Mark o`Meara hits his old Persimmon Driver...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKHTMso_fIQ[/youtube]

Nice flinch flip save wing & a prayer steer job on that second one, I could hear the gears grinding in his head ‘Whoops, this is a steel X shaft, no drop & dump, I gotta do it myself… how do you that again? Oh God don’t let me whiff this thing on camera…’

What an embarrassment, and he’s one of the best players I’ve ever seen in my life, or was…

Yeah this really solidifies the argument that you will absolutely lose the ability to hit a persimmon if you play the modern stuff exclusively for any length of time.

What the hell would be wrong with that?

Nothing.

LOL… exactly what I was thinking when I saw the 2nd motion. Looks like he managed to catch some cycolac on the 3rd jerk though. :stuck_out_tongue:

And when did the definition of a ball coming off “hot” change to a shot that goes 80 yards to the right?

robbo

Remember his last line. Essentially we HAVE to continue to dumb-it-down for the entire golfing population for the game to survive. Heaven forbid we require participants to develop some skills. I haven’t seen the latest numbers but I’m guessing you have the same percentage of golfers leaving the game now as you did before all the game-improvement stuff went viral.

Well,
the game would easily survive, and the public players that don’t like it might all quit. And then you would have the real golfers enjoying it and playing it properly. If the golfing public shrunk by 90%, the crap courses would go away, the gems would still remain, the game would be more affordable, courses less crowded, and better players would evolve. Corporations might invest their money in more productive areas of commerce… so I think it’s a great idea. :sunglasses:

1 Like

A quote from “The Majors” by John Feinstein that seems somewhat appropriate.

On another occasion, Mark O’Meara flew into town after winning a tournament in Japan. He and Hogan went to the far end of the range at Shady Oaks, and Hogan, ever present cigarette dangling from his mouth watched O’Meara hit a few balls. O’Meara felt good…confident coming off a victory, and he figured he was impressing the old man. O’Meara kept hitting shots, while Hogan said nothing. Finally O’Meara walked back to where Hogan stood. “Well Mr. Hogan” he said “What do you think?” Hogan took the cigarette out of his mouth…“Awful” he replied…O’Meara almost gagged.

LOL! Hogan probably wouldn’t have been a Medicus fan either. Can’t you just picture him trying to not make that hinge break?!

robbo

Yeah I guess ‘hot’ is code for low skanky & dead right 190… gotta have at least 3 hanger-on sycophants around at all times worshipping every dead shot in the book. The worst part about hanging around tour players is the myopic God complex no question.

I bet there’s a thread on golfwrx about how incredible he is to get the ‘worthless antique’ in the air & in the fairway no less!! OMG!! And then 50 identical comments about how small & hard to hit persimmon is yadda yadda. Gag…

Think what o’Meara meant was how fast the ball curved right. He is not use to the ball spinning left or right at such a high speed, and the old equipment showed him that he did not put correct swing on it. It still surprises me how fast the ball hooks or cuts with persimmon when you swing badly.

Having the pros play persimmon would be a lot like how they have pro baseball players play wooden bats. No one really has an issue with that. Amateur baseball players still play the aluminum bats.

But still, the equipment industry just has too much money tied up into sponsorship and marketing at this point.

At the end of the day I’m not so sure I’d be in such a hurry to create a new market for persimmon/blades/balata. The only reason you’re all getting these clubs and balls so cheap is because there is zero demand for them aside from between yourselves. There is no practical value in the marketplace and the small niche collector’s market is in the toilet because the economy is so bad. So the old stuff is available dirt cheap but if the movement catches on and demand spikes you’re going to price yourselves right out of the market almost overnight. You’ve got a tiny core completely under the radar and a relative abundance of equipment that has huge value to you but not to anyone else. There’s something to be said about not screwing that up.

Twice now in the last two years I’ve done a preliminary set of financials & cost analysis to set up a shop to make wound golf balls, the last time I did the numbers with natural and synthetic materials. I cannot express how absolutely awful the numbers came out every single time. It just doesn’t work for more reasons than I care to list, and the investment necessary for even a small run can’t be done because no supplier will sell the raw materials by less than what works out to either a container or at minimum palettes. Then it starts getting hard and rather silly to even contemplate actual manufacturing facilities and everything that nightmare entails right now. I was really thinking about doing it both times, I always swore for personal reasons I’d never ever go back into any manufacturing business again and I still wanted to do it but without a huge intrinsic demand it’s not viable at all and even with proper demand I couldn’t figure how to possibly get the wholesale price per unit below $5.00 even with a full seven year amortization on rock bottom cost equipment, setting up shop in Nevada and importing all the packaging. And that’s not even figuring marketing or distribution. No one in their right mind would ever do this even on a designed loss tax shelter C-Corp, there’s way too much exposure involved.

But enough about that, point is that the stuff they’re making now is rock bottom dirt cheap to make. The woods are all titanium alloy probably about 40% so would work out to about an ounce of titanium per head with the rest aluminium and assorted scrap that’s dirt cheap. Titanium trades around 2.5x copper, right now about $8.15/oz. Total material cost say $12.00 per head give or take. Its all cast, automated to the hilt done in Asia so the unit cost per piece goes way down as volume increases. With handmade persimmon heads the cost per piece is static, costs the same per piece to do 100 basically as 10,000… You can’t compete that way, it’s not a growth model and prices are going to be so high that most of your customers can’t afford your product plus your at the mercy of your suppliers all the time and if you can’t find the high quality wood blocks you have no business. Take Scratch Golf for example with their irons and wedges, its great quality but its not American steel, their wholesale price is over $1500/set, way too high to get the distribution they need and they’re totally at the mercy of their raw material supplier. Not good long term.

The point at the end of this is not to look a gift horse in the mouth, which is pretty much what you’ve got now. The more popular this gets the more expensive its going to get big time. Don’t price yourselves out of your own game just because everyone else doesn’t know what they’re doing. Unless you want this to be the norm…

item.mobileweb.ebay.com/viewitem … 6405812939

Sometimes people do things that make no sense. Let’s make a balata golf ball or something similar. If they were able to make golf balls in the early 1900’s with such archaic technology, we should have no trouble doing it with today’s amazing geniuses and such a high tech society.

As far as persimmon woods, there are other woods that can be used to fashion a club from. Most any hard wood would do.
With very rudimentary tools such as a saw drill and a file, you could sculpt a club from a piece of tree trunk fairly easily.
Lead fishing weights could be melted in a spoon and poured into a hole in the head from underneath and locked in with any kind of small metal plate. A shaft hole could be drilled with a 3/8th bit to fit a shaft into. Making a steel shaft is more of an issue to caveman. I think it’s nothing more than a long weekend project.

Might be time to engage the brain again rather than staring at a smart phone all day looking for answers. Is it possible that there are people walking the earth right now that have less mathematical knowledge than the Egyptians did 4000 years ago?
Less knowledge of natural laws, the movement of the cosmos, and a basic understanding of survival in even a non hostile environment?

I doubt our human cranial hardware has evolved away in less than two generations… but I would speculate we are being given a lot of inferior software to plug into our brains… while society is clearly trying fanatically, to dumb us down into mindless sacks of potatoes at best, worthy of one focus of specialization at best. If one can’t see the paradigm shift into artificial intelligence at this point in history, you might be wise to take a moment of reflection.

Golf offers many levels of skill development, and many non golfing skills as you walk around the course that come in many forms from fitness and proper breathing, sharpening your senses, sight, sound, intuition, and communication both with your playing partners and the environment. You’re learning aviation and gyroscopic principals, navigation and ancient yogic practices if you look in the right places. I learned where to look for wild asparagus growing off the fairways on three of the holes out at Mare. Wild blackberries in abundance all summer and plenty of anise to chew on. Sometimes I look forward to just snacking my way around the course with all the fresh produce that’s often more valuable than the petty green fee. Fish in the lake and wild turkeys in abundance if play gets too slow and the economy gets worse.

Monetary affordability issues for some… yes, but ultimately just another excuse for most everyone else.

I read both posts above…and see the rationale of each one.

Lag said:

This song came to mind:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uLtyzRgmyI[/youtube]

item.mobileweb.ebay.com/viewitem … 4337367853

These have been sitting here for a year. No takers. They cannot be manufactured less expensively. Last I checked wound balata golf balls didn’t grow on trees or bushes either. It costs money to make things, in this case a lot of money and it takes a huge amount of equipment & machinery to do it. Come on, you need a full on factory to do this whether it’s here or in Thailand, somebody somewhere has to actually pay for it, that is unless you know how to make catalyzed pressurized injection molded golf ball covers in the garage with 99.8% quality control for thickness, density, coefficient of hardness, weight and no seam. That’s a good trick without tempering the material either and I would love to find out how exactly to do that.

It would be great to have the good wound balls again, there’s nobody that would love it more than me but at a very specific point the idea evolves into things like FOB Destination, lost batches because it went out of temper at 4am & 2net15 when you’re lucky to get a check in 90. It can be done, there’s no question about that but it ain’t gonna be by me. I stopped making truffles fifteen years ago and I swore I’d never do it again. You’d think these were golf balls but they’re really truffles except worse because the temper is pressure AND temperature sensitive. What an unbelievable nightmare this would be. No chance here.

m.youtube.com/index?desktop_uri= … YGF5R9i53A

wireworld.com/huestis/produc … inder.html

Great, now how do you do the covers? The cover is the problem, always has been.

same way they used to do them…

they make covers now much the same way… it’s the insides that are awful.

???

Umm, wee bit of difference between tree sap & Dupont thermoresins… besides no matter what it is it still needs to be tempered, catalyzed, molded & resolidified to exact tolerances. That’s 4 steps all of which don’t want to work all the time. This is where the cost comes from. Plus what is there like 2 miles of windings in every ball, that ain’t free either.

I’m sorry but I did the math every which way I knew how. $5.30 per ball was the lowest I ever got and it was still a loser because I didn’t allow for trial & error. Its the machinery for making the covers, you need 2000 sq ft of space just for that. All to make a product 95% of the customer base thinks is obsolete. To do this for real it takes like $1.5m and a real production facility like 5000 ft or so. And to BS tinker this at home doesn’t work, you could do it with a baseball but not a golf ball. It’s physically impossible to fake injection molding.