Why is a oe500 lump of titanium shaking the genteel world of golf to its foundations?
Richard Williams It’s lunchtime in Nevada Bob’s, and the boys are discussing length. Karl, thirtyish, has just emerged from the storeroom holding a golf club. It’s a driver, the type of club that sends the ball furthest whether you’re Tiger Woods or Tiny Tim. Nevada Bob, a golf superstore in the heart of the City of London, is full of brand-new fat-headed and long-shanked drivers, racked alongside ranks of glittering irons and bizarrely formed putters. In the week of the Open championship at St Andrews, the place is buzzing with bankers and brokers trying out new pieces of kit that might just give them an edge. But the one Karl has brought out of the storeroom is something different. This is an implement so new and so hot that every golfer seems to want one. So hot, indeed, that in some parts of the world it is an offence to try to use one in a tournament. So hot that in the United States and Canada, club golfers trawl the e-bay Internet auction site to pick up examples from other parts of the world. So hot that Karl and his fellow sales assistants at Nevada Bob keep them in the back room, available for inspection on request. This is the Callaway ERC, the driver with a titanium head forged to a pattern that is said to produce something known as the “trampoline effect”, virtually guaranteed to catapult the ball up to 40m further in the hands of just about any golfer capable of hitting the ball straight. Does it work? “Certainly,” Karl says. “Look at Brian over there.” He points to a colleague, who is discussing the merits of a set of irons with a customer. “He’s 1,61m tall and 56 years old. Used to be a pro. Up to last week I was out-driving him by 30m.lll Then he got an ERC. ll Now lll his ball’s up level with mine.”
The potential consequences are obvious, in both competitive and commercial terms. The ERC is the latest piece of sporting equipment that threatens not only to conquer its competitors but to change the very parameters of its world. Those extra 40m, some feel, could redraw the geography and geometry of every hole on every golf course in the world, if enough people got hold of the clubs. The ERC also costs oe500 a pop. Since the first consignment arrived from Carlsbad, California, three months ago, Nevada Bob has been selling them at the rate of two a day, mostly to the bankers and brokers who feel the need to maintain that vital edge of superiority in every area of their lives, weekends included. But about half of the clubs go back to North America, where they are not on sale, thanks to a ban on their use in competition by the US Golf Association (USGA) and the Royal Canadian Golf Association (RCGA). Nevada Bob sells them to the US in pairs, at oe1E000 plus shipment. On the e- bay site in the week of the Open, 29 ERCs were up for offer to deprived American golfers, with bids ranging from oe400 to oe600 for the Japanese version. So hot is the ERC, and so limited are the supplies of its titanium head, which is fabricated in Australia before being sent to California for assembly, that its producers restrict supply to each store to two a week, forcing Nevada Bob to meet demand by buying its stock from abroad – from Sweden, for example, where a shop might have over-ordered and be willing to sell on a dozen spares. At Nevada Bob’s, they’re gone faster than a ball off Tiger Woods’s tee. In Britain, use of the ERC is unrestricted. From its headquarters overlooking the Old Course at St Andrews, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club announced that it would allow golfers to wield the club in tournaments around the world which subscribe to its rules – in other words, everywhere except the US and Mexico. However it has set up an expensive investigation into the trampoline effect, funding scientists at the University of Birmingham to look at the phenomenon created when the plastic-coated surface of a golf ball meets the thin titanium face of a hollow-bodied club head, and to answer the question: is it fair? On paper, fairness ought to be the essence of sport. In some disciplines, such as running, that continues to be so. No one would seriously entertain the idea of permitting the use of drugs such as steroids or amphetamines, which are the only means by which an individual can gain an advantage. And when extra speed is built into the surface of a particular track, as happened in Tokyo a few years ago, it benefits everyone and no one. Some innovations make a splash and then disappear. When Graham Roope, the Surrey and England batsman, and Dennis Lillee, the Australian fast bowler, turned up at cricket matches more than 20 years ago carrying aluminium bats painted bright blue, they were quickly outlawed – as much, one suspects, on the grounds of aesthetics as of the suspicion that they conferred an unfair advantage. The suction fans installed to give Chaparral sports cars and Brabham formula one machines better roadholding by pulling them down on to the track surface were banned for safety reasons in the 1970s. But when hydrodynamic fibreglass racing shells made in Italy and Germany took over from the old wooden boats used by oarsmen, when Jimmy Connors turned up at Wimbledon brandishing his Wilson T2000 metal-framed racket, when the first speed skater arrived carrying a pair of hinged clap-skates, and when Chris Boardman and Graeme Obree mounted their streamlined record-breaking bicycles, they were introducing something that changed their sports for good.
It is too early to tell whether the ERC -named after the initials of the company’s founder, Ely Reeves Callaway (82), a former two-handicapper – will have a similar effect, wrecking the careful calculations of such celebrated golf -ourse architects as Robert Trent Jones and Jack Nicklaus. Last week Nicklaus criticised the R&A for adding 172 yards to the length of the Old Course – where golf has been played for 600 years, according to legend, and where Nicklaus won two of his three Opens – in order to take account of the extra power of contemporary figures such as Woods. It is true that the placement of bunkers, for instance, is calculated according to the probable landing area of shots, and that Woods’s phenomenal driving has routinely turned par four holes into comfortable threes – for him, if for no one else. But golf has survived the replacement of hickory shafts, first by steel and then by graphite, and the disappearance of gutta percha balls along with plus-fours. The replacement of the old British-standard golf ball, measuring 4,11cm in diameter, by the larger US ball, 4,26cm across, took place in the mid-Seventies, with the R&A taking the lead. Ball technology continues to evolve, under the eye of the club’s implements and balls committee, and the latest “hot ball” is reckoned to give a good golfer an extra 20m on his drive. Colin Montgomerie, the leading golfer on the European tour for the past seven years, and a director of Callaway, used his ERC at the Open. With mild weather for all four days, however, the extra length did not seem to help – he finished a distant 14 shots behind Woods. But sporting considerations are not necessarily uppermost in the minds of those concerned with the fate of the ERC. There is a feeling that the US and British authorities are in seeming conflict over the matter, principally because they must not be seen to be colluding over a decision which could lead to a huge US lawsuit based on the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which orders governing bodies to avoid possible restraints of trade by acting independently of each other. Callaway’s lawsuit against the Canadian authority, due to be heard in a California court this autumn, will be a test case.
‘Since we weren’t marketing the club in the US,” said Larry Dorman, a Callaway vice-president, “we decided not to take action there. Because of the limited supplies, we’d opted to market it only in areas where it had been approved and could be sold without interference or restrictions. But in Canada, where the RCGA has always previously acted in accord with the R&A rulings, we believed that by banning the club arbitrarily and without any testing they were encouraging unfair business practice.” Do they expect the USGA to change their minds? “Hope springs eternal. We would like them to change their thinking on the question of extra distance off the tee. There’s a fundamental difference because some of their members believe that extra distance is bad for golf. We claim that it creates interest and helps to grow the game, and that to limit the access of 40- million golfers around the world to new technology because a handful of pros just might, on their very best day, threaten a golf course is specious reasoning.” Dorman also disputes the claim that a weapon like the ERC confers an unfair advantage. “We’re not creating an artificial means of propelling a golf ball down a fairway. We would be against that, too. All we’re trying to do in our research and development is to make the game more enjoyable for people. We don’t claim that we’ll reduce your handicap or make you send the ball further with every shot. What we do say is that because of the way we engineer our clubs you’ll have the chance on occasion to hit some more satisfying shots that will help you enjoy the game more.”
Back in Nevada Bob’s, meanwhile, Karl was admitting length wasn’t everything. “It goes 40m further,” he said, “but that means 40m further in whatever direction you hit it. If you hit to the right with your normal driver, and you end up in the long rough, hitting to the right with the ERC means that you’ll find yourself in the cabbage patch.” So, out of the “hundreds” of wonder clubs that Nevada Bob has sold to enthusiastic golfers, have any been brought back? “You must be joking. Not one. You drive for show and you putt for dough, as they say. When a guy buys one of these, even if he doesn’t know how to use the thing, everyone wants to have a look at it. If he’s got one of these in his bag, down at the club on a Saturday morning he’s Charlie Big Potatoes.”
The ERC driver is available to South African golfers and may be used in tournaments