Made in China

AN IMPACT FELT AROUND THE GLOBE

When Dick Rugge, senior technical director of the U.S. Golf Association, went looking three years ago for a titanium driver that he could make the organization's new official test club for its swing robot, he didn't go to TaylorMade, Callaway or Titleist. He didn't work with any of the highly regarded independent designers in the U.S. He didn't even tap into the elite academic expertise at some of the nation's top engineering schools, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lehigh and New York Polytechnic, that the USGA keeps on retainer to study golf technology.

Instead, he went to Asia.

More precisely, Rugge contacted Fu Sheng, the largest manufacturer of golf clubheads in the world, which has major factories in Taiwan, China and Vietnam that together produce more than a million clubheads a month. Rugge explained what he was looking for in a clubhead, and Fu Sheng shipped him several "open models," what the industry calls factory-produced design samples that smaller club companies in the U.S. and around the world will sometimes select and slap their own logos on. Rugge and the USGA staff put the samples through various tests and measurements before settling on one particular clubhead. That sample became the club that the game's chief governing body uses to determine which balls will conform to the Rules of Golf. In short, the present and the future of the game will be determined in part by what happened in a 3,000-degree titanium vacuum furnace in Tao-Yuan City, Taiwan.

Asia's coming-of-age has changed everything in golf, particularly the possibility of technological progress. What can be done to make a piece of metal work more efficiently at getting a golf ball into the hole, and how quickly that piece of metal can be transformed into a clubhead, depends on the capability of factories in China and Taiwan. "Made in China" not only stocks the shelves in Wal-Mart, it also inspires the intellectual horsepower in the research-and-development halls at golf's biggest club companies, as well as the inquisitive tinkerers alone in their garages. The confluence of the Information Age and the Chinese Century has revolutionized manufacturing and accelerated innovation. New ideas can become reality in days, not months or years. In fact, as one U.S. club designer says, "Anyone with a fax machine and a couple thousand dollars can be in the equipment business."

THE GREATEST VENDOR EVER

Five years ago, the California-based Coastcast Corporation was making more than a million titanium clubheads a year for some of golf's major brands. Today, it's making none.

In a telling statement in 2002, Bryan Rolfe, vice president of sales and business development for Coastcast at the time, dismissed any threat from its chief U.S.-based rival. "Our competition is not Ruger [Arizona-based titanium casting company Sturm, Ruger & Co.] -- not anymore," Rolfe said. "It's China." In less than a year, Rolfe's company had been delisted by the New York Stock Exchange, and by 2004 it had closed its doors.

To many in golf, the emergence of China as the country of birth for nearly all golf clubs seemed to happen that quickly. That statement has the quality of being overly simplistic and entirely accurate at the same time.

"They are the greatest vendors ever," says Clay Long, a veteran club designer for manufacturers such as MacGregor, Cobra and now Nicklaus Golf. "They are superior in every aspect. They're better, faster and not as expensive. What else would you want in a vendor?"

Japan has been in the club-manufacturing business for decades, but as investment casting of clubheads became more prominent, and the desire for more affordable labor became paramount, Taiwan took the lead in clubhead manufacturing. Fu Sheng, a company that dominates the air-compressor business in Asia, began manufacturing clubheads in 1978, and other companies would soon follow, as would years of consolidation. Today, the four major manufacturers that got their start in Taiwan have expanded operations to China and beyond. That family of four includes Fu Sheng, Advanced, O-TA and Dynamic.

Map: L-Dopa

As the demand for clubheads has increased and the factories have expanded to China, that country has sprouted more firms to work with smaller U.S. companies, because not even the combined resources of the four powers can come close to handling the orders that come their way. Just as cottage subcontractor vendors sprang up around Detroit to support the U.S. car-manufacturing industry, so too have equipment operations in southern China, across the Taiwan Strait in high-rise boom towns like Zhuhai, Zhongshan, Guangzhou, Dongguan and Shenzhen and up the coast to Shanghai. Throughout the region, the hotels are flashy nouveau riche, factories are built on top of each other and capitalism has taken hold. According to a report in the Chinese-language Commercial Times of Taiwan, of the world's 45 million clubs sold annually, three-quarters have Asian fingerprints on them.