Bernie, Pat - In the past week I have gotten several phone calls from a number of people in the industry including several of the magazines asking for my comments on Tiger's various recent comments about the drivers and his switch back to the 975. I get the impression that a lot of people in the industry who are even with companies that compete with Nike are very much down on how public Tiger has been in areas about which he personally has no expertise, as well as how public this whole driver switch was made. Dick Rugge from the USGA even released a statement refuting Tiger's comments about other players who supposedly were getting "30 yards" from playing illegal drivers. From a technical standpoint, Dick's comments were right on because he was just reiterating what most of you guys know from your technical studies, that while there are probably some drivers out there that are above the 0.830 limit due to +/- tolerances in production, that no COR increase even up as high as 0.900 could ever deliver 30 yards, much less 10 yards more for these guys.
Tiger's problem is that he is and incredibly sensitive player for his equipment who happens to be attached to an equipment company now that does not have a fraction of the R&D commitment as do the other OEMs that pay players to use their equipment. While Tom Stites is a superb designer and a super nice guy, he does not have the staff or the budget commitment to allow him to perform the same Nth degree analysis either in design modeling or player analysis testing as do the Titleists, Callaways, Taylor Mades, Pings or the world. Tiger's move downward in driving distance this year while having seen other players move up from where they were in past years is more a case of Tiger not being able to have all of the detailed launch monitor analysis, access to tons of head/shaft variations of designs and top engineering analysis for completely optimizing his swing characteristics as do players on staff with these other 4 major OEMs, primarily because Nike is much more of a sales and marketing company with far less desire to budget the tens of millions of dollars to create all of that R&D capability. Also, it does not help his driving performance that he still seems to swing with a controlled beauty and rhythm with the irons, but seems to come out of his shoes every time he puts the number 1 in his hands and sticks the ball up on a tee peg. Given that, I tend to believe that even if Tiger were on staff with one of the other 4 big OEMs and spending hours and hours in launch analysis in the off season, they too would be having troubles keeping him happy with a driver. At 130mph+ the margin for error is a whole lot less than it is at 110mph. Just my 2 cents on this, TOM WISHON -----Original Message----- From: Bernie Baymiller [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2003 7:52 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Re: ShopTalk: Stirring the pot.... Pat, >They claim he can accurately identify the current crop of hot faced drivers vs older models (without looking at them) by listening to the sound they make as he rubs the sole on the grass. Certainly a simpler test than the one which the USGA has come up with. :-) Bernie Writeto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
