We’ve stated it earlier than and we’ll say it once more right here and now.
If Karsten Solheim isn’t in your Mount Rushmore of golf, I recommend you severely replicate in your decision-making and discover the place you went fallacious.
It doesn’t matter what model of golf gear you’re taking part in; PING’s DNA is in there someplace. A lot of the know-how we see OEMs constructing upon in the present day, whether or not it’s low CG, perimeter weighting, spin management or most MOI, will be traced again to the person who based PING in his storage in 1959.
“He just had a different approach,” PING Engineering VP Paul Wooden tells MyGolfSpy. “He was an engineer rather than a craftsman, an engineer who thought, ‘How do I help people? How do I build a better mousetrap?’”
That aura stays at PING’s Scottsdale, Ariz., headquarters to this present day. PING workers will say they nonetheless really feel Solheim’s presence, almost 1 / 4 of a century after his passing.
It’s honest of you to ask whether or not that’s actual or simply one other case of company mythmaking. We placed on our cynical journalist hardhat and determined to have a look for ourselves.
What makes PING PING?
PING stays a household enterprise, making it an anomaly in in the present day’s golf gear world. Karsten’s youngest son, John A. Solheim, took over in 1995. John A.’s oldest son, John Okay. Solheim, was named CEO in 2022.
Wooden, a 20-year PING veteran, has been Engineering VP since 2015.
“Being a family company, that engineering spirit is very much alive,” he says. “John A. was with his dad building putters in their garage in 1959. He’s still here every week.”
John A. is 78. John Okay., a Summa Cum Laude Arizona State College engineering graduate, is nearing 50. Each of them, plus John A.’s niece (and Karsten’s granddaughter) Stacy Solheim Pawels, meet with the engineering group usually and, in Woods’ phrases, “go over every little thing.”
“Our conversations are all about how we can make our clubs perform better. Then we look at making a reasonable margin, selling it and all that other stuff. But it always starts with finding a better way to help a golfer get the ball in the hole quicker.”
The cynical golf journalist will let you know each OEM will ship an identical message. PING, nonetheless, is the one one that can sit you down to debate how its proprietary warmth therapy methodology will reset the molecular construction of 17-4 stainless-steel to present it efficiency traits it didn’t have earlier than.
You received’t be the one one who’ll discover it fascinating.
“In most companies, when you try to explain the intricacies of heat treatment to the executive teams, they’re like, ‘Why are you telling me this?’” says Wood. “John A. and John K. really want to know the details. John A. can talk more intelligently about heat treatment than I can because we have our own foundry and he has decades of live experience.”
The PING wedge saga makes PING PING
In case your design benchmark is to make the subsequent era of golf golf equipment demonstrably better-performing than the final one, some golf equipment are tougher to quantify than others.
“With drivers, it’s easier,” says Wooden. “We can all agree that if ball speed goes up, it’s better. Wedges are more of a challenge since there’s so much more of a human element.”
A number of years in the past, PING made a concerted effort to enhance its wedges. Not that its wedges had been dangerous however they had been maybe the weakest hyperlink within the PING lineup. Nevertheless, relatively than merely saying “make a better wedge,” PING did a really PING factor. It outlined what higher wedge efficiency really means.
“In the purest sense, ‘better’ means your handicap is coming down,” Wooden explains. “’Better’ is your Strokes Gained around the green is improving, your up-and-down percentage is up.”
In a single sense, that’s simple. The laborious half is that pesky human component.
“It can all depend on what side of the bed you got up on that day,” says Wooden. “Did I simply blade my first chip throughout the inexperienced and it’s going to smash my day? It’s laborious to see the sign above the noise.
“We can do a 20-player test but there are so many human pieces in there that sometimes you look at the results and go, ‘This looks like a mess.’ We do plenty of tests that have no results at all.”
As soon as it outlined “better,” PING’s engineering group wanted to find out the elements, check procedures and measurables. It got here all the way down to key parts: spin and turf interplay.
Hydrophobicity makes PING PING
PING’s first wedge efficiency ingredient is spin. Or, extra precisely, predictably excessive spin.
“If you have more spin potential, you’ll have more choices as a golfer,” says Wooden. “If you have more spin predictability, you can play a shot and have more faith in it.”
Spin potential is a groove, face-milling and face-blasting story. Spin predictability is a hydrophobicity story.
When PING talks about wedge hydrophobicity, it actually means making the wedge water-phobic.
“Even before my time started at PING, we’d do wet/dry testing with our PING Man robot,” says Wooden. “We knew dry testing off a tee would give you idealized conditions. I don’t know if Karsten or someone else on the team came up with the wet grass idea but we’d spritz some water on the club and ball and see what would happen.”
What occurred was that spin went down. Rather a lot. Throw some moist grass in there and spin went down much more.
“For the longest time, we’ve been trying to make those three conditions – dry, wet, and wet and grassy – to be as similar as we can.”
Measuring water beads makes PING PING
PING discovered the answer in a mixture of groove geometry and coatings.
“We dug into it with our metallurgists,” explains Wooden. “We found that with certain shapes of surface, we could create hydrophobic coatings, sort of like your non-stick Teflon pan at home.”
And PING, being PING, really developed exams to measure simply how hydrophobic its hydrophobic coatings may very well be.
“We put a drop of water on the surface and see what happens. If it spreads out and becomes like a film, that’s hydrophilic. If it beads up and you can actually see the beads, it’s hydrophobic. We can quantify this under a microscope by measuring the angle of the water bead.”
PING first launched its hydrophobic end, Hydropearl, in 2015 with its Glide wedges. MyGolfSpy began moist wedge testing in 2019 and the PING Glide 3.0 was the highest moist performer, shedding solely 10 % of its dry spin whereas others had been shedding 30 to 60 %.
In 2021, many OEMs considerably improved their moist spin retention however the PING Glide Cast shocked us by really choosing up 5 % extra spin when moist. Simply this 12 months, the brand new PING S159 wedge copped high honors in our annual testing with improved accuracy and consistency to go together with best-in-class spin efficiency, dry or moist.
The archer/arrow debate makes PING PING
When you consider it’s the archer, not the arrow, you need to in all probability amend your analogy. It’s extra correct to say it’s the archer, not the bow. The arrow is extra analogous to the ball than the membership.
Both approach, it’s a dismissive and inaccurate platitude. No, new gear received’t repair your swing however the correct gear works with you relatively than towards you. And the subsequent time you watch archery on the Olympics, discover the archers have very nice and expensive-looking bows.
Simply saying.
“If I give you a driver and you hit two or three shots that go way right, you’re going to say there’s something about this driver that makes it go right,” says Wooden. “If I give you a wedge and you hit a couple of terrible shots with it, your tendency is to say that wasn’t the wedge, that was me.”
The fact is it’s in all probability a mixture of each. When you make an ideal swing, all wedges will do nice. The membership that works greatest for you, nonetheless, is the one which makes the results of your less-than-good swings playable.
“The archer/arrow factor is actual for individuals so now we have to work via that,” Wooden says. “Understand that we can all hit one bad shot. But if it’s a pattern, that’s the wedge not working for you.”
That’s when bounces and grinds turn into vital. PING added some new grinds to the s159 lineup and has refined its on-line wedge becoming app to assist golfers sift via the noise to seek out the perfect wedges to demo based mostly on the knowledge they enter. It doesn’t take the place of a reside in-person wedge becoming nevertheless it at the least takes the guesswork out of selecting a wedge.
“No such thing as standard turf” makes PING PING
The brand new PING s159 wedge sequence options six complete grinds however Woods says the overwhelming majority of golfers match into three or 4 of these grinds with no drawback.
“In our fittings, four grinds do the heavy lifting. We needed more options for our Tour players and for elite players. Six grinds is enough for us. Any more than that would be on the verge of getting really complicated.”
Wedge becoming is difficult and Woods admits PING’s becoming protocols have developed over the previous a number of years.
“We’ve done a lot on trying to model how you deliver your club but modeling turf interaction is difficult because grass is complicated stuff. It’s very different in Pinehurst compared to Seattle. There’s no such thing as ‘standard turf.’”
A PING wedge becoming these days doesn’t allow you to get snug. The fitter can have you hit a number of full photographs on the vary, ask you a number of questions and produce you to the inexperienced to attempt some grinds.
“We put you into different scenarios and say, ‘Hit this shot to that hole,’” says Wooden. “You get one go at it, then you definitely transfer to a distinct shot. We’ll go across the inexperienced a few instances and received’t allow you to choose one shot. You then go into the bunker.
“If we leave you to your own devices, you’re not going to pick a shot you don’t like playing. You’ll pick something you like playing. What we need is the wedge that helps you on the shots you don’t like playing. You need to be a little bit uncomfortable.”
The 4,000-shot check makes PING PING
PING has not too long ago upgraded its movement seize system to raised seize partial photographs. In spite of everything, a 20-yard pitch seems to be very totally different in comparison with a full iron or driver swing. The rationale? PING wished extra knowledge on how the bottom impacts the swing and, by extension, contact.
PING examined 150 golfers on the brand new system, hitting greater than 4,000 photographs to see how a lot the bottom impacts what the ball sees when it comes to assault angle, membership velocity and affect location.
“We found that 86 percent of those 4,000 shots had some level of ground contact before ball contact,” explains Wooden. “It seems like we’re saying 86 % of the individuals chunk it however that’s not fairly true. You’re brushing the turf possibly a half inch earlier than the ball. It’s nonetheless a superb shot however the floor is a part of the equation.
“You might have a steep technique but if you just brush the ground slightly before hitting the ball, you might lose a lot of that force by the time you get to the ball because the ground is a pretty big force pushing back.”
PING makes use of this knowledge not solely to refine its bounce and grind choices additional but additionally to refine its on-line wedge becoming device. As soon as the algorithms decide a few choices for you, it’s as much as the golfer to see what would possibly work greatest.
“I can give you a wedge that absolutely sucks for you but by your third or fourth shot you’ll sort of figure out how to make it work, especially if you’re a good player,” says Wooden. “But on the course, you don’t get the best eight out of 10, do you? You get one go and you move on.”
The household factor makes PING PING
It’s attention-grabbing to marvel what Karsten would consider AI, movement seize techniques and trendy knowledge assortment. My solely guess is that, as an engineer, he’d embrace it to make golf equipment higher.
“I never got to see him putt,” says Wooden. “But the story goes that he was not a very good putter so he had to find a better way.”
That led to the PING 1A, the putter that basically did go “ping.”
You may also be assured that how different OEMs use trendy know-how wouldn’t affect Karsten one bit. By all accounts, he was the residing embodiment of Sinatra’s “My Way.”
“Growing up, I was told there was the right way, the wrong way and Karsten’s way,” David Solheim, John A.’s youngest son, advised Household Enterprise Journal in 2008. “When you start up your own company, you can tell people the way you want things done. It’s been a while since he was here but that idea has not left this place.”
“We don’t come out with many duds because it’s always about performance,” says Wooden. “There’s by no means any stress to launch one thing due to a cool advertising function. If it doesn’t work or it isn’t higher, it’s not getting in.
“If that means the product isn’t quite as exciting, so be it.”
The submit What Makes PING PING? appeared first on MyGolfSpy.
