they're using and they're going to make it happen.

Granted, there will be no gutta perchas pirouetting to a stop on a green, but they'll be in birdie range. And they may not turn drives into rocket launches, but, trust us, the longest hitters in the game will still be the longest.

It's all relative, you see. Put a Nike One or a Titleist Pro V1X in the hands of, say, Byron Nelson or Ben Hogan, and they'd still be doing incredible things just at 21st century driving averages.

You can't roll back technology anymore than you can take golf's majors back to a kinder, gentler time when it was, really, all about the golf. We hear the whining about golf courses becoming obsolete because of technology, but more often it's because it now takes a small village to host a major championship. The smaller, older courses like Merion and Champions just don't have the property to be able to handle the corporate tent demands.

And as for lengthening venerable courses? Don't get us started. We're of the mind that Augusta National, for one, is one hell of a test of golf no matter how far players can drive it. It doesn't matter what's in your hand for the approach there. If you don't know those greens like Jack and Tiger and Ben Crenshaw, you can forget about it.

Honestly, does it really matter that players are averaging three football fields off the tee? Or that balls really do dance and spin?

There's nothing illegal about it. It's advancements. Technology. Congress doesn't get a vote. Not yet, anyway.

Bottom line? What's happening here all fits neatly under the Rules of Golf. What's outside the lines stays there, relegated to advertisements for those who play the gentleman's game, but don't necessarily obey the rules.

Some technology may bump up against the rules testing the faces of drivers but is that really all bad? What we have now is better equipment, designed for the players. You no longer have to pick from a handful of options when you buy clubs. Now they're custom fit. And that balls are designed for different swings and experience levels? That's not all bad, is it?

You can play the same ball as Tiger or Vijay, but that's where it stops. They take it to highest level because they're simply great players. They realized years ago that Greg Norman, Nick Faldo and company had the right idea. Get fit, then get fitter. Understand yourself better than you understand the golf swing. Work hard. Then take dead aim on every shot.

Sure, it would be fun to see what even Norman in his prime would do with today's equipment. He was the best player in the world for 331 weeks with equipment as obsolete today as an old pre-pentium chip Compaq 286 laptop. But it would be fun, too, to see what Sammy Baugh could do on high-tech turf, in today's shoes and pads and jerseys too.

We move forward because that's what generations do. There's now what? a generation and a half of kids who don't know life without cell phones and laptops. They have no frame of reference, even, for the days when gas was 19 cents a gallon and airline travel meant on a DC-7 where windows had curtains and flight attendants stewardesses back then wore white gloves. They don't know Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer used to smoke.

They do know how much time Tiger and Annika put in at the gym and how Vijay has been known to close down more than his share of driving ranges. They watch Darren Clarke and Padraig Harrington play incredible golf in the face of tremendous personal strain. They see Annika redefine women's golf.

Nike Ones. Titleist ProV1. Callaway's HX Tour. We really don't have to know which one goes farther, bites harder, flies higher or is the best, period. We can, instead, marvel over what technology has given us in the past few decades and know that, while it always pushes the limit, it doesn't cross it. And, we can drop the debate.

Why? Because after all, golf isn't all about the ball.

It's mostly about the incredible players hitting them.

Pro's Don't Need High Tech Gear

PHILIP MARTIN NWAnews.com

My geekiness is manifested in an electronic subscription to a weekly bulletin on golf equipment published by an irascible man named Frank Thomas. He regularly answers questions from golfers — most of whom are interested in hitting the ball farther — in his newsletter, in a wry tone that cuts through most of the pseudo-scientific cant that surrounds golf marketing. Thomas believes most golfers are suckers for industry hype and technological “innovation,” and most of us would be better off if we saved the money we spend on new sticks and put it toward lessons.

(His recently published book — Just Hit It: Our Equipment and Our Game — reflects his skepticism of game-changing gear in its title. Unlike a reliable swing, the book can be bought — and Thomas’ newsletter subscribed to — at his Web site www. franklygolf. com. The book is $ 22. 95, the newsletter free. )

Thomas is probably the best credentialed person on the planet to write about such things; he is credited with inventing the graphite shaft and a device called the Stimpmeter that measures the relative speed of putting greens. For 26 years he was the technical director of the United States Golf Association, which means he played a big part in determining which clubs and balls conform to USGA standards. In some ways he reminds me, in attitude and prose style, of Bill James, the baseball statistician who revolutionized the way the game was analyzed and in the process devastated much of baseball’s conventional wisdom.

While Thomas is a similar debunker of wishful myths, he’s different from James in that he’s basically espousing rather than contravening one of golf’s most hallowed tenets, often vocalized by old clubhouse geezers as: “It’s the Indian, not the arrows.” Thomas believes most golfers are selfdeluding hacks looking to buy a game — they’ll pay $ 400 or $ 700 for a driver that promises them 10 more yards. And the sorry truth is despite the annual (or even more often ) upgrading of technology, the average male golfer still hits his drive — according to Thomas’ research — 192 yards. (They consistently estimate they hit it 30 or 40 yards longer than they actually do. )

Though my experience is necessarily skewed — I regularly play with some very good golfers, many of whom are young and strong and hit the ball prodigious distances — I tend to believe Thomas’ research. Especially when you allow for the mis-hits and pop-ups and wormburners the “average” golfer is prone to hit. Golf is such a difficult game that most people who try to learn to play it fail and end up giving up the sport.

People who have a vested interest in golf ought to be looking for ways to make the game easier for the recreational player (as opposed to harder for the best players ). The trend toward longer courses with faster greens is counterproductive for the golf industry, which enjoyed a mini-boom when Tiger Woods rose to prominence, and has slumped in recent years as all those new golfers inspired by Woods gave up the game.

Just because golf is hard, that doesn’t mean technological innovations don’t help. Thomas believes there have been only three genuinely significant advancements in golf club technology since 1970 or so. The first of these was the perimeter weighting on irons — and later metal woods and even putters — pioneered by Karsten Solheim’s Arizona-based golf equipment manufacturer Ping. Distributing weight along the edges of the club helped golfers straighten out mis-hit shots.

The second was the development of graphite shafts, which are lighter than steel but just as strong, allowing golfers to swing them faster, producing — other factors being equal — longer golf shots.

The third innovation was the accidental discovery of a springlike effect in titanium driver heads. Substituting lighter titanium for steel allowed club makers to make bigger club heads (which were more forgiving for average golfers, and eventually limited to 460 cubic centimeters in volume by the USGA ) but an unforeseen consequence of the new designs was a flexing of these thinner titanium faces that caused a kind of trampoline bounce.

For most golfers who swing the club at 80 to 90 mph, the USGA estimated that the greatest possible gain was maybe one or two yards. The average PGA tour player — with a swing speed of about 115 mph with a driver — could realize an extra eight to 10 yards of carry distance from the increased ball velocity. To head off an equipment arms race in which club makers would try to get closer and closer to an ideal “coefficient of restitution” (COR ) — resulting in ever longer tee shots that some thought might alter the character of the game or even render some championship courses obsolete — the USGA stepped in with limits on how springy a club could be.

Now virtually every driver on the market approaches the USGA-established (but otherwise entirely arbitrary ) COR limit of 0. 83. (A coefficient of 1. 0 would mean no energy at all is lost in the collision between club and ball — a physical impossibility. A coefficient of 0. 00 would mean that all the energy is lost — that the ball stuck to the face like a wad of gum. )

It’s primarily for this reason Thomas allows that if your driver is more than a couple of years old, you’d probably be well served by buying a new one — or, he suggests, a year-old one, which will cost half as much and work just as well.

While a longer, straighter drive doesn’t necessarily mean a golfer will play better, there’s no question that in the past few years golf equipment manufacturers have made it easier to hit a golf ball longer and straighter. It’s still not easy, and despite what you hear around the clubhouses, the chances of the average male golfer hitting a 300-yard drive is probably about the same as his dunking a basketball. For most people it’s just not going to happen. On the other hand, the difference between hitting one of today’s high-tech titanium shoe boxes and, say, a mid-1990 s Callaway Great Big Bertha feels like the difference between calculus and business math. To someone who learned to play in the era of persimmon-headed clubs, hitting one of these new drivers feels like cheating.

BALL GO FAR That’s not to say I’m still hitting the caramel-colored wood legendary club maker Irving King built for me when I was in high school; my current driver looks like a fastback computer hard drive on the end of a 44 3 / 4-inch graphite pipe. (It’s an 80 gram Adila VS Proto “By You” in the stiff flex ). And I probably hit it as far or farther than I hit my prized King driver when I was young and strong and hit the ball what, in the 1970 s, was considered prodigious distances. I don’t care if you think it looks silly, I’m not giving it up.

Thomas — who invented the graphite shaft — would probably argue that I’d get just as much out of the club if I was using the stock shaft that comes with the driver. In his newsletter he often points out that original equipment manufacturers (which club geeks like myself refer to as O. E. M. s ) such as TaylorMade, Cobra and Callaway fit their clubs with shafts that perform well for the overwhelming majority of golfers.

Only touring pros — who get their equipment for free — and extremely skilled players looking to tweak their clubs for specific variables probably ought to bother with “exotic” shafts like the Adila VS Proto. Which, at a retail price of about $ 180 uninstalled, is hardly the most expensive option out there. The Ozik TP-7, a version of which is used by K. J. Choi (a Korean player ranked in the world’s Top 10 ), carries a suggested retail price of $ 1, 000.

Choi is one of the few players on the PGA tour to use one of the new square-headed drivers, in his case the recently released Nike SUMO 2 5900 driver. Most of Nike’s tour staff — players (including Tiger Woods and 2008 Masters champion Trevor Immelman ) paid to use their product and display the trademark swoosh — use the marginally more traditionallooking Nike Tour 460 driver, which allows them to better shape their shots. Ernie Els is probably the biggest name to employ a square-headed driver at this time — he uses a Callaway FT-I LCG, which stands for low center of gravity.

The square shape — the SUMO 2 measures about 5 inches square — seems to be more than a marketing gimmick. After the club manufacturers nuzzled up against the COR limit, making their drivers as long as possible, the next step was to make them as easy to hit as possible. And it turns out that geometry may be the last frontier available to club designers. Almost every major club designer, even conservative Titleist, has a “new geometry” club on the market. Most of them — like the TaylorMade Burner, Titleist D 1 and the Cobra L 4 V series — are bullet-shaped.

Unlike increased COR, which proportionately benefited better golfers (or at least longer hitters ) more than average or struggling players, the new advances in design do nothing to help the pros (who don’t need the kind of help the new clubs provide ) and a lot to help those who have trouble hitting a golf ball in the direction they want to hit it.

It might be that the lousier a golfer you are, the more these new clubs could help you.

Callaway Golf

June 1, 2008 -- There's no playing through Callaway Golf. Trying to retain its status as one of the golf industry's most innovative manufacturers is driving the company to keep a fast design cycle that introduces seven to eight new products annually. Concepting, designing and launching new products at this pace requires tight coordination between design teams, engineers, marketing staff and, yes, lawyers. These teams need to communicate and quickly and securely exchange critical business information, including the type of large files created with computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software, with partners in China, Japan, Korea, Mexico and Taiwan that manufacture the product components.

Through the use of collaborative technology, Callaway Golf has streamlined workflow processes between highly dispersed teams of employees and manufacturers, ensuring the teams are all working from a single framework. The technology helps make the collaborative process of bringing new products to market much more efficient. It also helps speed access to data and fosters innovation through faster and clearer communication.

The content management capability of Teamcenter Community Collaboration helps Callaway Golf control changes made to product content by providing document and version histories and e-mail alerts.

"We have design teams in California and suppliers in Asia, but everyone is able to collaborate effectively by posting their product content on the portal and keeping track of what's being done on specific projects," says John Loo, senior manager of Design Systems at Callaway Golf. "The technology has allowed us to get away from using e-mail to send thousands of files to hundreds of people, and reduces time, travel and errors."

Information residing on the Callaway Golf portal is accessible 24 hours a day, eliminating the barriers created in the past by time zones and physical barriers. On a typical business day, 200 different users will log on to access documents and collaborate with others.

Scott Wins

Fairhaven, MA (April 28, 2008) - Titleist ambassador Adam Scott captured his sixth career PGA Tournament title with a dramatic playoff victory at the EDS Byron Nelson Championship. Scott converted a clutch 9-foot birdie putt on the final hole of regulation to force the playoff, and then drained a winding 48-foot birdie putt on the third extra hole for the win. Both players finished regulation at seven-under 273, and parred the first two playoff holes before Scott's heroics. The win marks the 14th of Scott's career as a professional, including his second of the year. He captured the Qatar Masters on the PGA European Tour in January after firing a final round 11-under 61 in just his second start with his new AP2 irons.

-- Trusting his Titleist equipment from tee-to-green, Scott finished among the Top 10 in Driving Distance (7th/302.6), Putts Per GIR (9th/1.696) and Greens in Regulation (T9/63.9) at the Byron Nelson Championship.
-- The momentum continues for Scott who has finished among the top 25 in each of the five PGA TOUR events in which he has completed this season. He withdrew from the Shell Houston Open due to illness after owning the first round lead with a 63.
--A complete listing of the equipment in Scott's winning bag includes: Pro V1 golf ball, 905R driver (8.5), 906F4 fairway metal (13.5), AP2 irons (2-9), Vokey Design pitching (50) wedge and Spin Milled sand (56) and lob (60) wedges and Scotty Cameron prototype putter.
-- Titleist was the most played golf ball at the EDS Byron Nelson Championship with 107 players, more than five times the nearest competitor with 21. In fact, nine of the 12 players who finished among the top 7 and ties trusted Titleist golf balls for their success. The victory was the 11th by a Titleist golf ball player this year, more than twice the nearest competitor.
-- In addition to being the #1 golf ball at the Byron Nelson Championship, Titleist was the field favorite in iron sets (41), wedges (155) and putters (58), and second in drivers (42).
--The AP2 is one of the four new irons introduced by Titleist for 2008. For more information and downloadable images of the new irons, please visit: http://www.titleist.com/news/newsdetail.asp?id=593&category=equipment

NATIONWIDE TOUR: Greg Chalmers topped Henrik Bjornstad on the second hole of an all-Pro V1x playoff hole at the Henrico County Open. The pair emerged from a crowded leaderboard during the final round and finished regulation play tied at 14-under-par 274. It marks the third straight playoff at the event. The victory vaults Chalmers to No. 2 on the 2008 money list, as the top 25 at the end of the year will move onto the PGA TOUR in 2009.
Chalmers is the fifth Australian to win in eight Nationwide Tour events this season, joining fellow Titleist golf ball loyalists Jarrod Lyle (Pro V1x), Ewan Porter (Pro V1x), Gavin Coles (Pro V1) and Aron Price (Pro V1x). In fact, Titleist golf ball players have won seven of the eight Nationwide Tour events this season. In addition to the Pro V1x golf ball, Chalmers relies upon the 905S driver (9.5), 906F2 fairway metal (15.0), new ZB Forged irons (3-9), Vokey Design pitching wedge (49) and Spin Milled sand (54) and lob (60) wedges for his success.
Titleist was the most played golf ball at the Henrico County Open with 108 players, more than five times the nearest competitor with 19. In addition, Titleist was first in iron sets (50), wedges (144) and putters (62), and second in drivers (36).
CHAMPIONS TOUR: Relying upon the Pro V1 golf ball, Tom Watson and his partner paired up to post a one-shot win at the 54-hole Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf team competition. The two finished with a 31-under 185 total in the two-man better-ball format, which included a record-tying 59 on Friday. For Watson, it marked his second consecutive victory, having captured the Outback Steakhouse Pro-Am last week. Titleist was the most played golf ball at the event with 40 players, compared to 12 for the nearest competitor.
WORLDWIDE TOURS: Tyrone van Aswegen closed his final round with back-to-back birdies for a seven-under 65 to capture his first South Africa Tour victory at the Vodacom Origins of Golf Gauteng. Van Aswegen, who entered the final round trailing by three shots, fired a five-under on the back nine to post a 15-under 201 total and a four shot victory over two players, including fellow Pro V1x player Neil Schietekat. Titleist was the most played golf ball at the Vodacom Origins of Golf Gauteng with 51 players, compared to 18 for the nearest competitor.
In Australia, Heath Reed (Pro V1x) broke through for his first PGA Von Nida Tour victory, winning the OG Roberts South Australian PGA Championship. Reed finished at 20-under, two clear of Aaron Townsend (Pro V1x), Peter Senior (Pro V1) and Tristan Lambert (Pro V1x). Titleist was the most played golf ball at the event with 100 players, more than five times the nearest competitor with 18.
It was a 1-2 Titleist Pro V1x finish at the Tsuruya Open, where S.K. Ho claimed his seventh career Japan Golf Tour title. Ho fired a final-round 68, which took him to a 12-under 272 total, edging Kim Kyung Tae by one shot following a final round 66. Titleist was the most played golf ball at the event with 66 players, compared with 29 for the nearest competitor. Titleist was also the top choice in wedges (63).
On the Canadian Tour, Pro V1 loyalist John Ellis birdied the final hole to post a wire-to-wire one-shot win over Pro V1x players Wes Heffernan and Adam Bland at the Mexican PGA Championship. It marked the second consecutive win for Ellis, who finished with a 15-under total. Last week he won the Stockton Sports Commission Classic in a playoff.