Golf

Just a quick fix

On-site engineers let clubs swing swift, true on tour.

By BOB HARIG
Published March 22, 2007

It is early on a Monday morning of another tournament week and Kenny Perry is still trying to rub the sleep out of his eyes. The PODS Championship is not set to start for three more days, but he already is at work.

Actually, a team of golf engineers is at work.

Perry has arrived at the TaylorMade equipment van, one of more than a dozen golf manufacturers' vehicles that travel the country and set up shop on the grounds of various PGA Tour events.

Perry has been experimenting with the company's new driver, the Super Quad, and has been trying to get it just right. So he has taken it to the van where Wade Liles, a 20-year veteran of the company, is adjusting the club.

"There's always a little tweaking involved," said Perry, 46, a nine-time tour winner. "This new Super Quad is the best driver they've made. I'm averaging 304 (yards off the tee) where last year I was averaging 295. I immediately gained a lot of distance. My problem is I don't hook it, but my miss has been a pull.

"We came to the conclusion that maybe it's a little too much loft and maybe it's too upright. So I came here to take a degree of loft off, from 8 degrees to 7 degrees. And we went from 59 to 58 on the lie. Hopefully the combination of the two will free my mind up a little bit while I'm out there and let me go at it."

Dozens of players will visit the TaylorMade van Monday through Wednesdays of a tournament week, whether to have a few clubs tweaked or an entire set built.

And TaylorMade is not alone. Titleist, Callaway, Cobra, Ping, Adams ... all are usually represented each week with state-of-the-art facilities.

"Most of these guys are very precise and I was very blown away by that," Liles said. "I liken it to tuning up cars for NASCAR. That's what we do. Everybody here is a fine-oiled machine."

Each day, Liles and another TaylorMade employee will go to work on a request sheet that is posted in the van. Most can be met in a matter of minutes. The longest task usually is regripping a set of clubs, which takes about 45 minutes. A new driver head can be put on a shaft in 10 minutes and dried with a special epoxy that allows it to be used only 10 minutes later.

"It's pretty impressive," said Vaughn Taylor, 31, a two-time PGA winner and another player who represents TaylorMade. "These guys are there for our needs."

The TaylorMade van is the biggest the PGA Tour allows, 32 feet long, 15 feet wide. It is, in essence, an 18-wheel mobile workshop that runs in the neighborhood of $500,000, according to Keith Sbarboro, TaylorMade's vice president of tour operations.

Sbarboro lives in San Diego, near company headquarters in Carlsbad, Calif. He will get to about 35 tournaments a year, with some of the reps getting to as many as 40 of the 48 events. The golf club technicians also are licensed truck drivers who alternate driving between tour stops. They typically are on site only for the practice rounds, then move on to the next site.

"What we do is a lot of adjustments," Sbarboro said. "Sometimes we build a set of irons. Sometimes we re-grip a set of clubs. Sometimes guys need a whole set because the airlines loose their clubs.

"Throughout the year, we've got probably 55 guys playing our driver. We have the most (players using our) fairway woods and drivers. If you're going to be the top performance brand in the world and on tour, you have to have a facility like this for service. We made 110 drivers in one day a few years ago after we released a new product. We need the ability to do that. Without this truck and this stuff, we wouldn't have the ability."

Some players might go weeks, maybe months, between visits to the tour vans. Then there are some who tinker every week, always looking for the right combination.

Either way, it's good to know what is available.

"Anything we need done they can do in minutes," said Corey Pavin, 47, a winner of 15 PGA events.

"I don't change stuff very often, but when I do, I have total confidence in them."

[Last modified March 21, 2007, 23:04:01]