A tinker’s tale - includes related articles on the use of technology on golf course designs and maintenance - Orlimar Golf
Jesse Ortiz offers profuse apologies as he excuses himself to take a call on a cell phone just outside the conference room at his company’s new headquarters in Hayward, CA, about 30 miles southeast of San Francisco. “It’s one of our lawyers,” explains the 46-year-old president, chief executive, and chief designer of Orlimar Golf. Some of the conversation, easily overheard, concerns the technology behind the firm’s new TriMetal irons.
An arcane facet of design technology is part of the reason Callaway Golf - one of several industry big dogs based in the Southern California enclave of Carlsbad - has filed a lawsuit against Orlimar. Charging patent infringement, the firm also has beefs with Orlimar’s advertising. The facts of the case are mildly interesting; that Callaway would even bother with this upstate upstart is a far more engaging tale.
Two years ago, not even that Taco Bell Chihuahua would tremble over a firm selling but $1.2 million worth of clubs. With its Big Bertha product line, Callaway dominated the driver and fairway wood market for most of the 1990s. But with the introduction of its TriMetal fairway woods in 1998, Orlimar took flight like a John Daly drive. During a year when overall golf equipment sales fell by nearly 20 percent, Orlimar’s net boomed past $70 million and is headed for $110 million in 1999.
While an annoying and possibly expensive affirmation, the lawsuit nonetheless signaled that Ortiz, and the company founded by his father in 1960, had finally arrived. “I guess we’re a 38-year overnight success,” says Jesse, who before puberty stood at the side of his father, Lou Ortiz, and helped handcraft elegant persimmon-headed woods. And then, with a wry smile and confessional tone, he adds, “I sometimes have this fantasy about one of the CEOs in Carlsbad, looking at his $20 million R&D budget, and just screaming at his scientists because they’re getting clobbered by a little father-and-son shop.”
Well, the reality is that Orlimar is no longer so little. Were it not for the son’s savvy research and development work, the company would still reside in the backwater of an industry that had passed it by. And ironically, just as technological advances enabled Callaway to fashion titanium into oversized club-heads that revolutionized the driver business, it’s the technology behind the TriMetal that transformed Orlimar into a premier equipment seller.
In fact, technology is a huge component of today’s entire golf business. It has changed the way architects design courses and how superintendents maintain them. It’s the reason we see ever-changing dimple patterns, composition, and differing flight patterns of golf balls. And it can help instructors give lessons, with video machines that show a player’s swing as a bio-mechanical schematic.
Of course, none of this really helps a lick when it comes to sinking a six-foot putt. Although equipment, instruction, and course conditioning have continually improved, the typical golfer hasn’t. In fact, the average handicap has remained at 15 for decades. Then again, no one ever claimed that playing golf was a logical pursuit.
However, it is this game’s inherent difficulty that enables manufacturers to develop “better” and more expensive equipment that promises improvement, and which in turn entices consumers to happily buy the stuff. This golfing truth is at least as old as Old Tom Morris, who sold sticks out of his shop at St. Andrews nearly 150 years ago. It’s just that technology cycles are coming ‘round as fast as a Scottish twosome.
This wasn’t always so. During the first four centuries of golf, balls were made of feather-stuffed leather, and “play clubs” were long-nosed, curving instruments made entirely of relatively soft wood. Before the turn of this century, as harder and more durable balls came into play, metal-headed irons and woods with harder heads were developed. Until the 1930s, these drivers and irons typically came with hickory shafts, until steel replaced that material. Today, steel shafts compete with graphite and other materials.
Until the 1970s, drivers and fairway woods had heads made, of course, of wood. Then came stainless steel driver heads, which took over the market during the 1980s. In the early 1990s, out came oversized steel-headed drivers. By 1995, the use of titanium allowed club-makers to craft even larger driver heads that were thin-walled, light, and, when combined with longer shafts, allowed golfers to swing the club at higher speeds. That translated into more distance off the tee.