Wedge Man
Above all, the groove rule means wedges, and the name most associated with wedges belongs to Bob Vokey, a 70-year-old eager to greet the challenge
Master Craftsman: "Voke," as he is known to friends, including many tour pros who swear by his designs, is still striving to make the perfect wedge.
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He never saw this coming, the Vokey brand, but then how could he? Prognostication has never been a strong suit. When he was shown a metal driver for the first time, he sneered. A driving-range club, he called it. Graphite shafts? Not a chance. Titanium clubheads? Too expensive.
"So how'd I do?" asks Bob Vokey, a graduate of the old school, mocking himself needlessly. Really, how could he have seen anything, least of all the future, through protective shop glasses, with his head down and his nose always to the grindstone, giving life to a cliché?
Vokey, 70, is standing in the hub of his universe, the shop floor at Titleist's club facility in Carlsbad, Calif. His gravelly voice is barely audible above the din -- the sound track for his life story, which has played out largely in machine shops. He is surrounded by wedges, hundreds of them, each one bearing his name. Vokey calls them Titleist wedges, golfers call them Vokeys, and reconciling the distinction has been disquieting for him.
A PGA Tour caddie recently asked whether Vokey thought about the fact that when he dies his name will live on? "I've thought about the dying part," Vokey says softly, his trademark ebullience momentarily retreating. In fall 2008, when cancer claimed one of his kidneys, it wasn't his immortality that he was considering.
Only after surgeons had restored his health would he reluctantly begin to recognize and appreciate what his handiwork has accomplished -- turning this native Canadian, the humble son of a tool-and-dye maker, into one of the game's first (or last) names in wedges.
What's in a name, anyway? He is more familiarly known as "Voke" to those with whom he is close, including a large number of PGA Tour players, most of whom have at one time or another relied on his skill at a grinding wheel to fine-tune their scoring clubs. "You're looking good, Voke," Tiger Woods said to him earlier this year, setting him up for a punch line. "I sure hope I have your body at 96."
Around the PGA Tour, Vokey is more popular than a courtesy car. "He's just a lovable guy," Zach Johnson says. "I've got uncles, and he's just like another uncle."
Vokey has an eye for detail and an obsession with getting it right that may or may not require a defibrillator in the event someone thinks he doesn't. Johnson recalls missing the cut at the Zurich Classic in 2006, then moving on to the Wachovia Championship, where he encountered a visibly flustered Vokey with some new wedges for him. Turns out, according to Johnson, that the Darrell Survey recorded his playing another wedge brand and got it wrong.
"I almost had a heart attack," Vokey says.
He's a perfectionist, says friend and former Titleist tour representative Steve Mata, who once asked a similarly possessed actor, Clint Eastwood, what he thought was the best movie he ever made. "I haven't done it yet," Eastwood replied.
"That's the same with Voke," Mata says. "There's nothing good enough for him. He hasn't come out with a perfect wedge yet, in his mind."
Vokey's disciples might argue otherwise, among them Steve Stricker, who has been using the same Vokey design since 2000.
"He really listens to the player," Stricker says. "That's a big key. He listens and will make whatever club you want." He'll listen for hours, if necessary, often in a practice bunker, as he's been known to do with short-game virtuoso Brad Faxon.
For Vokey, better to err on the side of discontent to fend off complacency, not that his upbringing would ever allow him to lay down on the job. His late father Walter's admonitions still resonate, more than a half century later. When he was knocked to the ice in a youth hockey game, for instance, he heard Walter's voice bellow: "Get your freakin' ass up, Vokey. Get back in the game." "I didn't realize until many years later that my dad was teaching me that in life, if you get knocked down, you get right back up," Vokey says.
Walter provided his son a summer job at his machine shop in Montreal and gave him the grunt work, his idea of a stay-in-school campaign. Vokey wanted to quit, but an exhaustive summer heightened the appeal of a classroom, while imbuing in him a work ethic that promised prosperity in due time.
Vokey's father had a passion for golf that Bob did not yet share. He preferred football instead, even playing professionally in 1964, as a punter for the Quebec Rifles of the United Football League. When the league folded, Vokey chose to follow a French-Canadian siren with whom he was smitten to Southern California, using his job with a telephone company (he was a PBX phone installer) as his passport to the United States and eventually to citizenship.
The romance, incidentally, dissolved, but another soon replaced it. In sunnier climes he developed an affection for golf, though ultimately he concluded he was better at working with clubs than swinging them. His job and he were less chummy; they parted ways soon after a stranger with whom he had struck up a conversation in a bar offered him a shot of wisdom to go with his beer.
"Son," the man said, "if you don't like what you're doing, quit, or you'll never be a success."
In 1976 Vokey opened Bob's Custom Golf Shop in the north San Diego County town of Fallbrook. Four years later, when his business outgrew his space, he moved into a 1,300-square-foot shop in Vista, adjacent to Carlsbad. He eked out a living, partially because the attic in his shop had room for a cot, saving him the cost of an apartment.
- Keywords:
- Golf,
- Golf World,
- john strege,
- Bob Vokey,
- wedges,
- grooves
