When it comes to our equipment, we golfers are a flighty bunch. We jump from club to club in the quest for a tool that will magically solve all of the problems in our game. The right driver will quell the hook that we're struggling with and keep us on the fairway. The right irons will give us the piercing ball flight we're looking for and help us hit more greens. And the right putter will turn us into a veritable virtuoso when we get there, calmly rolling in putt after putt as our playing partners look on with awe and envy.
Of course, it's a poor craftsman who blames his tools. After all, Tiger Woods—even with all of his recent struggles—could go out and beat me over 18 holes playing with a 2x4 and a rusty garden hoe. But golf is the rare sport where the best technology available to players can actually help the amateur more than the professional at the top of his game. In a sport that's so fiendishly difficult, that's such a mental battle as well as physical one, it's little wonder that most of us are willing to shell out to try and buy a better game.
It might be the case that no one has ever shelled out more than Bob Parsons, the billionaire former marine, founder of GoDaddy.com, and obsessive golf nut. Parsons claims he was spending $250,000 a year on golf equipment, a otherworldly sum that would mean he was emptying the pro shop of his course several times over each season. Eventually, Parsons had a different thought: Instead of spending all that money on other gear from other companies, what if he was to start his own club company?
"You could call it vanity, I guess," says Parsons. "I did it mostly because I wanted to build some good clubs." He named the new concern PXG, for Parsons Xtreme Golf.
Parsons had gotten to know Mike Nicolette, a former PGA Tour player, through some rounds they had played together at the ultra-exclusive Whisper Rock Golf Club in Scottsdale, Arizona. About a year and a half after they met, Nicolette was working as a club designer at Ping when Parsons called him.
"The first thing he said was, 'How long is your non-compete clause?'" says Nicolette. Parsons had made the decision to get into the club business, and wanted to hire Nicolette to lead the charge. Parsons hired Nicolette, who had a one-year non-compete clause, and had Nicolette work on non-golf projects.
Exactly 365 days later, Parsons came to Nicolette with a nearly impossible design brief.
"I want an iron that goes stronger than any other club on the market," said Parsons, "but you can't make the loft stronger. I want it to feel better than any other club I've hit in my life. It has to have a distinctive look, it can't be mistaken for anything else in the marketplace."
It was an intimidating task, but there was one saving grace: Parsons didn't put any limits on what the clubs could cost to design or build. Most club designs start with the price and work backward from there. Parsons was willing to pay, handsomely, for performance.
"We pay attention to costs to the extent that we don't want to be stupid," says Parsons. "But we are quite willing to spend a significant amount of money if the performance is there. We have no time constraints for our engineers, we have no cost constraints. Whatever makes sense, that's what we'll do."
With that lack of restrictions, Nicolette got to work on PXG's clubs. He started by designing a hollow iron with a cavity in the middle, rather than the more standard cavity at the back of the club. They performed well, but the feel of the club—a critical factor to most golfers—was poor. Parsons suggested that maybe if they filled the cavity with some sort of material, they could remedy the problem.
"I've got the easy part, making a suggestion," says Parsons. "They have the hard part of trying to figure out how to do it."
The team began to look at different plastics and polymers to fill the cavity at the center of the club. They finally found a thermoplastic elastomer (TPE) that offered a good sound and feel, but integrating the material had caused different issue: the clubhead was now too heavy.
"So we started to thin out the clubface to balance the mass of the club," says Nicolette. "We started with the face at 90/1000 of an inch, and went to 75 and then even tried some at 40. As we began our durability testing, 58/1000 seemed to be the sweet spot."
These were radically thinner faces than the standard iron. The TPE supported the steel of the face so that it wouldn't permanently deform after hitting a ball, but it was able to flex slightly at impact and then spring back like a trampoline.
"That thinner face gained us ball speed," says Nicolette. "And I now had mass that I could put around the perimeter of the club to make it more forgiving, and to move the center of gravity back on the club. That improves how the ball launches."
After four iterations of this new construction method, Nicolette met with the ultimate judge of his work: Parsons. After a range session, Parsons told the team that he thought they had made the best club on earth.