In the Studio with Jesse Ortiz

We are two weeks away from introducing a revolutionary design that, I believe, will change the way wedges are made.

Seven years ago I worked with short game guru, Dave Pelz on his wedges. Dave is a mentor to Phil and Vijay, among other Tour pros. He explained to me that the pros change their wedges every month or so…and some even every two or three weeks. Why? Because the face texture and the edge of their grooves wear out within a few hundred hits, and trajectory and spin control are compromised.

Golf, being a game of opposites, is challenging enough without fighting your equipment. The way to lower your scores, is to work on your short game, where 65% of your strokes are taken. Practice makes perfect, but the more you practice, the more your wedges will deteriorate….thus making finesse shots more difficult to execute.

Everyone has hit a great chip shot to a tough pin placement and been shocked to see the ball run way past the hole. The reason could very well be your worn out wedge. If the pros change so often, shouldn’t that be sending a message to you? If you think you aren’t good enough to notice a difference, then you probably don’t have the confidence that you can ever improve as a player.

That’s a bad thought. Nearly everyone can notice a difference in their chipping game when they get a new wedge, but as it wears, we become used to pitching the ball shorter and shorter from the pin and ‘letting it run up’. The basis of a good short game is to get the ball to land and stop as close to the pin as possible… to make the putt.

You can’t do that consistently with a worn out wedge. Sure, the pros get their equipment for free, so they can change frequently; but what about the rest of us? That’s what our new wedges are all about. Fitted with an indestructable aerospace material our faces will provide consistent spin and ‘bite’ characteristics for years instead of months. Log onto bobbyjonesgolf.com for more details. The future of wedge design is here.

The latest scam from manufacturers is the marketing of a new type of product called a fairway-hybrid club. It’s a clear attempt to extract more money from consumers for a product that not only serves no purpose, but actuallly will be detrimental to your game. It’s an unashamed move to capitalize on the hybrid craze in Golf.

Hybrids came into being because long irons had become too difficult to hit. Why? Because in the name of ‘technology’, manufacturers strengthened the lofts of irons to make them longer in distance. They also made them a half inch or one inch longer in length and ‘Presto! You’re 15 yards longer!’

It’s just the Law of Physics that a longer and stronger lofted club will go further. Ther’s no magic in this! No one could hit a 1-iron 25 years ago, so what makes you think you can hit today’s 3-iron? They are virtually the same loft!

Hybrids are designed with wider bodies, lower and deeper CGs and wider soles that make them more forgiving than the long irons they have replaced. But these are the exact features that give fairway woods the advantage over hybrids. As the shaft length gets longer, your hands are farther away from the ball, making contact more difficult.

This is why we are making drivers 460 cc’s! It’s because we are farther from the ball and thus need a bigger head that creates a higher MOI with a larger hitting area to produce more consistent drives.

For this same reason, fairway woods need to be larger in the proper areas than hybrids. Fairway woods are usually an inch and a half to two inches longer than hybrids. These new fairway-hybrids are actually smaller than normal fairway woods in critical dimensions such as body width and face area so as to make consistent contact MORE difficult.

Hybrids should replace your long irons, they should not replace your fairway woods! It appears that logic has taken flight at these companies, but when a company’s total existence is wrapped under the ‘Hybrid flag’ it will stop at nothing to expand their product line confusing consumers with the hope of gaining sales.

Next time you see one of those fairway-hybrid ads, ask that company if they also sell snake-oil products that cure baldness and impotency. It would not be a stretch for them. buy cialisbuy cialisbuy levitrabuy levitrabuy propeciabuy propeciabuy somabuy somabuy levitrabuy cialisbuy propeciabuy levitrabuy somabuy cialisbuy propeciabuy levitrabuy somabuy cialisbuy levitrabuy propeciabuy soma

The Off Season

So while the golf season slips into hibernation, the production of products is in high gear. It is the time of year when surprises are not welcome. Polishing and finishing issues that were long thought to have been solved arrive with the first run of final samples.

The blood pressure rises when I see a detail in the graphics that was ‘agreed upon’ months ago in long distance phone calls and emails, but has not made it to the final product.
My stomach gets that sinking feeing when that special face material that takes four months to get, is now delayed six more weeks! It’s just another wonderful day in the golf business.

On Innovation and Asia

Since I can’t afford to be a follower in this Industry, the price I pay to be an innovator is reflected in my thinning hair and my growing fondness of wine. I used to be particular about my wines, but recently the golf biz has made me much less particular. Although I abhor the travel to Asia, the suppliers I have cultivated over the past 15 years or so, treat me royally on my visits.

This despite the fact that I tend to passionately take over production meetings and the tooling and machine shop activities. My hosts fondly have a work apron with my name on it because they know that I come to work. One of the perks of the trips over are the great restaurants we go to every evening. I assure you that the cuisine is much different than the fare we get in the states; and remember, I live in San Francisco, so I know my Chinese food.

The abundance of seafood and fresh vegetables is incredible. Nearly all of the restaurants have huge holding tanks on display for the vast varieties of sea life, some recognizable, that will be presented in the middle of the table to be shared by all. Platter after platter appear on the centerpiece lazy susan with my hosts always spinning the new offering to me first. My frequent protests declaring that have been there so often that I should no longer be considered an honored guest, first go unoticed, and then loudly denounced.

Every three minutes, or so it seems, one of my hosts raises a glass and assertively say, “Jesse, cheers!’ Then after five or six toasts, comes the one I dread. It’s the , “Jesse, cheers….Gambay!”, which means bottoms up. One of my longtime suppliers likes fine Cognac and his group pours it during dinner into corressponding glasses like you would wine. I make sure I have no time scheduled at the machines the next day.

The New Products

This Fall season has been especially busy due to the production of our new driver and wedge collections. I’m very excited about both because they are so different from anything on the market. The driver is X-rated. It’s an extended, expananded and extraordinarily shaped design based on my original triangular version of 2004.

Although it somewhat shocks the senses when first gazed upon, within a few minutes, its grace, beauty and aerodynamics become so appealing that every other driver immeduiately looks stubby, bulky and very ordinary. The triangular shape provides the perfect takeaway path for your backswing, and locates the club’s CG in the optimim location for the proper rotational movement through the impact zone.

Square designs compromise the gear effect by creating pushes or pulls, rather than the corrective forces inherrent in a tripod designed body. But don’t believe me, just try one yourself in February; or if you live up North somewhere, try it in April. By then your snowbird buddies back from wintering in Florida or the Desert will have been using one and waiting on the first tee to tak advantage of your hibernated game.

Fall in Northern California signals shorter days and less intense sunlight. The smell of woodburning fireplaces fills the evenings. Although we enjoy some of the best weather of the year in October, clearly the season to enjoy playing golf is winding down.

However for equipment designers, it is kicking into high gear. I travel to Asia about three to four times a year. Living on the West Coast is an advantage, but it’s still a 14 hour flight and a 15 hour time change. I’m not getting any younger, and the recovery time is taking longer. Still, it is a necessity to be ther this time of year. It’s the final walk-through before the flipping the switch on full production on the new models for next season.

With leadtimes running nearly 12 weeks for product, manufacturers must book capacity at foundries now, to have product for assembly in late January so they can deliver in early march. Since I keep my models longer than my competitors, not every October is hectic, but this one has been. I’m introducing a new collection of drivers and wedges.

When all the foundries were in the US, production seemed to be easier to schedule. The Japanese and European markets have long been supplied by the Asian factories, but today, we are all using the same sourceing partners. It’s all about economics. I wish it weren’t, but American consumers want innovation and quality at inexpensive prices.

Now you may think that a $400 driver or a $200 hybrid is not cheap, but if the components were were made in the US, they would be nearlu double the price…and the extra cost would not be lining my pockets! Precision tooling and part manufacturing in the US is more costly than what consumers wish to pay for a golf club.

Nearly all of the companies have agents in place at the factories that represent them to oversee QC and production issues on a daily basis. This may sound like a good idea, but familiarity breeds complacency, and often the ‘in-house’ agents form loyalties that supercede those of their US employers. I prefer to be hands on and get into the machine shop and onto the production line to inspect the parts and instruct the workers how best to finish them.

Over the years, many of my techniques learned from my persimmon days, have been taught to the various factories, making their way into my competitiors’ products and improving them. Polishing techniques and metalurgical designs have become the melting pot that is the Asian production of golf parts to the world.

For years I’ve heard this refrain and I don’t buy it. Sure, the shaft is an important component of the club but its engine? People who say this demean the importance of clubhead design and, though I may be biased, the club head has gone through more technological advances in the past 10 years than graphite shafts. The differences between the models from each premium shaft manufacturer are a lot smaller than are the differences in manufacturers’ head designs.

The facts are, if you took ten identical heads and installed ten different premium shafts into them, the performance variance between them, being ball velocity, launch angle, spin rate and dispersion, would be much tighter than ten different head designs using one make and model shaft. I’m talking about the difference between shafts in the premium category…not a $10.00 low end shaft.

Clearly the shaft manufacturers are enjoying a renaissance of sorts. Any time they can charge upwards of $150.00 wholesale for a single shaft, times are good. Yet are they good for golfers? Certainly the quality and performance of shafts have never been so consistent, but has the cost of raw graphite risen so high to command over $200.00 per shaft? Is a $200.00 shaft four times better than a $50.00 shaft? For the answer, we need to take a history lesson, and unfortunately, I must take some blame for this.

By the late ‘90’s, it was common for equipment manufacturers to use inexpensive graphite shafts in their stock-line offerings to increase margins. Custom club builders were strong in their opinions that $10.00 was the ceiling, and that paying $300.00 for any OEM Driver was a rip-off. Obviously, the custom club building industry was interested in promoting their lucrative re-shafting services, but their arguments had some merit. Through 1998, no OEM put the name of their shaft manufacturer on their in-line offerings. For example at the time, TaylorMade’s Bubble Shaft was very popular, but the source of “who made it” was the topic of speculation (it was Fujikura). Everyone knew that the Tour Pros weren’t using stock shafts. Since they were getting these special, exotic shafts for free, there was a consensus that only wealthy, top amateurs could afford to have their Drivers built with Tour shafts and even the shaft manufacturers bought into this.

Although the custom club industry was fueling the grassroots movement to premium custom shaft options, they did not have access to Tour quality head designs. Sensing this growing movement against stock shafts and needing a follow-up to my original TriMetals, in 1999 we became the first OEM to offer a Tour shaft with original factory graphics on an in-line OEM product. The TriMetal Plus woods came standard with True Temper’s EI-70 shaft. A year later several OEM’S followed our lead and the genie was out of the bottle. If you didn’t offer Tour shafts, the most common question asked in shops was, “who makes your shafts?” The shift brought “celebrity” or cache to the shaft manufacturers, and with that, leverage. I had drawn open the curtain of anonymity and put them in the same spotlight as the club itself… and equal component to the head. As consumers were presented with more brightly colored Tour shafts available as in-line stock offerings, the demand for ever more exotic shafts grew. Paint jobs and wild graphics that exploded on the television screen provided instant product differentiation…and fodder for Monday morning conversations by the water cooler. Now shaft manufacturers had more incentive to experiment with costlier high modulus materials to improve performance.
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Up until the past couple of years, I was sure all this was a benefit to golfers, but today I have concerns. I am a huge advocate of Tour Premium shafts, but when I see shafts selling for $300.00, $500.00 or even $1000.00 each, who’s fooling who? When I meet people and they ask what I do for a living, I often say, “I’m in the business of selling hope.” It usually gets a chuckle, but it’s true. Can anyone tell the difference between a $100.00 shaft and a $500.00 one? I don’t believe so.

It just seems that there is so much hype to this, to the point that shafts have become more of a fashion statement than a component that adds a quantifiable performance enhancement…and don’t think this is lost on the manufacturers. When you are standing with your foursome on the first tee, all the heads look the same, but you can instantly tell what shaft each member is using. If you don’t think shafts have become a fashion statement, then you missed the “semi-finalists’” segment of The Golf Channels Fore Inventors Only show. One inventor presented a product called “shaft skins”, which essentially was a cleverly designed shrink-wrap sock that when blow-dried, tightly wrapped itself onto your club’s non-descript shaft. Got a cool blue apparel ensemble? Blow on some matching blue “skins” to your set. Want to psych-out your playing partners with your bold Tiger Woods Sunday look, just peel off the Tuesday blues and bring out the red shafted arsenal.

Am I being sarcastic? Of course…but the point is “Buyer Beware.” So much of the shaft game is marketing. There are many great shaft options available to golfers of every skill level but buying a game has never been a wise move. Before you lay out $300.00 or more reshafting your driver on the illusive quest for The Holy Grail, take the time to test various shaft opinions in the head design you favor. Don’t be surprised if the $75.00 shaft performs as well as the $300.00 re-shaft option. Club head design is still paramount. Shapes, weight positioning, CG, MOI, characteristic of time, spin rates, ball velocity, sound and feel, are still determined by head design, not the shaft.

The “shaft is the engine” statement is a myth. A more appropriate analogy would be: Just as a Ferrari can’t get out of the garage without tires, a golf club can’t hit a ball without a shaft. Hey, I like that. How about, “the shaft is the Pirelli’s of the club?” Michelins?

Welcome to my blog…the first installment of what will be a periodic ‘rant’, as my handlers have so aptly named. Those who have known me over the 40-plus years of my design and clubmaking career would say that ‘rant’ is very apropos. Over the years, I’ve been called a lot of things by my peers and competitors, but I’ll settle for ‘candid and passionate’. I don’t consider myself a writer, but I will try to provide a no-nonsense, off-the-cuff perspective of this industry that I hope will be refreshingly open, thought provoking and entertaining. As I often say, ‘I don’t know it all, but I’ve probably seen it all.’

Is that really a 3-iron in your bag??

Since we have a show running nearly everyday on The Golf Channel, it’s only logical that my first blog would be about hybrids… how they can help your game, and how to choose the right one for you. Anyone who says they can hit their long irons well is either Tiger Woods or delusional. No average, recreational golfer can hit long irons better than a hybrid when using distance control and accuracy as the criteria. Prove it to yourself at the driving range. Pick a target, and hit 25 shots with your 3 or 4 iron, and plot on a piece of paper where the ball first hits the ground, and where it finally settles. Repeat this by plotting the shots of a 21- or 22-degree hybrid. Sure, you’ll hit some bad shots with both, but your poor shots with the hybrid will be much closer to the target and more consistent in distance. I assure you that you will never put the 3 or 4 irons back in play.

Now that you know that a hybrid is easier to hit and control, how do you choose the right one? Hybrids should be chosen based on their playability and versatility for each particular golfer’s set of needs. The last thing you want to do is buy a hybrid ‘because it came with the set of irons.’ Hybrids should be considered your long iron replacement system, just as uniquely tailored to your game as your short game wedge system. No one serious about improving their games buys wedges because they came with their set of irons. You should take great care in selecting the clubs that make up these two very important scoring set categories.

The Hybrid for You

If you play regularly on a wide open, short rough, windy course, then your selection of lower lofted, high center-of-gravity (CG) hybrids may be advantageous to your game. If you tend to hit everything on a high trajectory, then these high CG hybrids will best suit your game. These designs tend to feature long, heavy hosels, deeper and longer faces with very little face curvature… or bulge and roll. They also have a duller, muted sound at impact caused by the thicker and heavier face. The ball comes off the face very much like a long iron, but is much more forgiving on mis-hits than a 3 iron. Conversely, if you play on courses with rough, elevated greens, or hit your shots on a lower trajectory, hybrids with contoured soles and low CGs will bring you the best results.
Another factor in choosing your hybrid is the versatility out of trouble. Most golfers don’t look at their selection of a hybrid as a ‘scoring club’, but you can’t score well consistently if you don’t have the confidence in getting near the green, in one shot, from 190 yards out…and from any lie. Remember, it’s a lot tougher saving par from 50 yards out, than it is if you are just off the green and pin high. A hybrid mis-hit will always put you closer to the green than a mis-hit 3 or 4 iron. Check the sole area of the hybrids you are considering. If you wish to use your hybrid mainly off the tee, then a flat soled design may work best for you. However, if extensive use from the fairway or trouble is in your hybrid’s future, then you should choose a very contoured sole design. Flat-bottomed sole designs tend to grab and twist in poor lies and in the rough.

The Shaft Debate

Shaft length is another critical issue. I don’t understand why so many manufacturers make their shaft lengths so long… like fairway woods! Hybrids should replace your long irons, not your fairway woods. Unless you are 6’4” or taller, you shouldn’t be using a hybrid over 40.5 or 41 inches long. Sure, a longer shaft provides more distance, but it’s consistency and accuracy that you want from your hybrids. If you need 225 yards, then use your 3-wood or 5-wood. They are longer in length by about two inches; they have larger, higher MOI heads for forgiveness; and deeper CGs for higher trajectories. I don’t see recreational golfers hitting their 3-irons 225 yards…. why do so many insist that their hybrids should? It makes no sense. Again, think of your hybrids as your long iron replacement system. That means you should focus in on the 175 to 210 yard range to best fit your set. I see so many golfers disappointed with their hybrids because they have strong lofts and fairway wood shaft lengths. They can’t make solid contact consistently, and thus, haven’t improved their play from that critical yardage. Get shorter lengths and higher lofts for more success.

Trying to get too much distance from your hybrids is the most common miscue I see from players. For the best results, swing your hybrids like a 7-iron – don’t overswing. Take the time to learn and trust the distance that each hybrid loft gives you on a consistent basis and then accept that! Don’t try to get any more out of it. Concentrate on making a smooth, controlled 7-iron swing with a slight descending blow. Many golfers feel they need to sweep their hybrids and try to pick the ball up. Don’t do this. Trust the loft of the clubhead. Just think about making solid contact – let the clubhead do the work. You’ll be surprised by the results.

Remember, ANY hybrid is a better option than using a long iron, but choosing the right hybrid is vital if you are serious about improving your game. Demo several brands in actual course play before buying to see which has the versatility to fit your game and course conditions.