Be careful with your first love, my father once told me. It only comes once. This must be true, but I’m here to tell you: I got it right the third time.
My first serious relationship was with a set of Wilson Staff stamped irons Dynapower on the back, with red dots on the soles, along with the words FLUID feeling. Wilson Staff was the crown prince of elite irons in the mid-1970s, and I saved up for months to buy this set secondhand for $100.
Later, I replaced them with a set of Japanese-made PRGRs, bladed irons with a dull matte finish, as nice as a club could be, though part of the appeal was their space-age shafts, graphite black and chosen to match the player’s swing speed. These PRGRs cost a fortune, but I was single and what else would I spend my disposable income on?
And then I felt Ping. It wasn’t love at first sight. The friendship unfolded over time, over an extended honeymoon of sorts. (There was no end date.) Kristina and I were married in the fall of 1990, and in February 1991 we flew to France, where I had a one-week stint in velvet with an American master on the European Tour, Peter Teravainen, a Yale graduate with an economics degree and a mind that gravitated toward numbers and logic.
It was a period of heightened awareness for me: Chris Isaak’s “Bad Game” was playing in the cab we took to JFK; our Pan Am flight to Paris was choking on cigarette smoke. On our first morning in Saint-Raphaël, Kristina gave me a ride from our hotel hanging on the course on the back of motorbikes and through a misty rain. Breakfast was a chocolate croissant, out of a bag and still warm. etc.
;)
Courtesy Ping
I met Peter. He had small teeth, a broad forehead, and his trousers were shiny with wear. His bag was filled with Ping irons, along with a Ping putter. His bag itself was a white staff bag with a single strap, stamped with his name on one side and Ping on the other hand. In the second week of wearing it (passed the test with some adventure) the bag had a small scratch on the side of it where my left thigh had been pushed into it.
I went to Peter directly in the summer when the tour arrived Scotland and Kristina and I got off the bus. In those days, the European Tour still wintered on the continent, in the southern parts of France, Spain, Portugal and Italy. Somewhere in those weeks I started leaving the toothbrush at the Ping House. Part of the appeal was seeing Peter use his Ping clubs so effectively. (He was making cuts.) I’ve been playing Ping Eye2s, the model Peter has been playing, almost ever since.
Ping’s iron and joint designs (Ping Anser, Ping Pal) were once considered radical. For decades, the clubs themselves were a testament to his vision Karsten Solheimthe company’s founder, who valued function above all else. His irons had a wide heel, a high toe, a sharp gut and a wild amount of compensation. The company’s bands, its first product, were considered wildly different when they made their debut. But Tom Watson made his Ping Pal look good, just winning with it again and again. Tiger Woods did the same with his Anser 2, going back to his amateur days. In terms of form and utility, early Scotty Cameron putter line is a direct descendant of the early Ping putter line. You know what they say about imitation.
I met Karsten Solheim only once, on a tour of the Ping (Karsten Manufacturing) factory in Phoenix 30 years ago. Karsten was 84 years old and had recently passed the keys to the company to the youngest of his three sons, John A. Solheim. A small group of us entered Karsten’s office, with John as our tour guide. Karsten bent over a drawing table like a doctor looking at an X-ray. I mentioned to Karsten my love for the Eye 2 and he said, “We never made a better iron.” Others were less than thrilled, but that’s what he said. Karsten, for Forbes magazine, was one of the 400 richest Americans at the time, but his motivation in business was not primarily money. It was the pursuit of the best golf equipment. His superwealth flowed from it. He lived up to the GE engineer he once was.
A few months ago, I shared Karsten’s long-ago review of the Eye2 with Robin McCool, a retired Ping sales representative and accomplished amateur golfer. Robin, while readily acknowledging Karsten’s commitment to Eye 2, offered this addition: “But he also said this: ‘We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface.’
Enter John A., scratching. He was 50 the day of the Ping factory tour, when the company was trying to promote an iron with John’s fingerprints all over it, the ISI. That club was never a top 40 superhit, but a year or two later John’s TiSI driver was. He is now 80 years old and chairman of Ping.
For 30 years—from 1996 to 2026, from age 50 to age 80—John has been the caretaker of what his father started and then some. The business is still family owned. The company has consistently kept the number of employees at around 1,000 with low turnover. Intensive customer service is still a hallmark of the company.
But there have also been notable changes. In the Karsten years, there were players who left Ping after winning majors, among them John Daly, Mark Calcavecchia and Bob Tway. They wanted the guaranteed paycheck that comes with being a star golfer, and Karsten, a headstrong Norwegian and a child of the Depression, despised the notion of getting paid to play. His system was a set of bonuses based on what you earned on the course. John changed that policy and thus has kept Louis Oosthuizen, Bubba Watson and others in the Ping group. John A.’s son, John K., now the company’s president and CEO, ran into a startling realization: The visual and tactile elements of the club’s design—its feel, its finish—actually affect performance. Somewhere, Karsten is stroking his little Col beard. Sanders in contemplative confusion, but this third-generation Solheim is surely correct. you I DO you must feel good about your club in every aspect. To like a club, you have to like its look and feel.
;)
Getty Images (2); Mark Peterman; Courtesy Ping
