BOMB: I remember a line from an old Abbott & Costello movie, “Ride ‘Em Cowboy,” where Costello is riding a bucking bronco and one of the ranch hands says, “The little guy is plenty good.”
That line comes to mind because over the last couple of weeks, the little guy has been plenty good when it comes to putter companies. Two weeks ago at the Italian Open, John Daly finished second using Boccieri Golf’s Heavy Putter Mid-Weight K-4 model—a bit of success that had 10 players using a putter from the Ridgefield, Conn.-based company at this past week’s Irish Open. This past week on the PGA Tour also saw Zach Johnson ring up his fifth PGA Tour win in the last 25 months (Only Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson have more during that span) using a SeeMore FGP Stainless putter. Although a SeeMore user for many years, Johnson just put this model in the bag at the Players championship.
In a time when it is damn near impossible for the little guy to compete with the behemoths, exposure such as this is critical.
And there is no shortage of cases to illustrate the point. SeeMore received some 50,000 orders after Payne Stewart won the 1999 U.S. Open with one of its putters. And at the time of Nick Price's 1994 PGA Championship win with Bobby Grace's odd-looking Fat Lady Swings mallet, Grace was making putterheads in his St. Petersburg, Fla., garage, producing a handful at a time. And after Price's victory?
"I had 25,000 orders the next day," said Grace. "I went from a Toyota to a Lexus overnight."
Still, like a person who enjoys a few cocktails, the buzz lasts only so long. But last week, once again the little guys were plenty good.
GOUGE: It is worth remembering that all of the really cool golf companies of the last three decades started small. Whether it’s TaylorMade, Callaway, Odyssey, Adams or a handful of others, small stands tall. Even a behemoth like Nike got its golf equipment start from Tom Stites and Impact Golf Technologies, which looked more like a converted body shop back in the day than the center of the golf innovation universe.
But true innovation doesn’t require an army. It only takes one bright guy to think of something nobody else has thought of before. Of course, sometimes getting that idea to reality often requires an army. That’s what makes the individual success stories of Boccieri and SeeMore appealing. Good ideas from small operators usually are nothing more than a secret shared by a few friends. Getting John Daly to use your putter and to have him finish second with it seems a less likely scenario than winning Powerball. (And that should be a warning to those of you messing around with a blowtorch in your garage.)
Moreover, the rewards of that unusual confluence of events are less certain. Your good idea, once endorsed, inspires those with more ammunition to engineer around your good idea, leaving you in their wake. Success today does not mean you’ve arrived. Just look at where our friend Bobby Grace is these days, lost in the wake of the dismantling of MacGregor Golf. His ideas are no less intriguing. Business sometimes gets in the way.
The beautiful thing is both SeeMore and Boccieri Golf, along with the previous success of Yes! Golf and Rife Putters, shows the putter is the one frontier in golf equipment that seems more open to possibility than any other. But then it’s always been that way, hasn’t it? How else can you explain the Ping Anser coming along in a field of Cash-Ins and Ironmasters? In 20 years will a SeeMore FGP Stainless be the standard shape? Will putters with 200-gram weights inserted in the grip end a la Boccieri’s Mid-Weight be commonplace? Never say never.
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