Linear thinkers love studying history’s mysteries.
When experienced in real time, life’s events usually appear random and unrelated. They’re seemingly unconnected, arbitrary and inconsequential in the moment. It’s only through the lens of time that we can connect those dots and create a “once-upon-a-time” story arc we linear types love so much.
It’s how we make sense of things.
Case in point: No one, and I mean no one, could have known it at the time but an offhand lunchroom comment in 1995 would, five years later, completely change the game of golf in just 90 days.
Yet that’s just what happened nearly 30 years ago at Titleist’s Ball Plant 2 in North Dartmouth, Mass. A bunch of R&D engineers were enjoying their lunch when one of them held up a Pinnacle Gold golf ball and asked what turned out to be a billion-dollar question:
“What if we put a urethane cover on this thing?”
By the start of the new millennium, that innocent bit of curiosity turned into the Pro V1.
History’s Mysteries: The birth of the Titleist Pro V1
Golf in the early 1990s wasn’t exactly hickory shafts and gutta perchas but it was a lot different than it is today. On the PGA Tour, you had golfers who looked more like Craig Stadler than Adam Scott, no launch monitors and guys with swings like Payne Stewart’s.
But that game was evolving. While Tiger was finishing up high school, power players like Fred Couples, Davis Love III and, of course, John Daly were hitting the ball a freaking mile. Equipment was evolving as well. Cast clubs such as the PING Eye 2 and Tommy Armour 845s were easier to hit while the Callaway Big Bertha and its all-titanium descendant, the Great Big Bertha, were changing the game off the tee.
However, despite all these changes, golfers were still playing with what amounted to 70-year-old technology: the wound balata golf ball.
In 1994, Titleist introduced what proved to be a major innovation: the Titleist Professional, a wound ball with a new invention: a cast urethane cover.
“The Professional was a pretty big deal,” Titleist Golf Ball Marketing VP Jeremy Stone tells MyGolfSpy. “The cast urethane cover added speed and improved durability over the balata ball.”
The Professional quickly replaced the Titleist Tour Balata as the No. 1 ball in golf.
Golf balls, circa 1994
Let’s pause the narrative for a moment to connect some historical dots. Before the Professional, you could choose between a balata-covered ball or an ionomer-covered ball. Better players and Tour pros preferred balatas because they provided better spin, control and feel. Recreational golfers mostly chose ionomer because they were noticeably longer, even though it felt like you were hitting a rock.
Additionally, ionomer-covered balls were much more durable. If you hit a balata just a wee bit thin, it would crack a smile and be unplayable.
While balata balls featured a core (either rubber or a liquid center) tightly wrapped with elastic, two-piece ionomer balls had a solid synthetic rubber core. In 1994, the Titleist-made Pinnacle Gold and Spalding’s Top-Flite were top sellers, each holding roughly a 17 percent market share.
For golfers, it was either spin, control and feel or distance and durability. They couldn’t have both.
That was about to change.
Back to the lunchroom …
Titleist has just replaced the former No. 1 ball in golf, the Tour Balata, with the new No. 1 ball in golf, the Professional. You’d figure they’d be good for a while but you’d be wrong.
“Even though we had this game-changing ball in the Professional, we were still going to push and see what else we can come up with,” says Titleist Golf Ball R&D VP Michael Madson. “That’s when somebody picked up a Pinnacle Gold and asked what would happen if we put a thin urethane cover on it.
“Then it was, ‘Let’s go find out.’”
Titleist already had plenty of experience with solid-core balls and it wasn’t looking to replace the Professional. A Pinnacle Gold with a urethane cover was intriguing, however, so Engineering got to work. The result was the Pro 2-Piece. Titleist liked what it saw and planned to test market the ball in Texas.
Disaster, however, was looming.
“Robot data that showed it was a magnificent ball,” says Stone. “We test golf balls in a controlled environment. The failure was not allowing them to sit in a humid golf shop in Texas.”
As it turned out, the Pro 2-Piece was a better sponge than a golf ball. It absorbed all that humidity and became, for lack of a better term, waterlogged. That made the ball slow to the point of being unplayable.
“It was a genuine marketplace failure,” admits Stone. “But without that failure, we wouldn’t enjoy today because it taught us things you wouldn’t uncover otherwise.”
The Titleist Pro 2-Piece becomes the Titleist Pro V1
Ever wonder why the Pro V1 is called the Pro V1?
“Pro” stands for Professional. That was Titleist’s No. 1 ball at the time, and like any smart company, Titleist was building off that ball’s name recognition.
“1” is for the first version of the ball.
The “V”? That’s where things get interesting.
After the Texas failure, Titleist realized it needed another layer to keep moisture out of the core so it developed a Surlyn mantle to prevent absorption. They called it a “veneer” layer.
The “V” in Pro V1 stands for veneer.
“We have a hell of a lot of failures on our patent wall,” says Madson. “You may start with an idea and write a patent and it might wind up being total crap. But there may be one piece of chemistry in there that opens up pathways to innovation. We’re looking at building new ideas so we let the creative minds in R&D just run rampant.”
Titleist R&D ran rampantly for five years while developing the first Pro V1 generation. In the interim, Mark O’Meara used the solid-core Top-Flite Strata to win the 1998 Masters and Open Championship. Two years later, Tiger blitzkrieged the U.S. Open field at Pebble Beach with the NIKE Tour Accuracy. Titleist saw what was going on but knew what it had. It was just looking for the final pieces of the puzzle.
The “100 Man March”
By the summer of 2000, the Pro V1 was almost ready for prime time. That last puzzle piece was Tour testing and validation. Starting in June, Titleist Tour reps worked driving ranges and walked practice rounds with more than 100 PGA Tour pros, looking for feedback. The defining moment came at Ocean Forest Golf Club in Georgia, courtesy of Davis Love III.
“Mac Fritz (Titleist VP of Tour Promotion) took a dozen ‘white box’ prototypes to test with Davis,” says Stone. “He had one directive: Come back with all 12. Don’t lose any of them.”
They set up testing on one hole with a marsh bisecting the fairway some 340 yards away. That marsh was out of play for Love and his gamer, the Titleist Professional. Love was hitting into the wind and Fritz was standing 300 yards down the fairway. Professionals were landing near Fritz’s feet, well short of the marsh.
According to Stone, that’s when Fritz had Love tee up a Pro V1 prototype with simple instructions: Let ‘er rip.
“The ball sailed over Mac’s head and right into the marsh. They spent 45 minutes wading through the marsh trying to find that ball. Mac had to head home with his tail between his legs and only 11 prototypes.”
Legend has it that Love and his son Dru felt so bad they returned the next day and spent hours scouring the marsh for that ball. It stands as the very first Pro V1 ever lost and is likely still in that marsh today.
“That was validation for Davis,” says Stone. “That marsh hadn’t been in play for him before. Now, all of a sudden, it was.”
What happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay in Vegas
Today the USGA updates its conforming list electronically. In 2000, however, OEMs would wait for a new list to be published before new products could be played on Tour. Titleist was ready to unleash the Pro V1 but the new USGA list wasn’t published until early October, just before the Invensys Classic in Las Vegas.
Fritz brought 60 dozen Pro V1s to the tournament, expecting 20, maybe 25 Titleist players to put them into play. Forty-seven did. It was the single biggest shift in equipment usage in PGA Tour history.
“Players are creatures of habit,” says Madson. “Even if they see performance they know deep down is better for them, they’re going to take their time before switching. For that many players to switch so quickly just showed how much better the Pro V1 was.”
One of the players who switched was a struggling veteran from Rhode Island, Billy Andrade.
Andrade was 160th on the money list and had already sent in his check for Qualifying School. Turns out he needn’t have bothered. Andrade tore up TPC Summerlin for his fourth and final PGA Tour win, a win for the Titleist Pro V1 in its first event.
“The ball was 20 yards longer than the Tour Prestige I was playing at the time,” says Andrade. “I chalked some of that up to altitude but the distance and overall performance was like nothing I had ever played.”
Phil Mickelson, also playing a Pro V1, finished second to Andrade. Less than a month later, he would outduel Tiger at the Tour Championship in Atlanta. In a career filled with fuse-lighting moments, Mickelson’s post-tournament comments may have been the biggest:
“I honestly believe that if you’re not playing this golf ball, then you are at a distinct disadvantage to the entire field.”
Number One with a bullet
Titleist originally planned to launch the ProV1 to retail in March 2001. Andrade and Mickelson forced that plan to change and the Pro V1 was released to Sun Belt retailers in mid-December. Things got crazier in January. Brad Faxon won the Sony Open in Hawaii with the Pro V1, tying the 72-hole scoring record. Mark Calcavecchia set the 36-, 54- and 72-hole scoring records with the Pro V1 the following week at the Phoenix Open. One week later, Love fired the lowest final round ever for a winner at Pebble Beach.
By the time the West Coast swing was over, the top eight money winners were playing the Pro V1.
“We had to accelerate product,” explains Stone. “It’s not like we mothballed our wound-ball lines. Our expectation was for a far lower adoption of the Pro V1 and we expected people to play wound balls through the year because that’s what our typical transition looked like.”
Typical, however, flew out the window in Vegas.
It’s impossible to overstate the speed and totality of the Pro V1 takeover. In mid-March, only 90 days after its retail launch, the ProV1 rocketed to number one in golf ball sales.
It hasn’t moved from that perch since.
By the 2001 Masters, 42 of the 45 Titleist players in the field switched to the Pro V1. In June, Retief Goosen won the U.S. Open with a Pro V1 and Karrie Webb gamed the Pro V1 to win the Women’s U.S. Open by eight strokes, the largest margin of victory in over two decades.
“The Pro V1 responded to the changing nature of the game,” says Titleist Golf Ball President Mary Lou Bohn. “The arrival of the power game necessitated golf balls that delivered low spin in the long game while maintaining spin, feel and control of the premium liquid-center, wound-technology balls.”
USA Today and an existential crisis
In the three months from mid-December of 2000 to mid-March of 2001, the Pro V1 went from nothing to No. 1. No one at Titleist had that on their bingo card which meant leadership had some difficult decisions to make.
“We just couldn’t make enough,” says Stone. “I don’t think any Tour player would have dreamt of hitting a ball as long off the tee as the Pinnacle but with the Professional’s performance around the green. That wouldn’t have been in the realm of possibility.”
The consumer frenzy went thermonuclear in March when USA Today published a front-page story on how the Pro V1 turned golf upside-down. There were even unfounded rumors that Titleist was artificially suppressing supply to boost demand.
That spring, Titleist faced an existential crisis: Fully embrace the new Pro V1 and obsolete 70 years of wound ball manufacturing or hedge its bets, let the market settle and transition slowly.
“The philosophical question at the time was, ‘Are we the wound-ball construction leader or are we the golf ball technology leader?’” says Stone. “That’s 70 years of legacy we’d be walking away from. You better believe there were people here who thought that might not be the smartest choice.”
Ultimately, Titleist decided its legacy wasn’t wound golf balls, it was better golf balls.
“Our brand literally exists because, in 1930, golf ball makers hadn’t figured out how to make a golf ball consistently,” Stone says. “Phil Young figured out how to do that. He felt his job was to make a better golf ball if he could. It wasn’t because it was wound; it’s because it was better.”
“We’re working around the clock …”
Retooling to meet demand was no easy task. It was like trying to change tires on a car going 90 miles an hour. As you’d expect, Titleist had a hard time keeping up.
“Wally (Uhlein, Acushnet CEO at the time) wrote a letter published in the golf magazines saying, ‘Hey, we’re trying our best to keep up with production,’” says Stone. “We were working around the clock but we just couldn’t make enough.
“We were trying to figure out how to retool and reinvest in the necessary capacity which is how Ball Plant 3 came to be. Ball Plant 1 was where we made our wound balls. We couldn’t just tear it down and renovate it. We needed a whole new facility.”
The fact Tour players were jumping to the Pro V1 in droves made the transition easier. Pro V1 production ramped up while Tour Balata, Tour Prestige and Professional production ramped down. By July, the last Tour Balata was played on Tour. By November, the last Professional was played on Tour.
How monumental was the 2001 sea change? Golfweek Magazine reported in December that 2001 was the first year that no one – not one single golfer – won on the PGA Tour using a wound ball. No one on the LPGA, Seniors, European, Canadian, Buy.com or Japan Golf tours won using a wound ball, either.
At some point in 2002, Titleist made its last wound ball. The Pro V1 takeover was complete.
“One of our mantras is that if it’s better for the golfer, we’ll figure it out eventually,” says Madson.
A rose by any other name
Since history is almost always accidental, it’s important to note that Titleist had no intention of calling the Pro V1 the Pro V1. That was simply the prototype name. They planned on coming up with a better name before release.
During the “100 Man March”, Tour players became familiar with the Pro V1 name. Titleist also called it Pro V1 during the long USGA conforming process so by the time Vegas rolled around, the name just stuck. All that early Tour success only solidified the name in everyone’s mind.
In 2003, there was talk of calling the new model the Pro V2. However, Marketing 101 says when you have a game-changing, top-selling golf ball, don’t mess with what you call it.
The addition of the Pro V1x was a smaller game-changer in its own right.
“The Pro V1 was the best ball for pros and it proved to be the best ball for amateurs,” says Stone. “But the Pro V1x allowed for unique flight, spin and feel characteristics to be designed into a ball with a purpose. It really created ball fitting.”
2000 versus today
While talking with Stone and Madson, one question kept bugging me.
“If I played a 2001 Pro V1 and the new Pro V1 (due in January) together, how different would they be?”
The answers came fast and furious.
“You’re going to have a steeper spin slope,” said Madson. “We’re always trying to drive spin down with the driver to get more distance off the tee while keeping spin up with irons and wedges.”
Additionally, improvements in core gradients, cover chemistry, aerodynamic packages, even paint, while incremental, add up over a quarter of a century.
“It’s hard to see differences from one generation to the next,” Madson explains. “But over time, when you keep at it, you end up with big performance changes over the generations. It’ll be faster and the better dimple pattern means it’ll fly farther. It’s also going to be more durable. It’ll stay whiter longer and the ink is going to look better.”
History’s Mysteries: The Titleist Pro V1 legacy
So why did history choose the Pro V1 to change the game and not the NIKE Tour Accuracy or even the Top-Flite Strata? After all, NIKE had Tiger Woods, an unprecedented U.S. Open blowout and a six-month head start. The Strata had a two-year head start.
“It’s one thing to have a great product,” says Stone. “It’s another thing to be committed and have a route to the market.”
Titleist had the top-selling golf ball before the Pro V1 showed up and it had been tops on Tour for decades. It also had a stronger pro shop and golf retail presence than NIKE. NIKE had Tiger but was still a relative newcomer to golf equipment and had no real track record. Spalding sold a lot of golf balls but, as we’ve documented before, was having its own troubles at the time.
“There’s a certain credibility that comes from being the market leader in an industry introducing a product, as opposed to someone else,” says Stone.
The Pro V1 represented an inflection point that was decades in the making. Power was taking over the pro game and ball makers could see it coming. That’s why that engineer in the lunchroom asked the eternal question: What if?
Titleist was uniquely positioned. It had the R&D juice, the manufacturing capabilities, the marketing strength and the distribution channel to turn that product into a game-changing moment in golf history.
The post History’s Mysteries: How the Titleist ProV1 Changed Golf Forever in Just 90 Days appeared first on MyGolfSpy.
