The Golf Entrepreneurs: The Baffler That Begot Cobra

The late Tom Crow, who was an excellent player from Australia, started Cobra Golf in 1973 with the goal of making clubs for regular players, not touring professionals. Although he did not take up the sport until he was 18, he made quick progress.

Crow won the Australian Amateur Championship in 1961, perhaps the crowning achievement of an amateur career that included 20 club championships.  He still, according to available data, holds the West Course record at Royal Melbourne with a 63.  He shot it in 1956.

In 1962 and 1964, Crow played for Australia in the Eisenhower Trophy competition. Then, sensibly, he went to work for a golf club manufacturer. But it just wasn’t what he wanted to do.  He thought he could make better clubs than the ones he’d been using or selling.

In 1973 he founded Cobra Golf and in 1975 moved to Southern California to follow his dream. Either in 1974 or 1975, depending on the source, Crow debuted a club that would become a friend to more amateurs than anyone could imagine.

It was so user-friendly that it was one of Dinah Shore’s favorite clubs, and she was, by all accounts, an average but enthusiastic 22-handicapper who didn’t start playing until she was in her 50s.

The club had a name that could have been out of a Batman movie.  It was called The Baffler.

The idea for The Baffler, featuring a sole plate with rails, came to Crow when he was watching catamarans skim across waves in Sydney Harbor.

He applied the concept to a utility wood, to keep it from digging into the turf. Mid-handicappers loved it because it was easy to get the ball into the air using the Baffler.  They also loved it because it was great for getting balls out of the rough.

In fact, the Baffler became so popular that it is still used today. The Baffler design concept has been extended to other woods and also to hybrids.

However, that certainly wasn’t the only innovation at Cobra Golf.

In the late 1970s, Cobra was first to have a 46-inch golf shaft.  At the time, standard was 43 inches.

Cobra Golf, in 1985, was the first to make graphite-shafted clubs available in stock sets for the general public.

But two things happened in 1991 that brought them a new level of acclaim.

First, John Daly won the PGA.  During that tournament, he was using an unusual white driver which had been specially made for him by Cobra.  As Tom Crow explained it to me at a subsequent PGA Merchandise Show, Daly hit the ball so hard that he was crushing regular driver faces.

Crow created something for him that he wouldn’t destroy, at least not for a few rounds.  It was called Ultramid.  But the head was actually made from Kevlar, the stuff in bullet-proof vests. Its popularity was perhaps not as great at The Baffler, but it was designed for just one person.

Sometime during 1991, Greg Norman signed on with Cobra becoming a player of the clubs as well as an investor in the company. Both of those events, Daly’s victory with the Ultramid and Norman’s investment, created more visibility for Cobra products than ever before.  The company went on to create the first oversized irons, later called King Cobra.

Today, Rickie Fowler, Lexi Thompson, Bryson DeChambeau, Jason Dufner, and Andrew (the Beef) Johnson are among pros who use Cobra clubs.

DeChambeau threw them a curveball when he asked for one length irons, but the company, to their credit, created a set like that, and now they sell them.

Crow died in 2020, but left a legacy of innovation in golf.

Cobra has been owned by Puma since 2010.