The Golf Entrepreneurs: Striking It Rich with Metalwoods

Every year, there are people who show up with new products and new ideas to help golfers play better, look better, feel better. It’s time we gave them their due.

In the first three parts of this series, we pay tribute to those who really did take their ideas from conception to multi-millions of dollars. Then, we’ll review some newcomers who have ideas that they hope will make them overnight successes or at least millionaires.

First, there’s Gary Adams, who started TaylorMade Golf, Founders Club, and McHenry Metals. Not everyone will strike it rich in golf with a new product, but a few, like Adams, certainly inspired many more golf inventors and entrepreneurs to take a chance on their ideas.

Most of today’s golfers probably don’t know anything about Adams, but he popularized the modern metalwood, the Pittsburgh Persimmon driver under the umbrella of TaylorMade Golf.

The year, according to Taylormade Golf’s website, was 1979, but I first met Adams some years later, in the mid-1980s, at a breakfast during the PGA Show where the sale of his company to Salomon was being announced.

Gary Adams, as it turned out, had a product that was gaining traction and making sales, but he needed more money to expand and grow.

The Salomon company wanted to add other sports to its product line and to become more than a one-season sporting equipment company.  ( They were ski specialists.) Golf, with three seasons, was their answer. But it all started a few years before that.

In the 1970s, we don’t know when, Gary Adams met a man named John Zebelean who had created a homemade metal wood.  He was intrigued, and Adams’ inventor brain cell started working overtime. In those days, he was working for Wittek, a company that made products for driving ranges.

Coincidentally, Surlyn golf ball covers had been invented in the late 1960s and came into popular use a short time later.

Eventually, Gary Adams created his own metal driver, and in the process, discovered that he could hit a two-piece, surlyn golf ball farther with a metal driver than he could with a persimmon driver.  Adams’ tinkering led to the birth of his first metal driver, a 12-degree lofted club with a steel shaft, the first in the Pittsburgh Persimmon line.

Gary Adams debuted his new metalwood clubs at the PGA Show in 1979.

Some months later, he convinced golfers in the 1979 Club Professional Championship to try it.

Ron Streck was an early adopter and became the first PGA Tour pro to use the club. He won what was then the Michelob-Houston Open using it.

Once a Tour pro wins with a new kind of club, everyone takes a look at it, in case the winning will rub off on them.

Soon, Pittsburgh Persimmon clubs were being discovered by many golfers.  I know because my father had one. He was an early purchaser of anything new and improved in golf. He said he could hit the ball farther with the metal driver and showed his friends.

You have to assume that experience was multiplied all over the country. But the majority of the best players in the world were still using persimmon.

In the early 1980s, at the Walt Disney Classic, Mark O’Meara was using a metal wood on the range. It was the last tournament of the year in those days.  O’Meara said he was making the switch for one reason: he could hit 15 yards farther off the tee than he could with a persimmon club.

O’Meara, you’ll recall, was never a long hitter, but he was always a brilliant putter.  The additional 15 yards probably allowed him to hit one or two clubs less into greens.

At that time, the longest drivers on the PGA Tour still favored wood woods.  Convincing the longest drivers and golf traditionalists to hit metal woods was a tough sell. Many hung on until the mid to late 1990s.

According to the PGA of America, the last players to win majors using wooden drivers were Bernhard Langer at the Masters in 1993, Tom Kite at the U.S. Open in 1992, and Nick Faldo at the British Open in 1992.

To explain how long the hold-outs lasted, Justin Leonard switched to metal woods just before he won the 1997 British Open.  Davis Love III lasted a bit longer, until just before he won the PGA in 1997.

While the metal woods caught on because they hit the ball farther, they did have a downside at first.  They had a metallic ring to them when hitting the golf ball.  Adams solved that problem by putting a foam product in the interior of the hollow club.

However, sometimes after a lot of use, the foam would break off and rattle around inside the club, which was an annoyance. That happened to my dad’s driver, and he solved it by putting laundry detergent inside the clubhead.

But he got a permanent solution one season while he and my mom were driving from Illinois to Michigan for a vacation.  He took a side trip to the original TaylorMade facility in McHenry, Illinois, where he explained the problem to someone there who took his club and fixed it for him.

Turns out it was Gary Adams, because, when I told him the story, Adams said he remembered that club because of all the funny white fluffy stuff that just poured out of the driver. I laughed and told him what it was. He said it was a good solution.

Adams went on to create hollow cavity irons and other innovative clubs. Unfortunately, in 1991, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and everyone expected his life to end within six months.

However, Adams had what he called a near-death experience which included a dream where he was waking upside a FootJoy shoebox with a bright light at one end and then hearing a voice tell him to “go back” because he wasn’t done yet.  And he wasn’t.

Later that same year, having left TaylorMade, he created a new company called Founders Club.  Again, it was a metal wood company, and he was able to get Hale Irwin, Tom Watson, Curtis Strange, and Lee Janzen to use them.

In 1996, Gary Adams sold Founders Club, and most people thought that was it. But the next year, he began again.

At age 54, still looking frail and very thin, with his weight down from 170 to 119, he started McHenry Metals.

While other drivers had gotten bigger, he created a throwback style, traditional-sized driver out of titanium that became one of the hottest products in 1998.  It also became the top driver played on PGA TOUR Champions for 1999.  It was used on the PGA Tour in 1999 and 2000.

Then, two years after creating McHenry Metals, nine years after his first cancer diagnosis, Adams’ cancer returned, and he finally succumbed.  However, his near-death experience proved true.  He wasn’t done.  In addition, his legacy as an innovator and entrepreneur lives on.