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Callaway's hired a team of aerospace engineers to help perfect its game. And they're not the only rocket scientists on the golf course these days.
It looks like something out of a Karloff-era Frankenstein movie. But these electromagnetic bolts of light aren't aimed at a soon-to-be-reanimated corpse. They're bombarding an unfinished golf ball suspended in a Plexiglas box the size of a microwave on Callaway Golf's factory floor.
"It's a proprietary technology that makes the cover adhere better to the inner layers of the ball," says Chuck Yash, president of the industry monolith.
But that technology merely hints, he says, at the exotic thinking - and the $170 million for design and manufacturing - that's been poured into the company's first golf ball, the Rule 35. Taylor Made and Nike, who teed up their first balls last year, have made similarly sizable investments. All three companies have the same objective: to topple Acushnet, whose Titleist, Pinnacle, and Cobra brands together control 40 percent of the golf ball market. They also share a common design strategy: to make balls that perform well whether struck by beginner or pro.
Golf ball design, with its recent influx of space-age materials and technology, has turned into rocket science. But it's just now catching up with what happened to club design in the early '90s. When post-Reagan-era budget cuts deflated Department of Defense spending, hundreds of aerospace engineers in Southern California flocked to new jobs in nearby Carlsbad, home to most of golf's major equipment manufacturers.
Now the same industry that transformed clubs has made the humble golf ball the most R&D-rich projectile this side of Cape Canaveral. Ballmakers are investing millions of dollars in aerodynamic research on the cute little dimples of a cover. Just below the cover, they've replaced wound rubber with new generations of polymers, giving manufacturers increasing control over spin rates. In the core, they are infusing industry standbys like polybutadiene and urethane with metals ranging from superheavy tungsten to ultralight titanium to generate livelier balls that travel greater distances.
Callaway has assembled a veritable dream team to create its Rule 35 ball. "We brought in the most talented people we could find," says Yash. "In aerodynamics, we have a Boeing engineer who worked on the wings of the Boeing 767. We have people from DuPont in the polymer science area. We have PhDs and specialists in rubber chemistry, physics, and applied math."
The United States Golf Association says that golf balls have to weigh less than 1.62 ounces with diameters smaller than 1.68 inches. Other tests ensure that the little white projectiles all have a similar initial velocity when hit with a metal striker, and that they rebound at the same angle and speed when launched against a metal block. Working within these parameters, manufacturers have concentrated on spin rates, materials, and dimple design to help average golfers produce the driving distances of tour pros.
"The challenge in golf ball design has always been to get a driver spin rate that's really low," says Dean Snell, director of research and development at Taylor Made's golf ball division. "That's really how you maximize your distance. Then you want a very high spin rate when you use your 8-iron or pitching wedge. That's where you want to maximize your control."
The material that defines the playing characteristics of Taylor Made's ball line is InerGel, a copolymer that's derived from plastics once used in ski boots by sibling company Salomon. It constitutes the layer between cover and core. Snell explains: "We copolymerized that material" - essentially adding other plastics to the basic mix - "and made a new material that has the benefits of the original soft, resilient material."
When you smack a Taylor Made InerGel ball with a driver, Snell says, the ball compresses, and the inside layer works with the core to create a fast, low-spinning long shot on the drive. But when you hit with a lofted iron, you stretch the cover, and that soft mantle layer of InerGel creates a higher spin.
While Taylor Made focuses inside the ball, Nike has hung its R&D efforts on aerodynamics. At the end of a ball's flight, explains Gary Tavares, Nike's golf ball product development manager, "it behaves erratically. You want to keep it in a state where it's got a narrow, small wake so it can follow its line." To control flight, Nike has produced a ball that has dimples within dimples. The company's new Precision Tour Control ball, says Tavares, "produces a more stable air flow around the ball." When a ball slows down at the end of its flight and reaches what is called its laminar state, he says, "most golf balls will tend to fall out of the sky, or flutter a little bit. By making the double dimple, you can actually trip the laminar state back into a turbulent state, so that the ball holds its line better."
Advanced science like this is the product not just of industry brainpower, but of faster and better microchips. "When we started our ball project three years ago," says Callaway's Yash, "we had people from Lawrence Livermore and UC Berkeley come in to talk to us about the dynamic modeling of spin rates and everything that goes on inside a dimple, so that we understood the laminar and turbulent flows that take place while the ball is spinning at 8,000 or 9,000 revolutions per minute. They said that at the time, even a supercomputer would need 18 months to calculate all the things we had to calculate. They said we should wait a couple of years to get that time frame down to six or eight months. So that's what we did."
What resulted were CAD programs complex enough to impress the likes of Bill Gates, who in recent years has moonlighted as a Callaway product pitchman. "A few months ago he came in to look at our initial product run prior to doing a commercial for us. When he saw what kinds of applications we were running, he was pretty captivated by all the technology that goes into something as simple as a golf ball."
Laser tag Bad putters will try anything to improve their game. Even Bushnell's LaserPractice Pro. When attached to the shaft of a flatstick, it projects a stream of laser dots along the target line, ensuring that the club is correctly aimed and encouraging a straight takeaway, stroke, and follow-through. LaserPractice Pro: $119. Bushnell: (800) 423 3537,www.bushnell.com.
Port-a-Green At first blink, the BrellaGreen looks like the all-time winner in the goofy golf-gadget sweepstakes, the kind of thing Roy "Tin Cup" McAvoy would reach for if his short game went barmy. But when stood on its head, this little piece of whimsy morphs from a fully functional golf umbrella into a practice pitching and chipping green. BrellaGreen: $49.95. Foothill Golf: +1 (801) 583 5883,www.brellagreen.com.
Baggadocio Ogio's new HardDrive golf bag weighs a mere 4 3/4 pounds, has pockets for everything from balls to beer bottles, comes with a sturdy rain hood, and boasts the most comfortable carrying strap in the business. Tiger-age golfers will appreciate that its tough, ripstop nylon exterior comes in funky colors like royal, ecru, graphite, black, or sludge. HardDrive: $149. Ogio Sport: (800) 922 1944,www.ogio.com.
Death of Distance Just how far is it to carry that fairway bunker? And which club will get you to the green if you shank it into the woods? With digital maps of 1,800 of the most popular courses in the US, GolfWits yardage software takes the guesswork out of the game. It also keeps score and, unlike human loopers, doesn't look for a tip after the round. The software runs on Pocket PCs using Microsoft CE software. GolfWits: $49.95 for handheld CE version; $29.95 for PC version; $9.95 per downloadable course map. Siscosoft: +1 (360) 318 1526,www.golfwits.com.
Under Cover Jan Craig headcovers are the golf equivalent of comfort food. The 100 percent wool pom-pommed or tasseled stick stockings are available in four styles and numerous color combinations. You can also opt for stripes, monograms, or club numbers. Headcovers: $23-28 per cover $4.50-9.50 more for oversize covers. Jan Craig: (800) 862 3227,www.jancraigheadcovers.com.
Custom Iron For nearly four decades, Ping has been making peak-performance irons, all of them custom-fit. The only problem: Its clubheads, cast to withstand customization's bending and tweaking, were always ugly. But that's changed. Ping's new i3 Blades (for single-digit handicappers) and O-Size irons (for improving players) are gorgeous sticks with a classic look - and they play beautifully, too. i3 Blades and O-Size irons: $110 per club with stainless steel shafts, $140 with graphite. Ping: (800) 474 6434,www.pinggolf.com.
The Fat Advantage Club shaft design has always been about minimizing torque, and therefore stabilizing the clubhead, at the moment of impact. Closest to perfection are Wilson's new Fat Shaft irons - composed of a new, denser-crystal breed of graphite - which feature a Hyper Carbon shaft measuring a chubby .535 inch in diameter at the tip. The clubheads themselves place extra weight at the toe to correct off-center hits. The resulting club is almost impossible to hit badly. Fat Shaft irons with Hyper Carbon 535 shafts: $1,060 per set. Wilson: (800) 469 4576,www.wilsonsports.com.
Evolution Rarely if ever does duffer-targeted technology translate into a club that feels and plays (asSportsCenter's Stuart Scott would say) like straight butta. But Tommy Armour's new 845 evo v-31 irons pull it off with two clever innovations. The weight distribution changes from club to club, making the 9-iron, for example, look strikingly different from the 3-iron. And the flex points of the new Tri-Gold shafts differ through the set to optimize distance and trajectory. 845 evo v-31 irons: $832 per set. Tommy Armour: www.armourgolf.com.
Range Rover If you haven't done enough to shock the polite, gin rickey-sipping citizens who live along the fairway, roll out some morning in the Humdinger. Sold by Electric Car Distributors - which also stocks Chrysler- and Lexus-replica carts - the faux Hummer features marvelously superfluous accessories like an Alpine CD player, built-in ice chests, a wood-grain steering wheel, and a fold-down windshield. Most important, this little beast runs on an 11-horsepower motor (no commercially produced golf cart is more powerful) and can do a zippy 24 mph, for an effective assault on the fifth hole. Humdinger Golf Cart: $15,900 for four-passenger car; 19,500 for six-passenger car. Electric Car Distributors: (800) 476 5642,www.elec-car.com.
Glove Me Tender The only thing scarier than a 6-foot putt for par is packing your sticks for a trip. But with tons of padding in all the right places, well-positioned straps that prevent shifting and grating, and tearproof cordura nylon (not to mention a lifetime warranty), the virtually indestructible Club Glove Last Bag is the next best thing to Vicodin for soothing pre-airport panic. It also features roomy pockets and 70-mm in-line skate wheels to ease you along the corridors of fear. Last Bag: $249. Club Glove: (800) 736 4568, www.clubglove.com.
Swinger's Club From the mystical realm of the infomercial comes - surprise! - a training aid that actually works. The Kallassy Swing Magic full-swing trainer has a split grip that lets your right hand break away and slide up and down the shaft - thus ingraining a steady swing tempo and encouraging acceleration through the ball as the hands reunite on the downswing. Swing Magic: $89.85. Kallassy Sports: (800) 718 1890,www.swingmagic.com.
Roughing It Taylor Made's Rescue club may look like a gene-splicing experiment gone terribly wrong, but its performance benefits are unbeatable. By combining fairway wood distance with long-iron control, it serves as the trouble club nonpareil: The tungsten sole plate under its titanium body makes it play as well from the rough and from fairway bunkers as from perfect lies. Rescue club with Bubble graphite shafts: $320 each, in 15-, 18-, 21-, and 24-degree lofts. Taylor Made: (800) 829 5676, www.taylormadegolf.com.
Damn Straight Adams Tight Lies2 drivers and fairway woods incorporate the same upside-down clubface design that three years ago made the original Tight Lies the darling of the fair-to-middling golfer. What's new is Adams' "asymmetrical face curvature" - a slight bulge toward the toe of the clubface that helps correct slices. With clubheads made of stainless steel, these may not be the longest-hitting clubs in the world, but they may well be the straightest. Tight Lies2 driver and fairway woods: $200 with stainless steel shaft, $249.95 with graphite. Adams Golf: (800) 622 0609, www.adamsgolf.com.
Power Launch Mizuno has long been a favorite clubmaker of pure ball-strikers, and its new T-Zoid Forged Driver shows why. By cutting away a crescent-shaped portion of its titanium clubface, the company's R&D folk have produced a club that generates so much rebound effect that the club barely abides by USGA regulations. Novices be warned: Misfires with a club this potent will have you playing second shots out of parking lots and clubhouse restaurants. T-Zoid Forged Driver: $385. Mizuno: (800) 966 1211,www.mizuno.com.
Green is Good The Full Swing Golf Simulator is the ultimate duffer's toy. Never mind that it costs as much as the first year of a Harvard MBA. In a black box the size of a storage shed, golfers can pound regulation balls into a 10-by-12-foot screen that displays superrealistic renderings of golf holes from famed tour layouts like Firestone and Pinehurst no. 2. By monitoring the ball's speed and position through impact, a computer analyzes your swing and projects the flight of the ball onto the course along with stats on its speed, distance, and flight angle. Full Swing Golf Simulator: $45,000 (includes 11 courses; additional 10-course packages $1,250 each). Full Swing Golf: (800) 798 9094,www.fullswinggolfinc.com..
Turf Warrior Determined to end the tyranny of the stiff-soled golf saddle shoe, Adidas brings front- and rear-foot torsion systems, ultralight materials, and top-notch outsole traction to its fairway footwear. For women, the shoemaker eschewed the business-as-usual borrowing of men's lasts and made the cleat sing to the female sole. (Note: A men's version is also available.) Scottsdale W: $110. Adidas: (800) 982 9337,www.adidas.com.
Master of Compromise At one point last summer, it seemed like every tour pro alive - from Juli Inkster and Arnold Palmer to infamous Frenchman Jean Van de Velde - was playing the same Never Compromise putter. And who could blame them? Even in the hands of ordinary folk, it's a magic wand. This flatstick's wizardry resides in its "gray matter," a lightweight polymer in the middle of the clubhead carrying only 10 percent of its total weight; the rest is distributed at the ends, making for the best balanced and most forgiving putter you'll ever play. Z/I Delta 2 Putter: $139.99. Never Compromise: (800) 615 3792, www.nevercompromise.com.
Precious Metal OK, so it's not solid platinum. It's carbon steel and nickel, with a thin platinum plating. But the oh-so-elegant Titleist Scotty Cameron Pro Platinum putter delivers on the promise of its name in balance, feel, and aesthetics. In the right hands, each clack is like a kiss from a movie star. Scotty Cameron Pro Platinum putter: $250. Titleist:www.titleist.com.
Ball-istic Missiles Callaway's new Rule 35 ball is ratcheting up the battle to be your favorite golf ball. It joins new entries such as Nike's superlatively long and responsive Precision Tour Control, not to mention Taylor Made's InerGel Pro Distance, fashioned for mid to high handicappers, which is as soft and playable as any distance ball you'll ever drive. Rule 35: $44 for 10. Callaway: (800) 228 2767, www.callawaygolf.com. Precision Tour Control: $45 per dozen. Nike: (800) 806 6453,www.nike.com/golf. InerGel Pro Distance: $40 per dozen. Taylor Made: (800) 888 2582,www.taylormadegolf.com.
E-bookie UltraCaddie software makes scorekeeping ultraquick and ultraconvenient, and its gambling features can help it pay for itself. The application can track all kinds of side bets, from skins to multipress nassaus. Runs on all versions of the PalmOS. UltraCaddie: $39.95. UltraCaddie:www.ultracaddie.com.
Slippery Slope Since few putts on real golf courses are dead flat, practicing on your living room carpet isn't much help. The Electronic Putting Challenge fabricates 72 sloping putts, some of them annoyingly difficult - just like on real putting greens. Electronic Putting Challenge: $1,495. GL Technology: (888) 372 7888,www.gl-tech.com.
