Speaker 1: The guys from Ping. They've kind of showed me how
Speaker 1: much the equipment matters. I just love that I can
Speaker 1: hit any shot I kind of want.
Speaker 2: We're gonna be able to tell some fun stories about
Speaker 2: what goes on here to help golfers play better golf.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Ping Proving Grounds podcast. I'm Shane Bacon.
Speaker 1: That is Marty Jertsen, and this is a very very
Speaker 1: important thing to tell you off the bat. If you're
Speaker 1: listening to the podcast, pause the podcast for a moment
Speaker 1: and then open it back up on YouTube, because I
Speaker 1: will say, Marty, it's gonna be a visual medium. Today.
Speaker 1: Rob Griffin is with us. We are in the archive room. Rob,
Speaker 1: this is where I would say the magic happens, but
Speaker 1: the magic has been happening for a long time. How
Speaker 1: long have you been at Ping and how many golf
Speaker 1: clubs do you feel like are in the archive room
Speaker 1: right now?
Speaker 3: Well, I've been at Ping since nineteen eighty six. I
Speaker 3: did leave for three years, but I came back. And
Speaker 3: when I started, I was the company's photographer, so I
Speaker 3: shot all kinds of stuff for the company, tour events.
Speaker 3: I thought I was going to shoot a lot of
Speaker 3: tour events turned out. I was shot more product okay
Speaker 3: than anything. But then I left in two thousand and two.
Speaker 3: I came back in two thousand and five. My hair
Speaker 3: had turned white, so they said I could be the historian.
Speaker 1: That was all it took. On the rest today, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's gotten a little wider. You can do. You can
Speaker 1: get the archive room, you can have that. What what
Speaker 1: are the club's day back to? I mean you're talking
Speaker 1: like I was looking around as before we got going,
Speaker 1: and I was picking out clubs I played when I
Speaker 1: was a junior golfer. What year are some of these
Speaker 1: clubs dating back to?
Speaker 3: Well as far back as maybe late fifty eight, nineteen
Speaker 3: fifty nine.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable.
Speaker 3: And how many there are in here? I don't know.
Speaker 1: Exactly, but you can guess.
Speaker 3: I guess, yeah, there's more than a few thousand, okay.
Speaker 3: And we actually have three other rooms over in another building,
Speaker 3: and in one of those rooms is full of clubs.
Speaker 1: So there's what year do they push you? Do they
Speaker 1: push you to that room like on an office space situation.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, but that's over there where there's no there's
Speaker 3: no heater cooling.
Speaker 1: That's right, Okay, Okay, you don't want to be there
Speaker 1: in the summer.
Speaker 3: You don't want to be there in the summer. But
Speaker 3: that's where most of the wooden woods are actually, which
Speaker 3: is not a good maybe not the best thing, but
Speaker 3: that's where most of the wooden woods.
Speaker 2: Are rob I think one thing that US engineers have
Speaker 2: heard a lot of stories about through the family, through
Speaker 2: John Solheim when we're working on product development, is about
Speaker 2: Carston the originator. Give a little insight to the listener
Speaker 2: about him, maybe some of the fun pro I mean,
Speaker 2: I love looking at some of the from fun prototypes
Speaker 2: that he made or welded together, tried, you know, had
Speaker 2: his technicians go make real quickly. Give us a little
Speaker 2: insight into Carston and what made him tick. Well.
Speaker 3: Carsten's whole thing was he was trying to make the
Speaker 3: game of golf easier for the average player. That was
Speaker 3: his whole goal in life was to build a golf
Speaker 3: club that would make the game easier to play. He
Speaker 3: was a great problem solver, always trying to think how
Speaker 3: to improve his golf club or design a new putter,
Speaker 3: things like that. So you know there's a driver up
Speaker 3: here that's the square stainless steel square driver, and you
Speaker 3: know he just wanted to see how will that work?
Speaker 3: And I know when he was working on that with
Speaker 3: Greg Schmidt, one of our engineers, Greg told him, he says, Carson,
Speaker 3: that's going to cow bell and sure enough it did.
Speaker 3: But Carson said, no, it's okay, let's let's try it anyway,
Speaker 3: and they tried it, and sure enough it made a
Speaker 3: cow bell sound. It was pretty loud.
Speaker 1: I mean, but I mean you're talking about a square
Speaker 1: driver that was built in the nineties, yeah.
Speaker 3: Or probably sometime in the early nineties and.
Speaker 1: The early nineties. So, you know, you think about the
Speaker 1: innovation of golf and how we go through these ebbs
Speaker 1: and flows with certain designs. I mean, Marty's been, you know,
Speaker 1: so influential in that over the last twenty twenty five years.
Speaker 1: But some of the things that you have on these ricks,
Speaker 1: I mean, you're showing me an upside down putter from
Speaker 1: years ago. A lot of the ideas were just simply
Speaker 1: will this work or will this name?
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's see what happens. You know, Alan even told
Speaker 3: me one time that when Alan had an idea, Carson
Speaker 3: would ask him, have you tried doing it? Just backwards
Speaker 3: of that, have you tried doing that? One hundred and
Speaker 3: eighty degrees just to see what happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think Carston was the originator of what we're
Speaker 2: still doing today, which is trying things fail and learn
Speaker 2: from your failures, right, And he really started us on
Speaker 2: that journey, rob And it is fun to look at
Speaker 2: all the well you could call it a failure, but
Speaker 2: quote unquote, you know, failures that are learnings that we've
Speaker 2: you know, continued to build upon.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Oh, absolutely, no, I mean, he he wasn't He wasn't
Speaker 3: afraid to fail. He wasn't afraid for something.
Speaker 1: Not to work. How did the process of starting an
Speaker 1: archive room begin? Because I can only imagine you had
Speaker 1: a lot of these things laying around somewhere and you
Speaker 1: might as well display what you're saying, seventy years of
Speaker 1: golf clubs in this room, right.
Speaker 3: Well, the way the original idea of this started in
Speaker 3: the mid nineties and we had a historian. Her name
Speaker 3: was don Wingert, and she had actually been John's assistant
Speaker 3: administrative assistant for a while quite a while, and so
Speaker 3: she became the first historian and she did a lot
Speaker 3: of great work. I fall back on stuff that she's found,
Speaker 3: and she kind of did the initial organization of it,
Speaker 3: and a lot of the putters that I have are
Speaker 3: because she went up to shipping and grabbed a bunch
Speaker 3: of putters.
Speaker 1: You know, we need this for the archive, right, like.
Speaker 3: These white putters over here, which we didn't sell very
Speaker 3: we hardly ever sold. I'm almost positive that she went
Speaker 3: up to shipping and then we're up there and she says,
Speaker 3: I'll take all those stuff like that. She really got
Speaker 3: to start, you know, She's the one that got it started.
Speaker 3: So much of what I have done since then, I've
Speaker 3: fallen back on stuff that she had done.
Speaker 1: Rob.
Speaker 2: I think one of the one of the things that
Speaker 2: a lot of people don't know about is how influential
Speaker 2: Louise was in uh the entire company, especially some of
Speaker 2: the the the naming of the answer putter. She was
Speaker 2: a lab technician for for in the research industry, well dynamics.
Speaker 3: Actually she worked for Convert and she worked in the
Speaker 3: wind tunnel and her job title.
Speaker 1: Was computer, just computer computer.
Speaker 3: She was a math whiz, and so her job was
Speaker 3: to take the data that these engineers got from the
Speaker 3: wind tunnel and to somehow or other condense it into
Speaker 3: something they could really use. And that was you know,
Speaker 3: that's one of the jobs she had. And then later
Speaker 3: on when they were in New York, she actually worked
Speaker 3: for a government agency, the Dairy Board or something like that.
Speaker 3: And so, you know, she was very smart in terms
Speaker 3: of Carston and Louise. I always tell people this that
Speaker 3: if Carston had married a different young lady, we probably
Speaker 3: wouldn't be here today. She was that important to what
Speaker 3: we did. She came to work every day just like
Speaker 3: Carston did, and she was more of the personal touch
Speaker 3: with the employees and things like that. And yes, she
Speaker 3: named some of the putters, including the Answer famously, the
Speaker 3: answer putter.
Speaker 1: So is the story on that was it was drop
Speaker 1: a letter to make it fit on the putter? Was
Speaker 1: that how it went?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so Carston, you know, Carston came home from the
Speaker 3: La Open in January of sixty six and Arnold Palmer's
Speaker 3: putter was the most popular putter out there at the time,
Speaker 3: the eighty eight oh two, and so Carston came home
Speaker 3: and he told Louise he needed to find an answer
Speaker 3: to Arnie's putter. So within days Carston had a drawing,
Speaker 3: he had a sample and it was get He needed
Speaker 3: to go to the engraver to have the plates engraved
Speaker 3: to put the name on the putter. This started a
Speaker 3: few days before he had to go, and he said,
Speaker 3: you know, I need a name for my putter. And
Speaker 3: she says, why don't you just call it the Answer,
Speaker 3: because it's your answer to Ernie's putter. He said, well,
Speaker 3: that's no name for a putter, you know. So they
Speaker 3: went back and forth.
Speaker 1: One whiffs was considering what that name has done in
Speaker 1: the lineage of pain exactly.
Speaker 3: So they went back and forth a couple of days,
Speaker 3: and then the morning that he was supposed to go,
Speaker 3: he had his appointment to go to the engraver. They
Speaker 3: woke up and you know, he said, you know, I
Speaker 3: still need a name for this putter. And she said,
Speaker 3: I told you call it the Answer. And he goes, well,
Speaker 3: that's too long. It won't fit. And she said, we'll
Speaker 3: drop the W. It'll sound the same anyway.
Speaker 2: And there you go, and there you have it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how do you low? So you're talking initially in
Speaker 1: terms of archival stuff, it was go grab a club
Speaker 1: and let's put this to the side so we don't
Speaker 1: forget about this putter or this prototype. I'm assuming that
Speaker 1: process is a little bit more computerized if you will
Speaker 1: these days, how do you go about making sure every
Speaker 1: club from ping is in the room, every new club
Speaker 1: gets a spot in your room.
Speaker 3: I placed an order just like a customer. Okay, that's
Speaker 3: literally what I do, because I had tried other ways.
Speaker 3: People would say, oh, yeah, I can get you that,
Speaker 3: I can get you that, and it never it wouldn't
Speaker 3: show up half the time. And so we just went
Speaker 3: to the idea of just well, place an order just
Speaker 3: like a customer.
Speaker 1: And if you need a new driver, do you just
Speaker 1: place two? Is that's kind of how it goes. You
Speaker 1: just say I actually need two of those drivers for myself.
Speaker 1: It's what I'm saying. I just I got to have
Speaker 1: just an extra one just in case it doesn't quite work.
Speaker 1: It's not how it goes. They keep an eye on that.
Speaker 3: My badge doesn't let me walk out the door.
Speaker 1: Marty. When you look around this room, I mean you
Speaker 1: see clubs that you designed. How cool was that to
Speaker 1: kind of you know, see your clubs that you started
Speaker 1: as you know, mocking on a paper and working on
Speaker 1: a computer, to next to the square driver from the
Speaker 1: nineties or the white putters that maybe didn't make the team.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's incredible. And one of the funnest projects
Speaker 2: I had where you know, coming into the archives and
Speaker 2: learning and getting the history was working on the Answer iron.
Speaker 2: So we worked on a forged iron that had a
Speaker 2: milled cavity in the back, multi material and the original
Speaker 2: answer iron we're looking at over here. Rob can kind
Speaker 2: of tell the story of a little bit is getting
Speaker 2: some forge blanks and then Carston and Allen I think
Speaker 2: Alan worked on milling.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Alan did all the milling on the forge. They'd
Speaker 3: get the forge blanks for the sixty nine irons, which
Speaker 3: was the first model that they did. We got the
Speaker 3: heads from golf Craft. Yeah, and golf Craft became titleist,
Speaker 3: but they got the heads from golf Craft. They get
Speaker 3: him here. Then Alan would mill out the cavities. It
Speaker 3: had a dual cavity that one did, and then you know,
Speaker 3: to Carston's design and then they would send they had
Speaker 3: to send the heads back to golf Craft to be chromed.
Speaker 3: Then they'd come back here and they'd weigh out the
Speaker 3: heads and so they could put them into sets.
Speaker 2: And that cavity made him more forgiving, giving higher moment
Speaker 2: of nursia. That's what I loved about Carson is A
Speaker 2: he was not afraid to try some wild ideas and
Speaker 2: B he thought from a physics based kind of first
Speaker 2: principles approach. Uh, Rob, I want to go back to that,
Speaker 2: Louise a little bit working in the wind tunnel, because
Speaker 2: fast forward to golf club design. Yes, we I'm looking
Speaker 2: at the turbulator design that we developed in a wind tunnel,
Speaker 2: right and having that kind of in our company DNA,
Speaker 2: Carston and John wanted to test drivers for aerodynamics. They thought,
Speaker 2: if we could make it mourerodynamic, golfer could swing it faster.
Speaker 2: Tell us the story about developing woodwoods and testing the
Speaker 2: driver aerodynamics.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, when Carson first decided he was going to
Speaker 3: build his own wooden wood, you're right, he wanted it
Speaker 3: to bey aerodynamic, Swing it faster, hit it farther was
Speaker 3: his idea, of course, and so he checked into you know,
Speaker 3: he had worked on his design, then he checked into
Speaker 3: having it tested in a wind tunnel. And there was
Speaker 3: two problems. One was it was expensive. The second one
Speaker 3: was the deal breaker, and that was it was going
Speaker 3: to be several months before they could get him in
Speaker 3: line to.
Speaker 2: Have it tested.
Speaker 3: And also if he had to do a redesign is
Speaker 3: still going to be longer after that. So Carson was
Speaker 3: not the most patient person in the world. So he
Speaker 3: decided he had figured out how to do his own
Speaker 3: wind tunnel testing. So what he did is he got
Speaker 3: ahead and he put a short shaft in it, and
Speaker 3: he attached spring gauge to it, kind of like you'd
Speaker 3: weigh a fish with only probably a little higher tech
Speaker 3: than that, but a spring gauge like a machinist might use.
Speaker 3: And he got Alan and they got in the family
Speaker 3: car and they went down to Bell Road down here,
Speaker 3: which is a few miles north of here, and Allan's
Speaker 3: job was to drive the car exactly one hundred miles
Speaker 3: an hour. In those days, the only thing out there
Speaker 3: was the horse track, So Alan's job was to drive
Speaker 3: the car one hundred miles an hour. Carston would hold
Speaker 3: the club out the window with the spring gauge and
Speaker 3: turn it and watch how the gauge moved, maybe make
Speaker 3: some notes, I suppose, and then they come back work
Speaker 3: on it a little more, and go back and do
Speaker 3: it again. And so that's how he did his wind
Speaker 3: tunnel testing. And you know, I asked Allan, they so
Speaker 3: They did this in a Citron automobile, which Carston loves
Speaker 3: Citron automobiles because they were such high tech cars for
Speaker 3: the time, and the one that they used we believe
Speaker 3: maybe had a Maserati engine at it. But Allan said,
Speaker 3: it's great to get to drive the family car one
Speaker 3: hundred miles an hour, except that if he didn't drive
Speaker 3: it exactly one hundred miles an hour, Carston wood yell
Speaker 3: at it.
Speaker 1: Rob, do you look at Marty and you think he
Speaker 1: needs to do more of this when he's kind of
Speaker 1: testing out some of his new age stuff. Get behind
Speaker 1: the wheel of a car, let's get the get on
Speaker 1: a bicycle or a motorcycle and just see how passing
Speaker 1: go with the club in hand? Or do you like
Speaker 1: the way he goes about his business today?
Speaker 3: As far as I know, he goes he knows what
Speaker 3: he's doing perfect.
Speaker 1: As far as I know, Rob, we have so many
Speaker 1: unbelievable items. I know you've picked out a few that
Speaker 1: you really like. And a reminder to everybody watched this
Speaker 1: part of the podcast because it's going to be important,
Speaker 1: But do you have any clubs that you can pull
Speaker 1: out or any of the ones that you you know
Speaker 1: that you've pulled the side that are really notable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I thought we'd talk about, you know, since
Speaker 3: the answer is the you know, best putter in the
Speaker 3: history of golf. And so this is the hand drawing
Speaker 3: he did for the answer. Putt it the first drawing.
Speaker 1: This is his drawing.
Speaker 3: This is his drawing. He did this drawing. And when
Speaker 3: I first saw the drawing back in the nineties, when
Speaker 3: they found it in his desk drawer and they brought
Speaker 3: it to me so I could photograph it and make copies.
Speaker 3: And when I first saw I thought, that doesn't look
Speaker 3: like an answer. It looks like the Ping pal to me.
Speaker 3: And then his second drawing he made two days later,
Speaker 3: and it's dated and signed.
Speaker 1: YEP, January fourteenth, nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 3: Right, and then witnessed the fifteenth and on this you know,
Speaker 3: so now it's starting to look a little different, the
Speaker 3: drawing does. And on this drawing it says sample made
Speaker 3: the fourteenth, January fourteenth, and so this is the sample
Speaker 3: that he made.
Speaker 1: So this is from sixty six, I mean, this is
Speaker 1: the January.
Speaker 3: Fourteen, sixty six. So this started out as a Ping
Speaker 3: sixty nine putter this head, and it even was drilled
Speaker 3: for a shaft already, so he just took one that
Speaker 3: was already drilled and then he modified it and braised
Speaker 3: or welded this answer style hozzle onto it. So's the
Speaker 3: that's the prototype for the answer.
Speaker 1: Is this the most mimicked golf club in the world?
Speaker 1: Is that fair to say?
Speaker 3: I think it is?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think easily. And unfortunately nowadays a lot of
Speaker 3: people don't realize that Carston invented the answer design.
Speaker 1: So we have the podcast that's we're doing this, that's
Speaker 1: why we're doing yellow people.
Speaker 3: And so this is like one of the very first
Speaker 3: castings of the answer putter, and we know it's one
Speaker 3: of the first ones because the hozzle is much thinner
Speaker 3: than the answer is. Yeah, you can see that, and
Speaker 3: I think when they got their first casting they realize
Speaker 3: Carson really that when he put the shaft in and
Speaker 3: the ball bearing and he had to drive the ball
Speaker 3: bearing and it would bend this.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So Marty is someone that does this now, you know,
Speaker 1: for your life's work, if you will, what is it
Speaker 1: like looking at things like this from the sixties, thinking
Speaker 1: what it must have been like, you know, for Carston
Speaker 1: and any designer out there having to go about their
Speaker 1: business and the sixties trying to make golf clubs.
Speaker 2: I think in talking to Rob about the timeline of
Speaker 2: when Carston went out and realized there was a problem
Speaker 2: to solve looking at his brain, was thinking I could
Speaker 2: bring in some physics here to help the everyday golfer,
Speaker 2: right right, And how quickly he got that to market
Speaker 2: was is absolutely incredible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you don't want me asking you, Marty, how
Speaker 1: long does it take you to go from idea of
Speaker 1: a golf club first look at it, and then it's
Speaker 1: to market? I mean, what's the timeline for you nowadays
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean a lot longer than Carston got the
Speaker 2: answer out into players' hands. I mean a year, a
Speaker 2: year and a half, yeah, okay, yeah, somewhere in that timeframe,
Speaker 2: you know, for like a big scale project. But the
Speaker 2: fact that he could, you know, put so much effort, passion,
Speaker 2: and he could make things, get things done, do them
Speaker 2: and really bring in these physics principles of putting offset right.
Speaker 2: I mean, that was one of the main things he
Speaker 2: brought is that you can generate stability by creating a
Speaker 2: distance between where the player is going to apply the
Speaker 2: force through their hands in the center of gravity of
Speaker 2: the club, with the plumber.
Speaker 3: Absolutely offset with such a I mean that's his innovation.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, yeah, Rob, what's the let's call it the
Speaker 1: most unique golf club in the archive room. You could
Speaker 1: maybe go weirdest, you could go strangest, you could go
Speaker 1: most different. Now you didn't show me the upside down putter,
Speaker 1: which is my winner already. Okay, Well, because I just
Speaker 1: liked the idea of can we make it upside down? Sure?
Speaker 3: This is probably the This is what a lot of
Speaker 3: collectors feel as the holy grail of ping collectibles. Okay,
Speaker 3: this is the Ping trainer.
Speaker 2: Uh this what's the do you know?
Speaker 1: Do you know roughly a year for this?
Speaker 3: This would be from like sixty two three. Okay, there's
Speaker 3: supposed to be. This one's not quite complete. It doesn't
Speaker 3: have there's a wire that comes to a point back here, okay,
Speaker 3: and there's two movable weights here. The idea of the
Speaker 3: trainer is that where the wire comes to a point,
Speaker 3: you put a piece of like felt, and you dip
Speaker 3: it in ink, and then on butcher paper you hit
Speaker 3: some putts and it draws your stroke. Interesting So when
Speaker 3: Carston decided to make his own putter to help his
Speaker 3: own putting, he wasn't thinking of making putters for you know,
Speaker 3: for sale. He was just wanting to help his own putting.
Speaker 3: You know, he didn't take up the game of golf
Speaker 3: till he's in his forties. Putting was the hard part
Speaker 3: for him, you know, became the heart, you know, decided
Speaker 3: that was his weak weak spot. So he took the
Speaker 3: putter that he had, which was just a simple blade putter,
Speaker 3: and he had he did this wire thing attached to
Speaker 3: a wire to it, and on butcher paper, he did
Speaker 3: this little experiment. And what he found out was that
Speaker 3: no matter how he held the putter, how tightly, or
Speaker 3: any configuration of how he held the putter, if he
Speaker 3: didn't hit the putt right in the sweet spot of
Speaker 3: the putter or the ball right in the sweet part
Speaker 3: of the putter, the head twisted an impact. And he
Speaker 3: could see that because of the drawing, he could literally
Speaker 3: see a little squiggle, okay, And so he decided that's
Speaker 3: when he decided that he needed to move the weight
Speaker 3: to the heel and toe. Try to get more weight
Speaker 3: to the heel and toe. So the first thing you know,
Speaker 3: he went to one of his friends at ge and
Speaker 3: asked them to make him a blade, you know, a
Speaker 3: putterhead blade out of aluminum. And when he got that,
Speaker 3: he took it home and somehow or other he milled
Speaker 3: out or drilled out areas on the soul, big areas,
Speaker 3: and he filled those with lead to get the weight
Speaker 3: to the heel and toe and then shafted it up
Speaker 3: and sure enough it worked.
Speaker 1: Just a bummer. We don't have like video like we
Speaker 1: have video today of this. I mean, what an unbelievable
Speaker 1: video this would have been of just like adding the lead.
Speaker 1: I just love the creativity of how can we find
Speaker 1: a solution to a problem? Right, and I mean just
Speaker 1: hearing the stories is basically his life work was finding
Speaker 1: solutions into a problem. Exactly.
Speaker 3: So the trainer he came out with in sixty two
Speaker 3: so that he could people could see what he had seen,
Speaker 3: you know when he did this. And also he called
Speaker 3: it the trainer because he suggested that people put the
Speaker 3: weight in the center and hit putts, and then after
Speaker 3: they do that for a little bit, then move it
Speaker 3: to the heel and toe and they'd see how much
Speaker 3: better it was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so you know.
Speaker 3: I think he was thinking he might could do this
Speaker 3: with a putter, but then he turned out, of course
Speaker 3: you can't have you couldn't have movable weights. Then yeah,
Speaker 3: say so, But it became the trainer. It sold for
Speaker 3: twenty two fifty It was in the ads and the
Speaker 3: magazines and stuff, and he only made one when somebody
Speaker 3: ordered one.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 3: A few years ago once sold at auction for twenty
Speaker 3: two thousand, five hundred dollars.
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, and it's it.
Speaker 3: Literally, I don't we don't know how many he made.
Speaker 3: My guess is it's less than twenty.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, so you say, holy grail. It's really the
Speaker 1: holy grail. I mean, there's not many of these things.
Speaker 3: Collect for pink collectors. This is one of This is
Speaker 3: kind of the holy grail.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Carson was such a great storyteller, and he found very
Speaker 2: unique ways to show the value of the physics that
Speaker 2: he's uh right, he's bringing in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm always yeah, you know, he would show the
Speaker 3: one a putter. Uh, he would demonstrate that to people
Speaker 3: with two sugar cubes and popsicle sticks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, A little you do a little more than that, now, Marty,
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 3: Or or you know the bonamic shaft. Yep, yep, the
Speaker 3: ball namic shaft. He would demonstrate to people with a
Speaker 3: paper clip. He would take a paper clip and bend
Speaker 3: it like the balamic shaft to show him how the
Speaker 3: balnamic shaft worked.
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, Marty, like, we've talked so much
Speaker 1: about innovation in terms of what you're doing now, and
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm so impressed with kind of the ping's
Speaker 1: ability to push the app world forward. I just think
Speaker 1: that what you guys have done and what's coming has
Speaker 1: been very, very impressive because you're trying to solve a problem. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for the golfer at home, the technology is there, but
Speaker 1: maybe every golfer doesn't understand this. And it feels like,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's followed the footsteps of Carston, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of being under the same roof is. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: new age, maybe it's computerized me its apps, but at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, it's the same thing.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. We us and engineering. We talk about that all
Speaker 2: the time, and I think it's shows the importance of
Speaker 2: a lot of us that are designers are working on
Speaker 2: the product. We play golf, we feel the pain of
Speaker 2: the game or just like Carston and we're trying to
Speaker 2: come in and solve those you know, it's kind of personal.
Speaker 2: We want to if we could solve it for us,
Speaker 2: we can solve it for everybody. So we draw a
Speaker 2: lot of inspiration from that, and it's it's weaved into
Speaker 2: the fabric of the company.
Speaker 3: I mean, John encourages people like Marty and young engineers
Speaker 3: to come in here, yeah and look around, just just look,
Speaker 3: you know, yeah.
Speaker 1: Ask some full ideas away. What's interesting is you were
Speaker 1: showing me before we got going. I mean there's seven
Speaker 1: woods and drivers over there that are fifty inches long,
Speaker 1: fifty five inches long that are probably thirty years old, right, yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean yeah, so yeah, we have Weggie Winchester's five
Speaker 3: foot long driver, but you just win the long drive
Speaker 3: content back in the early eighties five foot long.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, real, Yeah, we're still trying to figure out
Speaker 2: driver length fitting today. You know what's the sweet spot
Speaker 2: of how long should you well that ever goes.
Speaker 1: Ex Stan Marty, we'll ever get to a place where
Speaker 1: it's where USGA says it can go longer than what
Speaker 1: is it forty five right now? Forty four and a half.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well it's forty six is the condition of competition rule,
Speaker 2: but usually that's only in play PGA Tour events and
Speaker 2: things of that nature, but still remains at forty eight.
Speaker 2: So there are a good number of golfers that do
Speaker 2: good with over forty six inch driver because our drivers
Speaker 2: are so forgiving from a moment of inertia standpoint, Rob.
Speaker 2: One thing I wanted to ask you about was the
Speaker 2: how the ballnamic shaft. Maybe we could take a look
Speaker 2: at the balnamic shaft there and then also how the
Speaker 2: concept of the pistol grip came to be.
Speaker 3: Right, that's that's that's a good question. We'll talk about
Speaker 3: the shaft first, the ballnamic shaft. So the balnamic shaft
Speaker 3: is actually have a con It has a compound bend
Speaker 3: and it's right here. It's kind of under the grip.
Speaker 3: It bends towards the player and away from the target,
Speaker 3: and so it's actually easier to see looking from the
Speaker 3: other end, so you can see how it bends. And
Speaker 3: just like you were talking about offset, yeah, Carstan's idea
Speaker 3: was this aligned the player's hands with the ball, not
Speaker 3: the face of the club. It also helps minimize the
Speaker 3: tow down effect when you swing the club. And the
Speaker 3: other thing it does is that it actually stabilizes the
Speaker 3: club at impact. So I can demonstrate that if hold
Speaker 3: that and let me show you how this works. So
Speaker 3: if I hold the club, you know, lightly between my
Speaker 3: thumb and finger and I you know, kind of if
Speaker 3: I hit it in the sweet spot, you know, it's
Speaker 3: pretty stable. If I start to get out here or
Speaker 3: to hear, it's not as stable. See if I can
Speaker 3: hang on to it better, there we go. You can
Speaker 3: see it twist. Now if I hold this above the
Speaker 3: bend and now I hit it on the sweet spots, great,
Speaker 3: and I hit it out here, it's way more stable.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And you can actually if you do this yourself, you
Speaker 3: can feel you can feel that in your fingers. You
Speaker 3: can actually feel the vibration, the vibration change. So that's
Speaker 3: the balnamic shaft. And so one of the first people
Speaker 3: to play this club with the balnamic shaft was Joel Goldstrand,
Speaker 3: and he told a story about you know, he got
Speaker 3: his set of clubs with the shaft balnamic shaft, and
Speaker 3: he went took his seven iron. He went out to
Speaker 3: the schoolyard school's out of session and he had a
Speaker 3: shag bag, and he said, he started hitting seven irons
Speaker 3: and he's out there all by himself, and he said
Speaker 3: he hit balls for about fifteen minutes or so, and
Speaker 3: he actually picked the club up and looked at it
Speaker 3: and he said out loud, this has got to be
Speaker 3: illegal because he hit the ball so straight. Well, unfortunately,
Speaker 3: the balnamic shaft did become non conforming. In sixty seven,
Speaker 3: the USGA changed the rule on shafts bins so that
Speaker 3: you couldn't have a bind more than five inches from
Speaker 3: the ground, and so almost all of Carston's clubs had
Speaker 3: a bind either here or they had a bind down
Speaker 3: lower like the putters. All had a bind down lower,
Speaker 3: kind of a double bind that he did and stuff,
Speaker 3: and a lot of those were more than five inches.
Speaker 3: And so when the rule changed, when the rule went
Speaker 3: into infect Carston didn't have. The only club he had
Speaker 3: that was conforming was the Answer putter, so he had
Speaker 3: to he wanted to make things right for people, so
Speaker 3: he straightened a lot of shafts and did a lot
Speaker 3: of things to make it right for people. And so
Speaker 3: it really literally almost put them out of business. But
Speaker 3: fortunately the Answer was such a hot cellar right away
Speaker 3: that the answer kind of saved the business. I suppose
Speaker 3: you could.
Speaker 1: Say, yeah, kind of an answer in more than one way, right, yeah, exactly, Rob.
Speaker 1: Do you have a favorite club in here, like you
Speaker 1: personally have one? Maybe it's just maybe it's a different
Speaker 1: looking club. Maybe it's one that not many people know
Speaker 1: much about. Is there one here that kind of stands
Speaker 1: out to you?
Speaker 2: Boy?
Speaker 3: I don't know if I have a favorite club. I
Speaker 3: know the most favorite club that people like to like
Speaker 3: to see when they come in. WHOA is a croquet putter?
Speaker 1: You know what? I'm not an engineer that hasn't been
Speaker 1: in the shaft. Yes, it does almost positive.
Speaker 3: So Carston did this bend himself with heat. He had
Speaker 3: to use heat to get it to bend like this,
Speaker 3: and see if I can get it to Well's stand
Speaker 3: up on the right, stand up by itself.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So yeah, so this was you know, croquet putting was
Speaker 3: pretty popular there for a while, and one of the
Speaker 3: reasons the USGA changed the bend and chef rule was
Speaker 3: croquet putting.
Speaker 2: That was part of it.
Speaker 3: And they also put in the rule that you couldn't
Speaker 3: straddle the line. Yes, yeah, but yeah, so this is
Speaker 3: I don't know if it's my favorite, but it's when
Speaker 3: people come in and I show them things.
Speaker 2: This is a big hit. One thing to notice on
Speaker 2: this is the.
Speaker 1: The pistol grip.
Speaker 2: Pistol grip yep. So give us a little insight into
Speaker 2: how that came to be. See that, Shane, I see
Speaker 2: this bad boy.
Speaker 1: It's heavy too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is heavy. So Carston's first putter's uh, the
Speaker 3: Redwood City putters made in Redwood City. They had a
Speaker 3: leather grip, a leather wrap grip, and they did that.
Speaker 3: The way they made that grip was they actually had
Speaker 3: a kind of heavy paper, like Kraft paper kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: And with that paper and white glue, they built up
Speaker 3: an underlisting and so you had to put put a
Speaker 3: layer on and have to dry overnight, and they put
Speaker 3: another layer, have to dry and so it took three
Speaker 3: or four days to do a shaft to do a grip,
Speaker 3: I mean, and and so on. Once they had the
Speaker 3: underlisting and it was dried up, you know, dried, then
Speaker 3: they would make a couple of cuts on the table
Speaker 3: saw shape it a little bit. And then Alan is
Speaker 3: the one that normally would wrap the leather around the grip. Well,
Speaker 3: Alan joined the Marine Reserves and he had to go
Speaker 3: to boot camp. So he he did as many grips
Speaker 3: as he could before he left. So then when they left,
Speaker 3: when they ran out of grips, leather grips, they went
Speaker 3: to this golf pride and former grip and so John says, yeah,
Speaker 3: our production time came way down when they went to
Speaker 3: the rubber grip. And so this is the grip that
Speaker 3: they used on a lot of the putters, a lot
Speaker 3: of the Scottsdale putters. So then Carston, because of the
Speaker 3: balnamic shaft being you know, ruled non conforming, Carston designed
Speaker 3: his own grip what we call the PP fifty eight.
Speaker 3: Now in those days we just called it the ping
Speaker 3: grip way back when it first designed. With that design
Speaker 3: of that grip, it's not bored through the center's it's
Speaker 3: bored off center. And that grip simulates some of the
Speaker 3: bend the balnamic bind and it you know, the USGA
Speaker 3: did outlaw pistol grips they got, so this grip became
Speaker 3: non conforming and that's when Carston would started design his grip.
Speaker 3: And so that grip the thing we did with the shaft,
Speaker 3: you know what I did with the bonamic shaft. You
Speaker 3: can do the same thing with one of our putters
Speaker 3: on a pin grip. The effect is not quite as much,
Speaker 3: but you can you can still feel it in your hands.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So that that grip, that PP fifty eight grip, and
Speaker 3: I think you can tell me because I don't know
Speaker 3: for sure, but most of all of our putter grips are
Speaker 3: now designed kind of that way.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, so we we that was Carson's ingenious way,
Speaker 2: you know, when they changed the rule on the bend
Speaker 2: in the shaft to get that physics effect right, And
Speaker 2: now we've done a lot of research, which turns out
Speaker 2: a lot of the research we do to today, Shane
Speaker 2: just proves what Carson Carson. So now we use that
Speaker 2: as a fitting variable that if we need to change
Speaker 2: how the putter rotates and match it perfectly to someone's stroke,
Speaker 2: we can put them in a grip that as like
Speaker 2: our PP. Fifty eight that has more pistol to it,
Speaker 2: that points their hand more towards the center of the
Speaker 2: center of the club. Yeah, which is really fun.
Speaker 1: Really, Yeah, Rob, you talk about ordering clubs these days
Speaker 1: for the archive room, what do you do about clubs
Speaker 1: that didn't make it in here in the sixties and seventies,
Speaker 1: but you want to acquire them, you want to add
Speaker 1: it to the archive room, but maybe you don't have
Speaker 1: one here. How do you go about finding those golf
Speaker 1: clubs and acquiring them?
Speaker 3: Well, generally we will try if people come to us,
Speaker 3: don't I try not to go out looking too much,
Speaker 3: but people will come to us with something, okay.
Speaker 1: And I mean, do you still get surprised, Like, do
Speaker 1: you still have people that say, I've got this club
Speaker 1: that you don't have in the room?
Speaker 2: I do.
Speaker 3: I occasionally do. And it's usually a variation of something
Speaker 3: because early on Carston did what a customer wanted.
Speaker 2: Carston would do that for people sometimes.
Speaker 3: And so occasionally you do get surprised, Like there's a
Speaker 3: putter right here that I don't think Murdy's ever seen.
Speaker 3: So this is a one a putter, but a fella
Speaker 3: asked to have one heavier, and so Carston actually, uh
Speaker 3: raised another piece of bronze. Oh, made it deeper and
Speaker 3: heavier and it has a little flange.
Speaker 2: I have not seen that, right, And.
Speaker 3: So yeah, so there's this this came a guy you know,
Speaker 3: called me up and said he had this putter and
Speaker 3: so what we like, what we'd like to do is trade,
Speaker 3: you know, trade new equipment. We don't want to purchase
Speaker 3: outright if we can help it, but sometimes we do.
Speaker 3: And uh, you know another putter that came to us
Speaker 3: was George Answers, George Archer's answer putter that we believe
Speaker 3: is the one he used to win the Masters. That's
Speaker 3: that's for that's up for debate, but we believe it
Speaker 3: is the one that he used to win the Masters.
Speaker 3: And so you know, that's one that we we did buy.
Speaker 1: Can I ask about the golf ball? Sure, because nowadays
Speaker 1: there's a lot of variations of golf balls that are
Speaker 1: different colors and they have different patterns on them. I mean,
Speaker 1: this was the og This was the original golf ball
Speaker 1: that had different variations of colorways and all that. What
Speaker 1: was the reasoning for the ping golf ball?
Speaker 3: Well, Carston, when he decided he wanted to build his
Speaker 3: own golf ball, he actually bought a company Truce Fear,
Speaker 3: I think that's the name of it. He bought them
Speaker 3: and moved all their equipment and actually their head engineer
Speaker 3: designer came and came to work for Carston. I don't
Speaker 3: know exactly how he came to the idea of the
Speaker 3: two color ball, but he called it stroboscopic because he
Speaker 3: liked the idea. You could see it spin and this
Speaker 3: is the orange and yellow combination. It was his favorite,
Speaker 3: and we called it the Ping punch, or he called
Speaker 3: it the Pink punch.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: As we went on, you know, we had yellow and
Speaker 3: white and pink and white, and red and white and
Speaker 3: different standard colors. With our customization process that Ping has
Speaker 3: had for a long time, we started doing custom colors
Speaker 3: for people. We would try to match a color to
Speaker 3: somebody's logo and we also could pad print logos on.
Speaker 1: God okay, I I mean again like in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: this is what you're seeing, what you're talking and we're
Speaker 1: doing this back in the in the eighties, right.
Speaker 3: But anyway, so the two color balls are very collectible,
Speaker 3: some of them, and depending on the color and stuff,
Speaker 3: people get all carried away about it. The ball collectors
Speaker 3: are different than the club collectors.
Speaker 1: Got to deal with both parties.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sometimes the ball collectors have kind of I understand,
Speaker 3: and there they want to know how many colors we made,
Speaker 3: and we don't know because we were custom mixing colors.
Speaker 3: To match logos, right stuff and so but yeah, so
Speaker 3: the two color ball was and it's a great putting
Speaker 3: aid is you guys probably know, And.
Speaker 1: I will, I will draw mine. So I will get
Speaker 1: the tool and draw half a golf ball with the sharpie.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know they sell golf balls now that
Speaker 1: you can do that with. But yea, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I will, I will do that. I'll also make my
Speaker 1: four year old do it too. And it's not a
Speaker 1: straight a little here.
Speaker 3: Before there, before anybody else was doing the two color
Speaker 3: ball like they are now. When Lee Westwood came here
Speaker 3: for a visit one time, uh been, I don't know,
Speaker 3: maybe ten years.
Speaker 2: Ago, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: And one of the things when he was here he
Speaker 3: asked for he asked for a two color.
Speaker 2: Ball for practice. Yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: So yeah, so we found him one.
Speaker 2: R Rob Fast forward to today. Uh well, Carson was
Speaker 2: kind of famous. He has a video where he's famous
Speaker 2: for saying that, you know, the golf ball is like
Speaker 2: the tuning fork for us. It tells us what to
Speaker 2: do on the clubs. And so fast forward to today,
Speaker 2: we made a golf ball fitting wrapp software solution, you know,
Speaker 2: inspired by the name Baldnamic. I know that, you know,
Speaker 2: just golf ball's flight Carston Aerodynamics. Let's bring it all
Speaker 2: in and so that that's how we kind of have
Speaker 2: that name for our Baldnamic fitting software. But he knew
Speaker 2: the importance of marrying ball and club together, right.
Speaker 3: And it's funny you say that because just the other
Speaker 3: day John said something to me where he said, well,
Speaker 3: you know, the golf ball is what you know because
Speaker 3: I asked him about the golf ball. I asked him
Speaker 3: how what he felt about, like the golf ball being
Speaker 3: cut you know, the USGA wanted to cut back on
Speaker 3: flight or the distance and all that sort of stuff,
Speaker 3: and he said, well, the ball is our tuning fork.
Speaker 2: They used the same.
Speaker 3: Phrase, Carson, And so that's it's really interesting and your
Speaker 3: ball app is is pretty cool. When James Lee fit
Speaker 3: me over there. For clubs, we went through.
Speaker 1: The Marty will run you through it. We've talked about
Speaker 1: acquiring clubs and finding golf clubs. Are there clubs that
Speaker 1: are missing? Do you have any? Do you have any
Speaker 1: clubs that you could I mean, this is a PSA.
Speaker 1: It's a podcast for goodness sakes, So let the people
Speaker 1: know what we need what we need.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, we're missing. We have some holes. We have
Speaker 3: a few holes one of them, and most of the
Speaker 3: older stuff I have, although I'll say any I will
Speaker 3: say any older club, Redwood City address club or Scott
Speaker 3: Stale address club. I'm always interested in seeing pictures because
Speaker 3: Carston did do variations just like I showed you, So
Speaker 3: I'm always interested in those. As far as one that's
Speaker 3: missing from our collection, I don't have a ping sixty
Speaker 3: nine W putter with a Scott Stale address. Okay, I've
Speaker 3: got them with Phoenix address. I don't have one with
Speaker 3: a Scott Stie address. But the putters I'm actually missing
Speaker 3: is because like I mentioned Don Wingert, and she was
Speaker 3: here and then she wasn't here, and then I didn't
Speaker 3: start doing this into two thousand and five. In that
Speaker 3: period of time, new putters that came out, we didn't.
Speaker 2: Get them all.
Speaker 1: So so some mod you're saying, some more modern.
Speaker 3: More modern, so G two putters, G two, I, G
Speaker 3: five I putters, all of the I have some of those,
Speaker 3: but not all of them. And there was a number
Speaker 3: of those.
Speaker 2: Models, Yeah, there were, Yeah, we had a lot of
Speaker 2: models that right.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that's something that works.
Speaker 1: So so, I mean, I know I'm joking about a
Speaker 1: p s A. But if somebody had a club and
Speaker 1: they were interested in showing it to you, how do
Speaker 1: they get ahold of you?
Speaker 3: Oh? They can just they can just call the main number.
Speaker 2: Main ping customer service.
Speaker 3: Customer service number. They can ask to speak to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Can I call and just ask to speak to you
Speaker 1: every now and again just to chatter? Okay, just making
Speaker 1: sure that's good. I was gonna say we could actually
Speaker 1: maybe get the direct line after the pod. What is
Speaker 1: your role with the Ping Putter vault, because I can
Speaker 1: only imagine that you're somehow involved in the gold Putter
Speaker 1: Vault that considering you're the archive guy, you probably have
Speaker 1: some involvement over there as well.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 3: When we were working on the book, you know, our
Speaker 3: ping book, the History.
Speaker 1: Of and you picked that thing up with one arm.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, seven pounds, so the putter went ping. When
Speaker 3: we were working on this book, Jeff Ellis that wrote
Speaker 3: the book, he actually discovered a number of wins that
Speaker 3: we had missed and so.
Speaker 2: We weren't in the vault.
Speaker 3: We won in the vault, and we had we the
Speaker 3: player didn't have a putter either, we just that, you know,
Speaker 3: and so we we went back and tried to pick
Speaker 3: those up, and we we picked up a good number
Speaker 3: of them, but we haven't actually some of them we
Speaker 3: have been able to pick up. So my involvement, my
Speaker 3: involvement over there is pretty minimal. Sometimes if we need
Speaker 3: a gold putter, what's happened in the last few years,
Speaker 3: and sometimes we needed we need putter heads to make
Speaker 3: gold putters with. And if a player wins with a
Speaker 3: putter that is maybe four or five years old, we
Speaker 3: may not have a head. And so I've had to
Speaker 3: go on eBay and buy some putters for the gold
Speaker 3: putter end up in the gold butter ball.
Speaker 1: It's true technology, Chase, right, We're talking about full circle
Speaker 1: technology here, right.
Speaker 3: Because nowadays when we do putters, don't we don't have
Speaker 3: the molds and we can't make another one ten years later.
Speaker 3: We used to be able to. So it's become a
Speaker 3: little bit of a problem. We need to get those
Speaker 3: the players to always use them.
Speaker 1: We're current model. There you go, it's the PSA for them. Rob.
Speaker 1: When you sit in your office and you sit in
Speaker 1: here and you're here every single day looking around, what
Speaker 1: does it say about your experience with ping. What has
Speaker 1: that been like throughout your life.
Speaker 3: Well, I always tell people when they call me and
Speaker 3: they are asking a lot of questions, and they'll say, boy,
Speaker 3: I really am sorry to bother you. So no, no,
Speaker 3: you're no bother at all, because I learned. I learned
Speaker 3: as much from them as they learn from me.
Speaker 2: I really do.
Speaker 3: So I really enjoy talking to people when they when
Speaker 3: even emailing. Although I'm a terrible type, but I enjoy
Speaker 3: talking to people about the equipment, and you know, just
Speaker 3: talking about what we're talking about today, what Carston did
Speaker 3: and didn't do. And I'm constantly learning things about Carston
Speaker 3: I didn't know, or about Carston or Louise I didn't know.
Speaker 3: So it's, uh, it is just a constant learning thing
Speaker 3: for me, and I enjoy it a lot. Otherwise I
Speaker 3: probably would have retired a long time ago. Maybe, but
Speaker 3: well probably not. I couldn't afford it, you know. So yeah,
Speaker 3: that's that's you know. And and sometimes you know, once
Speaker 3: in a while, Tony You'll come to Tony Serrano will
Speaker 3: come over and want to look at a at a
Speaker 3: putter because they're talking about making a PLD putter like
Speaker 3: it or something like that, And I really do enjoy
Speaker 3: when people like Marty and Tony and young guys come
Speaker 3: in and I can show them this stuff and talk
Speaker 3: to him about it.
Speaker 2: One of my favorite putter projects I worked on coming
Speaker 2: in here, Rob was working on the Dale Answer. So
Speaker 2: when we remade the Dale Answer, and maybe you could
Speaker 2: tell the story of the difference between the answer and
Speaker 2: the Dale was I think in you know, the collectors
Speaker 2: called the Dale Head otherwise known as the Dale Answer.
Speaker 2: Where the name Dale come from? What was that little well,
Speaker 2: the issue on the putter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so.
Speaker 3: The Scottsdale answer the putters the answer putters made with
Speaker 3: the Scottsdale address. There were two masters for that. Those
Speaker 3: are sand cast putters, and there were two masters. Carston
Speaker 3: made the first master, and he asked Allan to make
Speaker 3: the second master. When Alan was making the second master,
Speaker 3: cutting on the toe ballast, YEP, the back of the
Speaker 3: putter cutting on the toe ballast, the mill slipped a
Speaker 3: little bit. Well, he didn't want to start over, so
Speaker 3: he decided what he would do on the other side.
Speaker 3: He made it look like the mistake and kind of
Speaker 3: evened it out, and he said that, you know, he
Speaker 3: figured when he got done, Carston would make him start
Speaker 3: over it.
Speaker 1: I might as well lean into the mistake.
Speaker 3: And so when he showed it to Carston, Carston said, no,
Speaker 3: that's okay. So there's two masters, and so any any putter,
Speaker 3: any any answer putter with a Phoenix address that's made
Speaker 3: from one of those masters. Because when they first moved
Speaker 3: to from where they were doing Scott Steale address putters,
Speaker 3: which actually wasn't in scott Steele, but I was in
Speaker 3: the county and the Scott Steal was the closest peel,
Speaker 3: the closest closest mailbox. But anyway, they moved here to
Speaker 3: the first building on our campus here, they just changed
Speaker 3: the address plate to Carston Coe Carston Company or and
Speaker 3: then a little later Carson Manufacturing Corporation, and they still
Speaker 3: were using the Scott Still Master, but with a different address.
Speaker 3: So those putters collectors refer to started referring to those
Speaker 3: as dale Heads, Scottsdale dale Heads. Okay, Well, when we
Speaker 3: were working on the book and the story that I
Speaker 3: just told you about Alan talking about how he made
Speaker 3: the second master, John didn't know this. John, I remember
Speaker 3: so well because I asked the question, why are the
Speaker 3: two masters? And Alan said, oh, I know that, and
Speaker 3: John said you do. And Alan tells the story about
Speaker 3: what happened, you know where he made a little mistake. Well,
Speaker 3: John said, oh, your middle name's Dale. That's where the
Speaker 3: Dalehead comes from. Yes, And I was like, now we
Speaker 3: have a second reason.
Speaker 2: It's a Dalehead, Alan Dale Solheiman Dale. So when I
Speaker 2: was working on the dale Head in the Answer or
Speaker 2: a Vault two point zero, we relaunched the dale Head
Speaker 2: but milled. We came in here, got a dale Head
Speaker 2: Answer three D, scanned it, brought it into our CAD software,
Speaker 2: and I matched up every little nuance of the mistake
Speaker 2: on both sides, and a bunch of the nuance there.
Speaker 1: So cool. I mean, I love I love the marriage
Speaker 1: of you know, the Vintage Club with the New Age
Speaker 1: Club is so cool and I feel like I feel
Speaker 1: like you guys have done that for a long time.
Speaker 1: It's like marrying that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So.
Speaker 3: One of the one of the things Alan's really proud
Speaker 3: of too about his you know, putters made from his master,
Speaker 3: is that he saw Seve someplace one time and Sebe
Speaker 3: was talking to him about the Answer and told Alan
Speaker 3: he'd like to get a dale Head with with that
Speaker 3: what what they then called flat Soul, which was the
Speaker 3: master from Alan's Allen's Master. Sevie would like to get
Speaker 3: a master to get a answer like that. Yeah, so, uh,
Speaker 3: Alan knew that Lee McCormick, one of our sales reps,
Speaker 3: had one, and he called Lee, and Lee gave the
Speaker 3: putter to Seve. Literally gave the putter to Seve, you know,
Speaker 3: sent it to Seve, and then Seve uh sent Lee
Speaker 3: a really nice letter thanking him. So Lee, Lee's got
Speaker 3: that letter really, you know, framed and everything. But Alan
Speaker 3: is very proud that Sevee wanted that answer from that master.
Speaker 2: Sevy's got a few putters in the in the ball,
Speaker 2: in the ball, I've seen him.
Speaker 1: Rob, We've talked about ping collectors. So I got to
Speaker 1: ask you this as we kind of wind down, what
Speaker 1: do we talking in terms of most expensive club in
Speaker 1: this room?
Speaker 3: Well, we don't like to get into value. You know,
Speaker 3: as a ping employee. Ping employees actually are not allowed
Speaker 3: to appraise or value on vintage ping equipment. Now, we
Speaker 3: have some things in here that are priceless, okay, and
Speaker 3: so the original these two original drawings, they're priceless, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: the the prototype for the answer, that's a priceless item.
Speaker 3: You're not going to replace that for any amount of money.
Speaker 3: And then not in here, but in John's closet he
Speaker 3: has the first one A which is welded up from
Speaker 3: stainless steel. You know. Again, those are priceless items. Like
Speaker 3: you know, I mentioned before, the highest priced thing I
Speaker 3: know that sold, you know, at auction was probably this
Speaker 3: trainer that sold for you know, about twenty two to five.
Speaker 3: So it's you know, it's.
Speaker 1: So the answer is priceless. I feel like, yeah, priceless.
Speaker 1: And there's multiple items in that in that regard.
Speaker 3: And all that we have all these hand drawings by Carson,
Speaker 3: many more than this. Yeah, you know those those sorts
Speaker 3: of things are Yeah, they're just priceless.
Speaker 1: And that's so cool, Marty. You have anything else? We're
Speaker 1: up who you're.
Speaker 2: Rooting for this yere Sons or Pelicans? Pelicans of course.
Speaker 3: And why well, my son is the vice president of
Speaker 3: basketball operations for the New Orleans Pelicans.
Speaker 1: When he goes to another team, what do you do
Speaker 1: with the old team stuff? Is it like you donated
Speaker 1: so it stay? You keep it?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Because he was he was GM of the Cleveland Cavalist
Speaker 3: right when they won the championship.
Speaker 1: So you can't get rid of that. Are you talking
Speaker 1: about priceless? There you go, that's priceless stuff in your
Speaker 1: version of this room. I caddied years ago. It's St. Andrew's.
Speaker 1: I caddied there after college when I got out of school,
Speaker 1: and I had a lady show up one day and
Speaker 1: we're on the first team, and she was wearing this
Speaker 1: shirt and I had all these course logos on, you know,
Speaker 1: brand logos on the shirt, and I was like, that's
Speaker 1: kind of interesting. She was a pretty good player, hit
Speaker 1: down the middle of the fairway, you know, two twenty
Speaker 1: or something, and we went up there about three holes.
Speaker 1: Then I go, hey, listen, what's the deal with the shirt?
Speaker 1: And she was like, well, Anica Sorenstein's my neighbor. The
Speaker 1: time she gets a new brand or she gets a
Speaker 1: new sponsor, she just brings all the old shirts over
Speaker 1: to me. So that's kind of paying it for it,
Speaker 1: if you will. Well, Rob, this has been really really interesting.
Speaker 1: I mean, this room is unbelievable. I've never been in
Speaker 1: here before. I mean, this is my first visit here.
Speaker 1: I mean, I will be coming back. I was taking
Speaker 1: pictures of some of the lefty irons over there to
Speaker 1: some of my dad, because I mean, I know he
Speaker 1: had a set of those. What are the brilliant ones?
Speaker 1: What was that the Yeah, I mean he had a
Speaker 1: set of those. When I first started playing golf. I
Speaker 1: remember he had a set of those irons in his back.
Speaker 1: So I have to send him a picture. But we
Speaker 1: appreciate the time and the insight because it has been
Speaker 1: very very cool.
Speaker 3: Lots of fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks Frev. Always fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah. This is the Ping Proving Grounds podcast.