DAVE et al: I can add a little to this.
First of all, you are right about Scott Verplank's asking price going up and being the main reason that GS was not able to re-sign him. It was not sky high considering he had become a Top 20 money winner at the time and a Top 30 Sony ranking player but it was more than what the decision makers wanted to pay him. However, he is currently on contract with Taylor Made and signed that deal the year after he left the GS contract - he just makes a little more from splitting the bag contract away from the hat contract. And for Taylor Made that was a way to save some money in signing him to play their clubs and carry the bag. These days on the tour, the top players can command as much or more from the hat contract as they can from the bag and clubs. The reason is obvious. The name on the hat is seen on TV far more than the name on the bag or the clubs. And as you have seen, even the caddies have been able to make a little money from hat contracts themselves because they too are often seen on TV when they are close to their player. On club contracts, most of the companies today have a minimum number of their branded clubs that the player has to use. Minimum on that is 8 clubs, but there are a few who will insist on 12. In addition, for the past 5-6 years there has been a weekly payout by the larger companies for pros to carry their driver, which as you know is a "glamour club" in the bag and on the weekly Darrell Survey count. So it is common knowledge on the tour that if you are not in the Top 50 but on the tour playing regularly, you can make anywhere from an extra $1000/week to $2000/week if all you do is stick one of these companies' drivers in your bag just for the one day that the Darrel Survey people do their count - usually Friday of any weekly tournament. It is well known on tour that there are players out there who want the extra money who will drop some long iron from the bag on Fridays to add in the driver for the money but keep their favorite driver in the bag to play with. If you happen to be a new company with a new model that you hire a tour rep to push on tour, if a player hits your club and likes it, the next question will always be "how much will you pay me to play/carry this club". So as a small company if you are not ready to fork over some real cash on a weekly basis, your club won't get used. Yes, every once in a while there might be a pro who likes a new club so much that he will play it with no payout, but this is far more rare these days on tour than it was even 5-10 yrs ago. The trick is to get your club(s) out there - about the only way for a new/small company to do that is to pay one of the independent tour sales reps to do that. And since these guys know that they are a limited commodity out there, they ask for anywhere from $50K to $100K to do that. And if you fork over the cash for that representation, you do it with the knowledge that each one of these independents has somewhere between 4 and 8 lines/companies that they are handling. Thus how much time your line/models get in the short time that these guys can talk the talk to the players on the practice range is very little. And what's more, you have to realize how little the tour reps know about equipment. What they all have in common is that they are salesmen who have the gift of gab to be able to get time with any of the pros on the practice range. So if a pro hits one of your clubs and the shaft, length, swingweight/MOI, face angle, loft, etc happen to not be perfectly matched to that pro, the pro will likely hit it 3-4 times, tell the rep that this is not any good and then the rep starts to think that because this club is new or from a company with no reputation on the tour, it must be a bad club. Thus he stops promoting it to players because he does not want to get a reputation among the pros for "passing out bad clubs". So it's real tough out there on tour to promote and land a new model with all of this going. The public unfortunately has no idea about all that goes on out there in this area of "paid to play". TOM -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dave Tutelman Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 8:28 AM To: ShopTalk@mail.msen.com Subject: Re: ShopTalk: Re:Heavy Putter At 05:08 PM 5/13/2005, Jeremy Ingle wrote: >Lets also apply a little bit of logic to to my other question about it >not being played on the PGA tour. Surely the best recomendation for any >piece of sporting equiptment is its use by the best players in the world >for any sport (taking due account of the fact that some players are paid >large sums of money to play with crap stuff ( ie Tiger Woods with the >first Nike drivers) Sorry to burst your bubble, but let's review some facts: (1) Very few players on the big tour are playing clubs that they aren't paid to play. And the higher you get in the rankings, the more entrenched is that truth. (2) The pros are, more often than not, playing stuff that has been modified considerably from what you can buy. Stock Nike irons and stock Callaway irons are probably more similar than either of them is to what any given Nike or Callaway pro plays. Have you ever seen the "pro shop" area of the major manufacturers' plants? Or walked inside one of the tour vans? It's an education. >Conversely if no one is using a certain piece of equiptment there must be >a reason -- put simply most likely that it's no good >or just possibly that nobody knows about it. Or, just possibly, you're dealing with a company (like Heavy Putter, or TourSwing, or Tom Wishon, or... pick just about any component company here) that doesn't have the budget to pay a big-time star. If you look at the lesser tours (Nationwide, Senior, the Mini-Tours, the long drive tour [for drivers, anyway]) there may be a little more truth to your premise. But just about all the players in the "big show" are kept shills. Perhaps a bit of an overstatement, but not by much. Little anecdote here: One year in the late '90s, Scott Verplank had a really good year, including two wins. At the time, he was a user of Golfsmith clubs. (Which means he was a paid endorser; he had "Golfsmith" across the front of his hat.) After that year, he became a "free agent" for clubs. His market value for endorsement went above what Golfsmith could afford, and they never really entered the bidding. Interestingly, his asking price was apparently more than the major companies were willing to risk on him; they probably wanted to wait to see if it was a one-time thing, and he was never a big audience favorite anyway. I think he's still without a club sponsorship deal; his hat space is occupied by a non-golf company. His only endorsement money for clubs probably comes from the Darrell-check bonuses. >Of course the best way to choose a piece of equiptment is to try it Finally, words of sense! DaveT -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. 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