Woods Switched Back To His Scotty The Day Nike Quit The Equipment Business

We know players make club switches to appease sponsors and face bag requirements. But most club companies ultimately trust a player to do what is best for their game if they are struggling. Tiger Woods has never been woeful on the greens. But before his layoff, he wasn't as good as he once was.

Given that Tiger Woods won 13 of 14 majors with his trusty Scotty Cameron Newport 2 putter, his response to a question about switching back to it today prompted an uncharacteristically blunt answer.

From Will Gray's full item on this fascinating insider issue.

“The day that we (Nike) were no longer a part of the hard goods side,” Woods said when asked when he put his old putter back into play.

Brandel Chamblee was asked about his expectations for the weekend but instead noted that Woods has moved into a unique place where he can pick whatever he wants in his bag. But the question may now linger: why didn't one of the greatest players of all time and richest golfers in history have the freedom to putt with his trusty flatstick?

Update on Saturday, December 3, 2016 at 11:58 AM by Geoff

**Big first day ratings:

VIEWERSHIP: 782k viewers tuned into @GolfChannel Thurs RD 1 cvge of Hero World Challenge, +190% YOY & most-watched RD 1 since The Open

— Golf Channel PR (@GolfChannelPR) December 3, 2016

USGA Conforming Still Matters: Wilson Triton Edition

Martin Kaufmann's look at the Wilson Triton driver's unapproved status is worth a look. The story provides some nice insight into how the reality-show produced product's timing worked but also demonstrates how much the road to conformity shows the value of USGA conforming-club status.

Kaufmann writes for Golfweek.com:

The owner of one East Coast golf retail chain said Nov. 25 that he was “shocked” to learn the Triton was not on the USGA’s conforming list, and said his first thought was to post signage alerting customers to that fact.

“We would not sell a nonconforming driver,” he said.

Wilson launched a busy demo-day schedule on Black Friday to promote the Triton, and that will continue through the spring.

Indian Spring Country Club in Boynton Beach, Fla., is scheduled to hold a Triton demo day Nov. 28, and director of golf Mike McLellan said he plans to stick to that schedule. But McLellan, who was unaware that the Triton was not yet a conforming product prior to being contacted by Golfweek, said he will inform his members that the USGA has not approved the club. After the demo day, McLellan said he probably will return the six Tritons he received this week.

“If it’s not USGA-approved, how can I sell it to my members?” McLellan said. “We play by the rules.”

McLellan’s reaction highlights Wilson’s dilemma: The Triton is an extremely tough sell if retailers and consumers are aware that it is not approved by the USGA.

The club will soon be added to the list and all will be well. But the episode serves as a reminder that as much as everyone complains about the USGA-R&A rules, they are afraid to defy them even when the club is not destined for non-conforming status.

XXIO's $849 Driver, $2080 Irons...

Mike Stachura of GolfDigest.com has a first look at XXIO's first clubs and what is presumably the first PXG competitor for the super high-end club market.  

The clubs are essentially the Lexus of Cleveland/Srixon and are coming to the U.S. after making a splash in Japan.

And they aren't cheap.

Whoa Nellie: MyGolfSpy Review Of Costco Golf Ball Vs. ProV1

My Golf Spy has done the testing of the new Kirkland-branded ball sold at Costco (and sold out already), and gives the ball a 10/10 score, suggesting it is comparable to Titleist's ProV1. Most fascinating (and probably stirring up some testing machines in Far Hills): MyGolfSpy claims 10 yards more distance with the driver.

Thanks to reader Alex for this link which won't go over too well in Fairhaven, where the Acushnet brand is barely a week old as a publicly traded company.

Check out the full review.

Bloomberg: "To Make Golf Fun, Just Add a Nightclub"

Topgolf gets the Bloomberg treatment and while there have been many profiles of the indoor-golf-driving-range-hipster-21st-Century-bowling-alley, Ira Boudway's story features plenty of fresh anecdotes.

A couple of highlights, starting with this on how CEO Erik Anderson, founder of private equity fund WestRiver Group brought the idea stateside and made a key move: TV's in the hitting bays.

In 2009, Anderson and a group of U.S. investors bought Topgolf’s technology for an undisclosed fee and decided to overhaul the floor plan for future locations. They added a third level, tripling the size of each venue to 65,000 square feet; replaced the buckets with motion-sensing ball dispensers; and, in a key change, put TVs and lounges—effectively, the entire sports bar experience—at each bay. “We realized that this was really an integrated entertainment and sports experience,” Anderson says.

There was also this on the financing side...

In September the company lined up $275 million in financing to build 7 to 10 locations a year. (Each costs $20 million to $25 million to open.) “We think there’s room for 100 or so in the U.S. and an equal amount globally,” Anderson says, though other than the original locations, the company hasn’t yet opened any outside the U.S. Revenue last year was about $300 million; this year it will be about a half-billion dollars.

It's Come To This Files: New Drivers Spotted!

Hand it to Golf WRX obtaining images of new drivers from Callaway and Taylor Made.

It's great to see golf drivers reaching the level of Apple products, with blurry, badly lit photos showing the next longer, straighter big sticks set to debut some time in the future.

Oh, and clearly green or lime yellow are testing through the roof. White and red are so last year.

Randall Stephenson's Influence On Dallas, Golf

Profiled by David Gelles and Michael J. de la Merced in a compelling New York Times profile Randall Stevenson, AT&T's CEO, as scrutiny of the proposed purchase of Time Warner begins.

Stephenson is all in on golf and Dallas, something that seemed apparent last week and is made clear in the story:

Upon assuming the role, Mr. Stephenson did something unexpected: He moved the company headquarters about 300 miles north, to Dallas from San Antonio, a decision he called in a recent interview “the hardest I’ve made as C.E.O.”

But the reasons were simple. “First and foremost, to get our people access to great airports,” he said. (Dallas has two international airports.) Also, he said, Dallas had one of the best labor markets in the country for engineers, sales personnel and managers.

Less than a decade later, AT&T has made a big impact on the city. AT&T is the lead sponsor of the Dallas Cowboys’ futuristic football stadium, and has its name on the city’s main performing arts center.

“It’s been amazing for Dallas,” Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, said in an email. “The jobs. The improvement downtown.”

Among Mr. Stephenson’s favored new projects is the development of the Trinity Forest Golf Club, which is designed to lure a big golf tournament back to Dallas.

He professes to be bad at the game himself — “I stink,” he said recently — although he has a 13 handicap, according to the United States Golf Association. But it’s a “thinking man’s game,” he said. “When you spend three or four hours walking 18 holes, you get to know somebody.”

Q&A With Acushnet COO David Maher

Today marked the initial public offering of Acushnet, makers of noted brands Titleist and Footjoy.

Longtime CEO Wally Uihlein rang the opening bell, flanked by many luminaries, including Butch Harmon, Jim Nantz, FILA chairman Gene Yoon, NYSE president Tom Farley and Brad Faxon. Also joining Uihlein on stage to the left in the image posted were Acushnet employees Diane Medeiros and Carlos Botelho who have been with the company for 51 and 44 years respectively.

The company COO, David Maher, who took that position in June, spoke from the New York Stock Exchange today about the IPO and future.

GS: You’ve been with the company since 1991, how would you describe the mood as Acushnet heads in this new direction?

DM: First and foremost, we like our brands to be front and center and our associate base really stays below the radar. Today they popped up above the radar and I think it was a great day for our associates. They’ve built some enduring brands and a very enduring business with the eyes of Wall Street gazing upon them they’re rightfully very, very proud. [The opening bell ringing] was simulcast to our plants in New Bedford and Thailand and around the world, so first and foremost a day of great pride for the folks of the Acushnet company.

GS: Going forward will we hear more about the associates, the renowned loyalty of Acushnet employees and how many of your products are still made in the United States?

DM: We’ll certainly need to be more transparent for financial reasons. We like to focus the attention placed upon us on our products, moreso than the people behind the products. But without question we’re going to have a broader and more transparent face to at least the financial community. We do believe, we’ve been around 80 years or so, and the Titleist ball has been number one in golf since 1949 and Footjoy has been the number one shoe in golf for six or seven decades. Our intent and our thoughts as we think about the future, we’ve got a proven and differentiated business model, number one. Our business has been built around dedicated golfers. There are eight million of them in the world and they account for about 70% of the total golf spend. Our focus is very clear as we think about the future under new ownership and we don’t expect to change that.

GS: What does an Acushnet IPO mean to your customers or does it mean anything to them?

DM: We hope not, we hope they think of us through our products and through the experiences they have with our products. Understandably many will also link the initial public offering with our company, but first and foremost we will make sure our interaction with them is as good as it’s always been and is only going to get better. As we think about the future, two certainties will be we know we need to continue to bring innovative new products to market and we know we need to continue to enrich and build upon the experiences we give dedicated golfers with our products. That truly is our focus. Insiders of the game and business will get a different view of the company because you’ll look at us through the public company lens but our hope is to continue to impress and earn the trust and loyalty of dedicated golfers with our product and the ways we interact with them.

GS: What is your position on the state of golf?

DM: We’ve talked about this a lot over the last few weeks as we’ve positioned the company and obviously there has been a lot of commentary about the industry over that time. It started in the 80s with the build a course a day where we went from 12,900 courses to 15,900 courses in the United States. It accelerated with the arrival of deep-pocket sporting goods companies when Nike and Adidas arrived, giving further validity to the potential size of the golf business. You had the retail expansion as big public companies joined the retail business and expanded their footprint. So you had three forces. Big buildup of golf course supply, a big buildup of golf retail supply and more OEM’s in the space.

Predicated on that, with the way ratings are spiking, call it the “Tiger Effect”, it’s only a matter of time before the golf population grows. Number one. And then I think what we’ve realized is that it prompted us to think about our business, we’ve done well in good times and we’ve done well in tough times in part because of our focus on the dedicated golfer. But the correction that’s played out, we’ve seen, accelerated by the sub-prime crisis in ’08 and ’09 exposed some of the tenuous nature of our industry. And over the last five years you’ve seen that correction. We’re dealing with a contraction of golf courses, 100 to 150 a year over the last several years. We’ve seen a dramatic reduction in retail square footage, from Sports Authority to Edwin Watts to Golfsmith the last several weeks, and we’ve seen some changes to the OEM landscape as Nike’s made a shift in the way they’re thinking about golf and as Adidas is looking to sell Taylor Made.

We see that as a necessary correction that is resulting in an improved set of industry fundamentals. So those that are left standing, whether it’s the golf courses or the OEM’s or the retail players will be operating in an environment that is just a whole lot more healthy than it had been over the last several years. We see that correction as probably 70 or 80 yards downfield, it’s got a little geographic bent to it and it’s probably further along in some areas more than others and largely that issue is primarily a U.S. issue. The rest of the world, where we transact our business, it’s been a whole lot more stable which, as a global company, has allowed us to weather the storm of that contraction.

But what we have seen, and this year is a good example as despite some pretty rigorous turmoil at retail, our sales are up. Our dedicated golfer is resilient, they continue to be engaged, but we are dealing with some obvious contraction at retail, and what that means for manufacturers is a reduction in the inventory you have in the marketplace which, yes, causes a little bit of short term pain. But longer term we feel good about the purchase behavior of our dedicated target audience.

GS: Will becoming a publicly traded company put more pressure on Acushnet to expedite and increase new product launches?

DM: It’s something we’ve talked about a lot the last several weeks as we were presenting the future plans of the company. Really our launch cadence begins with the dedicated golfer. It really is in sync with their replacement cycles. In clubs we tend to run every couple of years and with balls the same. Footwear is a little bit different. It’s a little more accelerated because that’s as much a fashion play. But the cadence of footwear is different than equipment.

We don’t have any intent to change that. It takes us a while. To think about this industry and what it takes to bring measurably improved product to market, it takes resources. We spend more money than any of our competitors on R&D. It takes time, there is an incubation period to bring meaningful performance benefits to the market. So we really like that launch cadence we’re on and we packaged it to the investor community as a competitive edge and they agree.

Do we think we are going to accelerate the timing of our launch cycles? I think that would be a road to ruin for us.

GS: The target range of the offering price was missed, should we read something into that?

DM: No, that’s left in the hands of the bankers and traders. We go tell our story to investors and we frame the industry in its rightful lens. But really, the valuation, you put out a projection, that falls in the hands of the bankers and traders, so that really has no effect on us. We enter the world a public company today and are committed to what we’ve said all along that we’re a company dedicated to delivering long term growth with great reliability and predictability, so that doesn’t change.

GS: Is Wally Uihlein is committed to staying on as CEO for two more years?

DM: As Wally would say, as long as he can add value Wally’s going to be here. Unless we kick him out. But no, Wally’s been a very active part of this process and has no plans to exit any time soon. He’s a remarkable leader and visionary, and he’d be quick to point out too that his proudest accomplishment is the team he’s built behind him. We feel real good about Wally’s place and outlook and more importantly he feels really good about the many talented folks behind him.

GS: The symbol for Acushnet GOLF, how was that not taken?!

DM: Years ago it was Golfsmith when they were traded on NASDAQ. What else could we be called!

Acushnet (GOLF) IPO Sets $17 Share Price

My eyes start glazing over reading these IPO statements and forecasts, especially given the track record of analysts, so here goes with a few copy and paste jobs on Acushnet's (Titleist/Footjoy) raising of $329 million on a $17 share price, below the projected range of $21 to $24/$435 million.

Analyst Eric Volkman at Motley Fool offered this take:

Meanwhile, Acushnet Holdings' fairly static top line and the high level of indebtedness would worry me if I were an investor. I'm also not really a fan of equity cash-outs, as the driving motivation of this activity is to put money in the hands of existing shareholders, not raise funds for the business.

Don Dion at Seeking Alpha had this to say:

Declining revenue and tough market for golf manufactures make us pass on investing in this upcoming IPO.

The fact that company insiders are selling 100% of the shares and that Fila Korea will have majoring voting power are additional detractors.

Its current valuation also looks like quite a significant mark-up from Fila Korea's 2011 purchase price.

While we do hear the deal is oversubscribed, we suggest investors play golf but avoid the GOLF IPO.

Update on Friday, October 28, 2016 at 09:41 AM by Geoff

**Scott B. Simpson noted the giant miss by Motley Fool's assessment that competitor Nike's equipment skews younger and cooler. Of course, they are getting out of the business.

Repot: Dick's Sporting Goods Wins Golfsmith Bankruptcy Auction, Loves Golf Again!

By winning the Golfsmith auction, Jessica DiNapoli of Reuters says Dick's Sporting Goods will become the leading golf retailer based on number of stores (it may already be now).

Pending bankruptcy judge approval, DiNapoli says:

Dick's plans to keep open at least 30 Golfsmith stores and wind down the rest with liquidators from Hilco Global and Tiger Capital Group, the people said. It plans to keep about 500 of the company's employees.

Golfsmith had 109 stores in the United States at the time of its bankruptcy filing last month, and has been closing stores since then.

With the bid, Dick's, the largest U.S. sporting goods retailer, also won Golfsmith's intellectual property and inventory, the people added, asking not to be identified because the results of the auction are not yet public.

Mike Stachura of GolfDigest.com notes Dick's bullish attitude towards golf continues after the retailer gave indications that it saw golf as in "structural decline" and layed off its professional fitters not long after buying into Mark King and Adidas' Taylor Made vision of three new driver releases in one year.

Now, it looks like Dick's Sporting Goods, whose sporting goods store model is megasized but its Golf Galaxy brand model is a more conservative sized store, will be dictating a big part of golf's retail footprint going forward.

Boston Globe: Acushnet's IPO Next Week, Ticker Symbol GOLF

Dan Adams of the Boston Globe reports that Acushnet Holdings will be valued at $1.7 billion and is hoping to raise $435 million with the sale of 19.3 million shares. A whole bunch of people will get rich!

Adams writes:

The offering is expected to raise roughly $435 million with the sale of 19.3 million shares priced between $21 and $24. Previous investors, not the company, will reap the proceeds.

Thanks to a series of related transactions in advance of the offering, the majority of voting shares will go to Fila Korea Ltd., which has owned Acushnet since 2011.

The long awaited IPO may also accelerate the sale of Taylor Made and Golfsmith.

Update on Monday, October 17, 2016 at 08:22 PM by Geoff

**Steve Pike says this is the "most anticipated IPO since Callaway Golf Founder Ely Callaway took his company public in the early 1990s – a move that sparked a Wall Street run (with varied results) on golf equipment companies."

Bryson! Cobra Bringing Single Length Irons To Market

Mike Stachura reports for GolfDigest.com on Cobra bringing not one, but two same-length irons sets inspired by former U.S. Amateur champion Bryson DeChambeau's philosophy.

Will they actually work for players other than someone as skilled as Bryson?

DeChambeau deeply believes the single-length approach is the game’s new frontier, and Tom Olsavsky, Cobra’s chief of research and development, has made that belief a more palatable reality for the masses. Unlike DeChambeau’s approach, which requires oversized grips and an unorthodox, steep one-plane swing, the King F7 One and King Forged One Length are designed to simplify the game for average golfers by making every club the traditional length of a 7-iron.

“We see more consistency in both full swings and the short game,” Olsavsky says. “It’s one setup and one swing through the bag. And in our testing we see impacts closer to the center of the face much more often. One other benefit we see is more confidence.”