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I Ping celebrates 40 years | of golf club innovationThe big surprise is what’s in store next year. The company that has become known for its offset clubs with the modem cavity back plans to• By DOUG FERGUSONThe Associated Press! It started with two sugar cubes,! two popsicle sticks and a “ping.' Karsten Solhcim was working as a ; mechanical engineer for General ; Electric in 1959 when he developed j the design for his 1-A putter, placing J the sticks on each side of the cubesJ with a shaft in the middle.» * : * •' '■ -Equipmenti ——————————————————! Upon contact with a golf hall, the• putter made a high-pitched ringing j sound that gave birth to the brand ; name Ping.j The sleeve of a 78-rpm record J made Solhcim leave GE for a new J career making clubs. On that sleeve ! is his sketch of a revolutionary idea ! for another putter — the Ping ! Anscr. which has become a model ! for today’s most popular styles.! Having grown from such extraor-! dtnary roots. Ping is celebrating its | 4lt;)th anniversary this year as a fami-j ly run business that has helped J shape the golf-equipment industry.{ The founder, who gave women’s ! golf the Solheim Cup and has two J college golf courses named for him, ! spends most of his time in a wheel-! chair now. Solheim has Parkinson’s ; disease and is unable to communi-; cate effectively.| Looking back over 40 years. John j Solheim. Karsten Solhcim’s son and | now the president of Ping went ! silent when asked what first comes ! to mind when Ping is mentioned.! Perhaps the Anscr putter, which j has been used to win 5(H) events on | professional tours around the world, { or investment casting, another | Solheim innovation aimed at | improving product consistency.J Who can forget perimeter weight-i ing on the Ping Eye 2 irons? Solheim ! was the first to design clubs that dis-' tributed weight to the extremities, j which increased the sweet spot and J offered more forgiveness.| Ping also put an “L” on a high-| lofted club that has become part of ! golfs glossary these days — the lob! wedge.John Solheim is just as enthusiastic looking forward as looking back at 40 years.He measured Ping’s growth in double digits last year and anticipates a big push over the next 12 months. Having done well with its new TiSi driver. Ping plans to unveil a new line of fairway metals in the fall.“They have a low center of gravity, but not the shallow heads like what the current market trend is,” he said.introduce its own line of blade irons.“We totally believe in the offset club,” Solheim said. “There is part of the marketplace that refused to go with offset. We decided we’re going to build a blade — but not like every elsc’s blade.”In a way, Ping will have come full circle. The company essentially took off when Karsten Solheim was looking for an answer to the blade putters that Arnold Palmer popularized by winning six major championship in a five-year span.Ping got a boost when Julius Boros won the Phoenix Open the next year using the Ping Anser. Now, the company has a vault at its headquarters with more than 1 .HCKJ gold-plated replicas of putters that have won on the major professional tours around the world. It also sends a replica to the player.Seve Ballesteros has the most of the gilded putters — 45. He has used the Scottsdale Anser for most of his international victories, and Ping gave him another one for his role as captain of Europe’s winning Ryder Cup team in 1997.Ping also has three gold-plated sand wedges in the vault from three memorable victories — Bob Twav,W wholing out from the bunker on the 72nd hole of the 1986 PGAChampionship; Paul Azinger doing the same thing in the 1993 Memorial; and Jeff Maggert chipping in for birdie on the 38th hole to win $1 million in the Match Play Championship.It hasn’t always been smooth sailing for 40 years.Ping also was out front by takingon the USGA and the PGA Tour over its use of square grooves. The controversy and subsequent lawsuits lingered for eight years.Ping agreed to reduce the width between the grooves the size of a human hair in settling a lawsuit with the USGA in 1990. Three years later, the PGA Tour backed awayfrom its threat to require only V-shaped grooves in competition.Still, the courtroom battles took a toll.“His mind was not on golf clubs, itwas on the lawsuit,” John Solheim said of his father. “That took a lot out of him. What Karsten really enjoyed was designing clubs and making them better.”From a popsicle sticks and sugar cubes. Ping has been doing that for 40 years.
Newspaper Details
Brownsville Herald
Brownsville, Texas, US
Wed, May 26, 1999
Page 15
Full Page
Clipped by
Earl G.
USA 10 Feb 2019
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