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BINK! WHEN THE CALLAWAY GOLF CO.'S ULTRA-ENGINEERED Big Bertha driver connects with a common golf ball, the space-age sound is no auditory accident. Forget thwack or clink -- think of a high-performance computer firing up. The low- tech ball, meanwhile, has landed 20 to 30 yds. farther down the fairway than you expected. "I've played for 61 years," says 12-handicapper Thomas Dight, 76, a retired Long Island, New York, school superintendent who prowls the links all summer long in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. "I've never seen anything like...
...golf industry. Two years after joining a market cluttered by ; clubs of every description, Big Bertha has become the world's best-selling driver. Named for the legendary World War I megacannon, the hollow, oversize "metalwood" has found almost universal acceptance. Bill Clinton and George Bush use it, as do many golf-tour professionals -- even those without endorsement contracts. Bertha's manufacturer, meanwhile, has doubled sales of all its products four years running, topping $132 million last year, with profits tripling to $19.3 million. FORTUNE now rates Callaway as the 14th fastest-growing company...
Time for another fantasy retirement. Callaway sold his vineyard at a handsome profit to Hiram Walker & Sons, then bought a tiny golf-club company that made classic hickory-shafted wedges and putters. Under his tutelage, sales soon boomed. That was merely the tee-off. After introducing a popular line of neckless irons, he hit upon the idea of Big Bertha. Callaway replaced an existing graphite club head with a hollow stainless-steel design weighted most heavily around the edges. "Perimeter weighting" gave Bertha a sweet spot like that of an oversize tennis racquet. Since hollow clubs already on the market...
DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT CARbon fiber is? Modulus graphite? Boron? They used to put boron into gasoline, or at least into gasoline ads. Now it goes into wildly technological golf clubs and tennis racquets. Or is that argon? Or titanium? Neither of which is to be confused with something called Kevlar -- the stuff they make bullet-proof vests from. Kevlar these days is a very hot item. There are bulletproof Kevlar canoes, for example. And water skis. And bicycle tights. (A lie: the Kevlar bike tights, for the moment, are imaginary. But remember, you saw them here first.) The rest...
Makers of tennis and golf equipment are the quintessential competitors in the gear market: their sports are so difficult to learn that most players spend their lives gazing wistfully up at mediocrity's underside. Repeated discouragement, of course, leads to repeated equipment purchase. But gear possibilities are poor; you don't really want moving parts or a liquid crystal display on a racquet or a three wood...