Can you really buy the same clubs as used by Tour pros?

 

Posted by Tom Stites | 30 November 2010

As the creator of golf clubs for Nike, my answer is an emphatic yes. One of the confusing and persistent myths floating around our business is the difference in clubs used by contract touring professionals and the clubs that are offered to the public. I tell you this as fact and to set the environment for how we are doing things here at Nike Golf.

The whole Nike philosophy in every sport it touches is to FIRST get it right with the athlete. Then we use athlete insights to drive the design and performance. This is a formula that goes back to the very first track shoe Coach Bill Bowerman made for his athletes at the University of Oregon. And it is the same formula used by every product category within Nike. This fact is very easy to square up with how I, and we, have been working for 25 years, and how we have worked since Nike Golf started making golf clubs just eight years ago.

The professional player should drive the club design for the products they use on Tour, and the club team must develop and support that player with product that he or she can use. After that is complete, we can then offer it for sale. We simply work with these guys and gals until the product works, and then we offer it to the public. We do not have any reason to make one club for Tiger Woods and then offer something else to the public. It is just not done. Some speculate that we make special clubs for Tiger and our other athletes that no one else can buy. This is just not true. We do sometimes test early prototypes with our Tour athletes and sometimes they want to keep these same clubs for competitive play. Many times these prototypes become the clubs that we introduce to the public in the next product cycle. We may dress up the graphics but the clubs are fundamentally the same. That said, almost all of the clubs in their bags are from our current product line. The forgings played by Tiger are the same that we sell to the public. Tiger's clubs have always been, are, and will always be Nike forgings from Nike tools. In fact the profiles and physics of his clubs are the same thing that defines our flagship blade line. When some other Nike Tour athlete decides to use the same blades, we sometimes give their own preference for "grind". We sometimes make a slight change to the toe polish or the leading edge, but this work is always done on top of the main line production iron forging as defined by our work with Tiger.

The same thing goes for our metal golf woods. We test prototypes with all the pros all year long, then decide and put into production our next offerings. The players out on Tour use our exact production heads. On occasion, to match a specific shaft we might weight-adjust the head, but it is the same head that comes right out of our production tooling and facility. There is no real difference.

So...at Nike, we do whatever it takes to help our athletes win. In doing so, we are helping amateurs be better golfers, because we sell and offer to the public the clubs we develop for our athletes. I assure you now that over 90% of the clubs played by Nike athletes on Tour are the exact same products as offered to the public. The other 10% in our athletes' hands - but not available to the public - is what we are testing for next year's models and most, or all of these, will be offered for sale soon.

Until next time,
Tom