Question:
Just a quick warning to all. I was playing today and after hitting out of a bunker, I reached down to grab the rake. I didn’t it realize at the time, but some moron had must have decided that it was the rake’s fault he or she was playing so badly and thought they would teach it a lesson by jumping up and down on the fiberglass handle, shattering it into long shreds that were just held together by the rake head and a small cap at the end of the handle. Well Muggins here comes along and grabs the handle to clean up and I ended up with a handful of very painful glass slivers in my right hand for the rest of the game! So beware, if you see a shattered fiberglass handle on a rake, DO NOT pick it up! And to the moron — thanks. –Ken
Response:
A solid trend on balls By DOUG FERGUSON AP Golf Writer September 27, 2000 2:18 am EST Two years before he won two major championships and was voted PGA Tour player of the year, Mark O’Meara bragged about a new multilayer ball he had in his bag, and everyone thought he was out of his mind. The best players in the world have always favored a wound ball for feel and control, especially around the green. No one is laughing at O’Meara now. They’re joining him. The majority of PGA Tour players still use a wound ball, primarily Titleist, which has been the industry leader for years. It has a smaller core and is wrapped tight by thin windings. Lately, however, more players are going to solid construction balls. A year ago, solid balls accounted for only seven victories on tour. That number has more than doubled this year – 15 victories, with eight tournaments still to play. Six of those wins belong to Tiger Woods, who switched from the Titleist Professional to the Nike Tour Accuracy in late May. "I’ve felt for six years now that in my lifetime working in the industry, wound balls would be obsolete," said Kel Devlin of Nike Golf, who previously worked with Spalding when O’Meara started playing the Strata. "I think the watershed moment for that was what Tiger has been able to do," Devlin said. "A lot of guys are taking note of that." But it’s not just Woods. Three of the top 10 players in the world rankings, and three of the top 10 on the PGA Tour money list, use a multilayer ball. And while only 8 percent of the players used a solid ball five years ago, that number has about tripled. "I’ll make a prediction," Devlin said. "At some point in the first of the year, there will only be four players in the top 20 in the world playing a wound ball." Perhaps the greatest evidence that the trend is toward solid balls comes from the market leader, Titleist, which has provided pros with wound balls for years. It has been working on a solid construction ball for three years, and it’s two weeks away from making its debut on the PGA Tour. It will be available to the public early next year. Titleist would only say that its new prototype is a "high performance, multi-component golf ball with a urethane elastomer cover." The ball is said to have an unusually large core and a double cover, each about one millimeter thick – about twice as thin as most other solid construction balls. "It’s so good it’s a joke," said Davis Love III, who along with Phil Mickelson is expected to put the new Titleist into play at the Las Vegas Invitational. Mickelson already used it in his "Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf" match against Fred Couples earlier this month, reaching all the par 5s with nothing more than a 6-iron. He told Golf World magazine, "I’m playing a game right now that is different from any game I ever played." So, with even Titleist moving toward a solid construction ball, is wound dead? When Nike first entered the ball market, it tried to get players to use a wound Tour Control ball. With the success of its multilayer ball, Devlin said the wound product likely will be phased out in the next year. "I’d like to think it’s dead," said Mike Farris, director of golf balls for Spalding, which led the surge to solid construction balls with the Strata. "A lot of people are entrenched in playing that product (wound ball). But I think it’s being severely challenged now." Consider Callaway Golf, which built a $170 million plant when it decided to get into the ball market. Callaway engineers designed two balls, and both are multilayer. "We have known for some time the limitations on wound-ball technology," said Chuck Yash, president and CEO of Callaway. The advantage of a wound ball, and the reason so many players continue to use it, is spin and control. But Yash also believes the windings can become more relaxed over time and lead to less consistency. "We felt we could achieve the features of spin and control another way to make the ball where it was going to be more consistent," he said. "The opportunity to explore and broaden the development in solid-core balls does give us a greater degree of flexibility." One of the benefits of a solid ball is that with a higher density in the core, it will hold its line much better in the wind. And that flexibility Yash mentions is especially helpful in design. Spalding vice president Tom Kennedy likes to say he can fit players with a ball better than a $2,000 suit. And it should be noted that the Nike ball used by Woods, in which the core and cover are about 5 percent harder than usual, took only 10 days to develop. The solid construction ball did not appear overnight. Spalding had a two-piece ball in 1968 that was rock-hard, but it wasn’t until 1985 that the company could make a solid ball suited for the tour. Even then, the number of players using a two-piece ball was marginal. "The difficulty was you have to find a material soft enough to go on a cover and give it spin," Farris said. "That material wasn’t around. If you just put on a soft material, it takes out the energy, so you had to replace that energy. "The core technology fueled the cover technology." That sounds like rocket science – in some cases, it is – to most players. Hal Sutton played a wound ball for most of his professional career until switching to the Strata three years ago. Since then, he was won five times, including The Players Championship in a head-to-head battle with Woods. "I like the way the ball reacted," Sutton said. "I think Strata was way ahead of its time on that one, and I think more people are trying to go in that direction."