Regarding Bribery and the 2010 Hot List: Bomb & Gouge: Golf Digest

Regarding Bribery and the 2010 Hot List

Monday, January 11, 2010 Comments

GOUGE: In case you haven't looked yet, the 2010 Hot List is online for your review. A lot of people put this project together, and we're looking to continue to add to it throughout the year in terms of new information and new features. Obviously, we're proud of our product, but we're also looking at making it better. We welcome any input or questions you have on the topic of what's on the Hot List and why, so feel free to e-mail us at equipment@golfdigest.com.

In the meantime, I've been seeing what others are saying about the Hot List and I dug up one representing a common theme of the critics out there. This one's from Bama on the golfwrx.com site: "I never take their hot list issues seriously, it always seems as if they're being bribed by certain manufacturers."

I'm happy to show you my bank transactions to confirm I'm not being bribed, but I will admit that when you look at our magazine and see large advertisements from equipment companies, it could give one pause.

As we've said many times, however, the logic of caving to advertisers simply doesn't hold up. Which advertisers are we giving in to, the big ones that already advertise or the small ones that don't yet advertise? (Case in point: If we were catering to advertisers, we'd simply put TaylorMade's new drivers on the Hot List even though we didn't receive them until the first week in December. That, as you can see, didn't happen.) Now, do the big companies generally have more products on the Hot List? Yes. Do the big companies generally spend more money on R&D and have more avenues of distribution? Yes. Do either of those characteristics prohibit smaller companies from being on the list? No. (See Scratch, Powerbilt, Fourteen, Bettinardi, Rife, Yes! and Heavy Putter from this year, for example.)

I'll also tell you this. No Hot List judge sees any ad that will run in the Hot List issue before we get our copy the last week of December. For the purposes of this discussion, we don't care who advertises, when they advertise or if they advertise. Our responsibility is as it has been from the start: Helpful to the reader, fair to the industry and true to ourselves. Or more simply put: No bribes.

BOMB: I hope your "In case you haven't looked yet" line is for our readers and not me because after spending the last few months pretty much joined at the hip with you over this project, you know I was looking at it.

As for defending ourselves against the charges of favoritism and bias towards large companies because they advertise, quite frankly I've lost interest. Fact is people are going to think what they think and nothing we say is going to change it. Only you, me, Stina and Max know that we sat in that damn room for three hours slugging it out over which blade putter was going to receive the top mark for Innovation. Yes, three hours over one criteria in one category. Debating every little bit of technological info we could. And advertising wasn't brought up once.

It used to be that I'd get upset by posts such as that. That I'd take it as a personal assault on our integrity. But now I realize that it's just a simple ignorance on the part of those who write such comments. They're not in the room. They don't see what we do and how we do it, so it's easy to make assumptions. But the fact is some companies that do well may not advertise. Others that don't do well might advertise. Or vice versa. But as much as it seems like some of our readers like to keep score, we don't. Yes, big companies tend to dominate the list for the reasons you listed above. But it's no guarantee their products are Gold. Or even get on the list. I just went back at looked at our voting chart and there are 24 products from significant golf companies that didn't even get on this year's Hot List. And that's not counting a couple of companies that could possibly be deemed significant.

OK, maybe I haven't totally lost interest in defending ourselves.