In the 40-plus years that I have been playing golf, the game has gone through a tremendous amount of change. True, I didn”t grow up in the era of the gutta percha ball, the featherie or hickory shafts, but I did grow up at a time when an errant iron shot would actually put a gouge in a balata-covered golf ball, woods were made from exotic trees such as persimmon, and all irons were blades with a sweet spot about the size of a dime.
Some 40 years ago the golf ball industry was extremely competitive. Acushnet Golf, the parent company for Titleist golf balls, specialized in golf balls and Bulls Eye putters. The Titleist golf ball was a popular choice of professionals and amateurs alike, but it didn”t have the large market share in the 1960s that it has today. Some of Titleists” competitors at that time were Dunlop Tires, maker of the Maxfli golf ball; Spaulding Sporting Goods and their Spaulding Dot golf ball; Wilson Sports, who produced the Wilson Staff ball; and MacGregor Golf, who made the MacGregor Tourney ball. If you were a budget-minded golfer, you might play a cheaper model such as the Wilson K-28 or you could go to your local Walgreens Drug Store and buy its economy ball, the Po Do.
While much has changed in the game over the past 40 years, with the advent of exotic shafts and space-aged metals and alloys in clubs, the ball has made the greatest advances on a technological level. The golf ball doesn”t cut anymore. The covers are multi-leveled and the core is solid. Long gone are the days when you could take the cover off of a golf ball, unwind the maze of wound rubber bands, and cut open its rubber core and have the gooey liquid center ooze out.
Nowadays, the golf ball is so well developed in a technological sense that the same ball will impart backspin when you hit it with your oversized metal driver off the tee and yet will dance with backspin when you hit a 100-yard sand wedge into the green.
There are just three major players today in the world of golf balls, namely Acushnet (Titleist), Callaway and Taylor Made. Titleist has a major share of the golf ball market and its Pro V1 line of golf balls are atop the leader board by a wide margin. While industry giants such as Acushnet and Callaway are fighting it out for the wallets of avid golfers, they”ve also been going toe to toe in the courts in a protracted legal battle over copyright infringement. The result has been a mixed bag of courtroom winners, patent adjustments and pricing moves.
The Titleist Pro V1 was introduced in 2000, took the golf ball market by storm, and quickly became the darling of professional golfers and top-notch amateurs. Its $52 retail price seemed excessive at the time, and yet the ball was so popular with good golfers that the demand quickly overwhelmed the supply. Titleist registered 65 patents in connection with the Pro V1 golf ball.
Spaulding Golf acquired four patents on its Strata golf ball in 2001 that scientific experts contended are eerily similar to those held by the Titleist Pro V1. Callaway Golf purchased Spaulding in 2003 and expressed legal concerns about its newly purchased four patents as they related to the Pro V1. Titleist and Callaway both filed complaints with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office regarding the validity of the four patents in question. In 2006, Callaway sued Titleist over copyright infringement. A jury trial that lasted close to one year concluded with a King Solomon-type decision. According to press releases, the jury found partial favor on behalf of Callaway and partial favor on behalf of Titleist. Since that judgment, the case has been appealed to the United States Court of Appeals and Callaway has enjoined Titleist seeking a judicial order which would force Titleist to remove the Pro V1 from pro shops and golf store shelves.
The lower court has ruled that the Pro V1 may not be sold to its distributors effective Jan. 1, 2009. Titleist wants the Court of Appeals to put a hold on this injunction while their appeal slowly works its way through the court system.
Meanwhile, the techies and the scientists at Titleist have converted the product guidelines of the Pro V1 so that the four patents in question no longer go into the make-up of the ball. It sounds like the golf ball equivalent of genetic engineering.
In a recent press release dated Nov. 17, Titleist has contended that the changes to the Pro V1 are minute and that there is neither a visual nor a performance difference between the current Pro V1 and the newly engineered Pro V1. Titleist also contends that they will introduce a new, improved prototype of the Pro V1 later in the spring of 2009. The advertising campaign will tout the new ball as an improvement over the current one based on PGA Tour players who have sampled the ball this past autumn in Fall Finish events.
Of course, for the immediate moment, all of this is of benefit to golfing consumers. The cheapest one could get a box of a dozen Pro V1s had historically been $45.99. Yet when I was at the Sports Authority in San Luis Obispo last month, they retailed for $39.95. At that time I was sure it was a misprint, however, the same was true the following week at Golfsmith in San Francisco. I just ordered four dozen balls online for the same price from Morton Golf, the owners of the pro shop at Haggin Oaks in Sacramento.
So, if the avid golfer on your Christmas list plays Pro V1 golf balls, buy them now while they”re cheap. After all, Titlesit and Callaway could settle out of court and retailers will raise the price. Of course, this never happened in the olden days when a three pack of Po Dos at Walgreens cost 59 cents.
