Rick Shiels: Golf Equipment’s YouTube Guru
It’s hard to pinpoint Rick Shiels’s English accent. Predominantly Lancastrian, there’s a lot of Mancunian in there too, and just a trace of Yorkshire perhaps. Fortunately, despite the mix, he has no problem communicating with an audience, be it online or fans of Golf Channel’s Driver v. Driver 2 on which he was a judge. […]
Is MyGolfSpy Disrupting the Golf Equipment World?
On Memorial Day 2018, Adam Beach was chilling at the beach with friends in a circle of chairs when someone asked if anyone had played with a little-known golf ball sold at Costco under its Kirkland house brand that had beaten the best-selling golf balls on the market in independent testing conducted by MyGolfSpy.com in […]
Q&A with Mark King on Honma Golf, TaylorMade’s Shortcomings, and More
Through relentless innovation and unrelenting product launches, Mark King guided TaylorMade-adidasGolf to more than 50 percent market share in the metalwoods category and $1.7 billion in annual sales in 2013. It was a remarkable run, but one that ultimately couldn’t last as customers grew confused by the rapid driver launches and left the market flooded […]
Testing Bridgestone’s TOUR B JGR Woods
By Graylyn Loomis A few months ago, a box of clubs arrived at the LINKS office. Not an unusual occurrence, but this package contained a driver, 3-wood, and 5-wood from Bridgestone’s new line, the TOUR B JGR Series. Right now, if you’re like most golfers, you’re thinking, “Bridgestone makes woods? I thought they only made […]
Maybe it is the Arrow: The Progression of Golf Equipment
Horace Hutchinson long ago bemoaned golf as “a game of putting little balls into little holes with instruments singularly ill-adapted for the purpose.” Poor Hutchinson. The two-time British Amateur champion (1896–97) missed out on over-sized titanium drivers, cavity-back game-improvement irons, perimeter-weighted putters, and solid-core, multilayer golf balls that hardly curve. Today’s equipment is designed by […]
PXG Golf Clubs – What’s the Big Deal?
By Erik Matuszewski Bob Parsons is a larger-than-life character in commercials for PXG’s high-end golf clubs. In real life, well, he’s the same way… only without saying, “Ka-boom, baby!” Sitting across a table in one of the luxurious villas at his Scottsdale National Golf Club, Parsons fixes his gaze on me and, in his […]
Characters: Tim Boyle
The longtime CEO of Columbia Sportswear has blown the dust off the oldest course west of the Mississippi Tim Boyle is getting set to play the short, par-three 15th at Gearhart Golf Links in tiny Gearhart, Ore., when a couple of cars pull to a stop on the adjoining road. Four locals jump out with […]
