hen Callaway set out to reimagine the driver in the late 1980s, we knew we needed to create something radically new that would signifi- cantly improve average golfers’ chances of hitting a good shot with their generally not-too-good swing. We needed a club with a larger sweet spot that remained stable at impact (particularly for off-centre hits), allow- ing the player to make more mistakes – a club that was forgiving. The
problem was fundamentally one of physics: We needed to make our existing driver-club- head design 25 percent bigger but not heavier (otherwise it would be too cumbersome to swing and more likely to break). We were willing to gamble that if we did that, we’d have a more satisfying club that would sell at a profit.
in the long run would be cheaper and make a better clubhead. I didn’t want to see any of this new technology or new designs until they were done, not even a drawing. I’m not a technical person, and I can’t visualise anything, so I didn’t want to see anything halfway through. All I wanted to see was the finished product so I could take it out and use it. Dick plopped down the first oversized stainless-steel clubhead on my desk in the summer of 1990. It wasn’t that big, but it was bigger than normal at the time. It was also ugly, but it pleased me in a way I couldn’t quite put into words. I told Dick to stick the head on a shaft so that we could take it for a spin. Dick and I tested our new driver that weekend at The Vintage Club in Indian Wells, California. The first time I swung it was on the 10th hole of the Mountain Course. I hit my first shot off the tee down the middle of the fairway. That was good, but it wasn’t the clincher: On my second shot, I hit the driver off the fairway, and the ball fired directly to the pin. As good a player as I was, I could not hit this kind of shot from the fairway. The trajectory as it rose into the air was more like a tee shot than an approach shot – it felt like it had been pro- pelled out of a cannon rather than ricocheting off the club face. Because of this feeling, the name of our new driver came to me almost immediately. It was not uncommon for people to name golf clubs after weapons – Spald- ing came out with a series of clubs called The Cannon in the mid-1980s. I remembered a reference book on artillery from my days in the army during World War Two. There was one image of a giant World War One German howitzer invented by Friedrich Krupp AG, the largest weapons manufacturer in Germany. The ref- erence book claimed this cannon shot artillery shells further and straighter than any other. German soldiers had bestowed the cannon with a peculiar nickname. I often went golfing with my son, Nicholas, and I brought the new Callaway driver to the Del Mar Coun- try Club one weekend, hoping I might impress him. I told him, “Nicky, we’re gonna bring out a new golf
We did not originate the oversized clubhead. Hisamitsu Ohnishi, the executive director of our Japa- nese distributor, Sumitomo, and one of the great fig- ures in golf in Japan, had introduced us to an oversized driver called the Yonex. This club was big in Japan, and Ohnishi thought it might do well to add this type of de- sign to Callaway’s repertoire. We liked the idea, but af- ter three weeks of trials, we determined the Yonex was not as good as our S2H2 driver. It didn’t feel as good, and it didn’t perform as well. Still, the idea of an over- sized clubhead was promising. This was a critical mo- ment: We could take the safe route and simply make an American knockoff of the Yonex and sell it right away or spend a lot of time and money finding ways to improve it. Some say it’s best to be first, but that’s a myth. Being first is always short lived. The key is to be first and the best. We chose to take our time and make the best. For- tunately for us, nobody else was interested in oversized clubheads, so we were going to be first no matter what. Our first problem was that the Yonex had a graphite head. Graphite was a composite material of carbon fi- bre and epoxy that could be stretched easily but was prone to scuffing and caving in. We thought, Let’s try to make it out of stainless steel instead, which is a stron- ger metal that could better hold its shape. A steel head would require developing a whole new casting technol- ogy – a technique to stretch the walls thin enough to make it big but sturdy enough to hold up on impact. I called up Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, and told him about this hot new idea we had and asked if anybody in his R&D department could lend us a hand. Welch said, “Let me put you in touch with my aircraft department.” My design team, led by Dick Helmstetter and our toolmaker, Glenn Schmidt, with help from GE’s science and technology people, crafted a new mould that could produce 100 000 stainless-steel clubheads without se- rious deterioration. Usually, the more you made, the more the quality of the heads would deteriorate over time, particularly with the size we were attempting. This mould cost twice as much as a regular mould, but
110 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
JUNE 2025
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