The guys from PING. They've kind of showed me how much the equipment matters. I just love that I can hit any shot.
I kind of want we're gonna be able to tell some fun stories about what goes on here to help golfers play better golf.
Well, welcome to the first episode of the Ping Proving Grounds Podcast. I'm Shane Bacon, joined by the vice president of Fitting and Performance Marty Jertsen. You might have heard the name. You might have to see him play and golf tournaments, made cuts in major championships in his career, and he's also built a whole bunch of golf clubs that you've played over the years. But before we kind of get into what we're going to talk about today, Marty, I
want to hear about you. I want to find out a little bit more about you and how you got into this business, how long you've been at PING, and what you've done over your years.
Yeah, Shan, I feel like I'm in a very lucky spot to combine what I'm passionate about along with my technical skills. So I grew up in Arizona, Phoenix area. Yeah, a little suburb globe, Arizona, Okay, a little small mining town, and the fact that it was a mining town is important because that's when I kind of learned about, you know, copper mining and going back to the connection to ping, we knew that from the supply chain, some of the copper that was mine there went into brillium copper irons.
They wanted to playing irons out of globe. So I grew up in that little small town love golf. Played golf, kind of turned it into my only sport, you know about high school timeframe, and I was always kind of a tier below some of the best players that grew up in Arizona, the Charlie Belgians and the chess reviews of the world. So I was always just below them, not quite good enough to play D one golf or if I did, you know, they weren't too excited about me,
you know, study engineering. So I went to the Corraail School of Mines, awesome school in Golden Colorado, played D two golf and was able to ski and do engineering and then got a little bit better at golf.
What year did you feel like you kind of switched like it switched on for you in college.
Yeah, So I started school in ninety eight and then year two thousand is when I kind of just got better. Okay, you know, I was playing a lot of amateur tournaments up there. I won the Colail Stadium, I played in the USGA pub links that did chess, actually won out of San Antonio, and that's where I was like, oh man. And I was playing the Colorado Open one year and one of my buddies was like, hey, what are you
gonna do when you graduate? You know, are you gonna go work in an oil and gas job on an oil rig like the rest of your guys or colleagues, or this could be your office and we're staying this beautiful course, sunning alp up in veil, and I'm like that sounds pretty good. That was the moment I was like, maybe I should try playing professional golf. And that kind of made my decision literally right there, or remember being on that range. I made that call.
So you get in, I mean, you go try to play, yep, and how many years did you try to play?
Not that long? And I think I was wise for doing that.
I have a similar story in terms of my many tour golf experiences, but my first ever Mini tour round, I shot sixty eight. I finished Birdie Birdie here in Phoenix, and I was in like thirty eighth place I shot sixty eight. I was like on Cloud one hundred, you know, and you go, oh, I'm five back. Okay, maybe this isn't what I'm what I should be doing.
Welcome to the Gateway Tour. You know. I did Monday into my very first I think it was a buy dot Com time, you know, corn Fair event today, and I was like, oh man, this is going to be easy. I got this thing made. But I went to Q school and I just kind of petered out, you know, too much pressure on myself and all that stuff. And I made the call right away to quote unquote retire from trying to chase the game professionally as my full
time deal. And then I started working at Pining kind of part time work in manufacturing, and kind of through a friend of a friend, got in got in the door.
What year is this?
This around two thousand and three, okay, so kind of got in the door. And when I decided to hang it up from playing full time, which was which was quick, I started. I moved into the design group here and started shadowing under some of the other engineers and kind of learning the trade, you know, and that's how we bring on new engineers. Now, it's kind of this apprenticeship model of studying under some of the more senior designers.
So when did you feel like you had this let's call it a vision of building golf clubs, because I mean, I know, you start off on a certain level and you're trying to work your way up, but not everybody's going to be able to kind of think their way through that business and actually kind of conceptualize golf clubs in general. How did that begin for you?
Yeah? It wasn't like I went to college thinking, oh, right, be a golf club designer. I was kind of intimidated by how do you even get in the industry? I mean, and I knew the industry and the grand scheme of things is relatively small compared to the oil and gas or automotive or aerospace where most you know, mechanical engineers go.
So you know, I kind of got lucky, you know, and then once I got in the door here, there was so much opportunity your colleagues that, you know, like that's where the curiosity about making golf clothes better really flourished is being in this environment. Being inside, you know, is where it is really where you know, for me, I've flourished and being able to ask questions or explore a certain area I was curious about.
It's it's wild walking around the grounds here at pain because you run into somebody that's been here for thirty nine years, and nineteen years and fifteen years and forty years in some cases. It's that environment that kind of lends itself to people wanting to stay around.
Yeah. I think the culture is awesome here, you know, and I think you, Shane, you're going to since that, you know, spending time here, being around here, meeting employees, whether it's in production, whether it's in engineering, whether it's administrative, marketing,
what have you. It's it's that culture and it's not we're not rested on, you know, things we've done in the past where we're loyal to our heritage, we know what God is here, we know our core principles, but we're not afraid to take chances, try things that are going to fail. And that's that's exactly what we do here on the proving grounds, which is where we're sitting today.
And you continue to play and you're still very good. And how old are you now?
Yeah? Forty two? You're forty two? Have you?
I know, once you turn thirty, just lose track of what age you are well, And that's I mean, I get confused. I've been off by two years at times before, which is very sad. You still play and you're still very competitive, and you played in multiple major championships, You've made a cut in a major champions You've played in PGA Tour events. Are you better now at your age than maybe you were it twenty one twenty two? Trying to chase it?
Definitely? And I think, yeah, I think about that a lot, like why am I better now? I got a family, I work forty plus hours a week and all these things, and.
Your boss is near, say sixty hours, it's.
Sixty seventy eighty hours a week. I have done that at times. You got a big design deadline, you got to you gotta ramp it up a little bit. But I'm just way more efficient with my practice, my training. Obviously, I have access to some knowledge here that we're going to share on this pod, so that to the everyday golfer of some things that can be helpful from a
performance equipment training, when green reading, what have you. I just have embraced like just trying to learn more about this sport, every single aspect, every aspect of it, whether it's design, training, fitness, equipment, strategy, stats, And I've tried to just kind of it's kind of like compound interest. You know, over all that time you just kind of added up. And even though I'm practicing less than ever, I am probably you know, still better than I've ever been.
Yeah, find an efficiency when you do have the time away from the kids, in away from work to actually spend forty five minutes on the driving range doing something that's actually got to be effective because we've all spent you know, spent two hours on the range. You have absolutely no idea what you did those two hours.
Yes, what are you doing? Actually having too much time is a bad thing, you know. I think you can get better with less time.
Yeah, that whole perfect practice makes perfect in general. So for people that don't know me, I mean, I've been in the media world. I've worked a lot of golf jobs in my life. I mean I've I've picked the range in East Texas.
Back in the day, I.
Watched golf carts. I've worked in a pro shop, I've been outside service, I've i caddied both professionally. I caddied for SMELLPJ friends of mine. My first ever caddy job was here in Phoenix at Papago. We made the cut, by the way, it was a very very good moment. And out of college, cadid at Saint Andrew's. But yeah, my journey has always been kind of my adult journey has been in and around golf.
I mean my whole life. I was a writer out of college.
I wrote for the student newspaper in two Soon I went to University of Arizona, tried to play, as I mentioned, did Gateway Tour, got my amateur status back as I learned very very quickly that professional golf is very very hard, and you've got to shoot low scores all the time. You can't go out there and shoot sixty five once in a while. You've got to shoot a lot of
sixty fives. And so got into the media space, was a writer, and then kind of got into the TV side, And yeah, I mean been podcasting and doing these types of things over the last few years, and very very excited to be a part of the Ping family with the Proving Grounds podcast and our kind of you know, our ability and our goal here is to share as much information as we can with people listening, because golf can be hard to understand, not just in terms of
playing it, but how fast it's growing and how much information and technology is involved in and around the game, and trying to simplify that is a very hard thing to do for people that are at home going wait, what does all this mean? And what are you guys talking about. I'm just trying to find a good driver exactly.
Yeah. I think it's making the complex simple because our products got more complex, got more nuanced, we're more targeted who we're designing for. But I think you hit the nail on the headshand we how do we simplify that message? And we're gonna be able to tell some fun stories about what goes on here to help golfers play better golf.
Yeah, I mean, we're gonna tell stories. We'll interview players. We'll have some interviews coming up very soon with some of the players and asking them their journey not just through golf, but kind of in their experiences with ping and how it's gone and you know, things we've learned, and golf clubs they've used, and maybe things that have changed in their game simply by proving things here on the grounds. And that's something I wanted to ask you.
You hear the turn proving grounds and obviously you see it on the podcast.
What does that mean here at Ping?
Yeah, so proving grounds is exactly where we're sitting today. So we're sitting on the test field. This is our driving range. We've evolved this a lot over the years. I think the early days we had ultrasonic sensors out on the range that measured where the balls were landing. We have weather stations you can see right over there as an antonometer, real time weather station. We're collecting tons of data all the time. I think we look over there,
we have our player test going on. So if you're an employee at Ping, you get scheduled on your outlook calendar, show up at the range at eleven o'clock. You better not be late, get warmed up, bring your golf shoes, and we focus you in on a specific test design. Right That's where we validate our new product designs over there, so we runt tons of player testing. We have decades worth of data from player testing, and it's everything we
do on the R and D side as well. So we have our ping putting lab that we use not only to fit players from a putting standpoint, but we run a lot of tests in there. We have a putting robot in there covers our robot like our ping man robot. And we have the bay there. We call that kind of the flight in collision depot. Okay, so that's where we can hit golf. We can hit balls
on our robot to validate our new product designs. We have a machine you took a look at it called the sling Man, so that we can use that to test aerodynamics of golf balls, right, which is really fun. And the and our our ding Man, which is our durability machine, is where we make sure our products durable.
Right.
So all of these little pieces kind of go into the proving grounds. We have the Gold Putter Vault.
Uh.
We have ping works where we build all of our tour players equipment uh in Ping works in our R and D area. So all that umbrella here is where we're sitting. So is where we test and develop new product We test and develop new fitting tools. Where we test and fit with our tour players, and we try things out, we prove them. We're not afraid to fail here, and we have a culture of learning and that keeps driving the innovations.
Marty, you mentioned tour players a couple times, but I mean the average golfer is not a tour player, and PING is speaking to the average golfer more than it is somebody that can play like Victor Hovelin. When you guys have employees come through and you're testing out in new equipment, how important is it to get a five handicap and a handicap and a fifteen handicap here on the proving grounds to hit some golf shots and see what a regular in theory golfer looks like versus maybe a tour player.
Yeah, Shane, that's crucial. Like for example, I mean, what would the point of Victor Hoblin hitting? Are our lightweight SFT driver? Right? We have to get the golfer archetype that's going to fit into that product. And we have the entire spectrum of skills and handicaps that are employees here at PING. You know the eight hundred plus employees. We know different handicap groups. We have them all measured
in our three D motion capture system. We know people who are over the top and they're not even going to work on it and try to fix it. So if we're developing a product targeted for them, we can cherry pick that group of golfers, get them down the range and prove it with them. Make sure make sure the product that we're designing for meets the requirements and is going to be better than its precessor.
There's history involved here.
I mean, it's twenty twenty three and you're looking at very very new equipment and drivers that you know, if you looked at it in nineteen eighty people would have like blown their minds seeing some of the new equipment. But I mean it's been a big part of the history of ping here in terms of fitting players for exactly what they need. And that's really the essence of what this company has been about.
Yeah. Absolutely, it's that marriage of great designs in a perfect fitting. Right. It's almost like you know a ven diagram, right, you got great designs and then you have great fitting where you can play your best golf is where you marry those two.
You guys want to live in that in that overlap.
Yeah, you want to marry that together. And that's what we want every golfer to have access.
To tell me about the story about this place because you look around here and you see a range, and you see a lab, and you see all of this stuff, and it seems like it's just continually expanded because this is where you know, what, are we two hundred yards away from the first ever building? How has this expanded in your time here?
Yeah? Just a lot of time, technology, a lot of technology. I mean, I think we're looking at a brand new short game area that we just built a couple of years ago. So that's brand new, and we want to have an area that we could prove our wedges to develop a game like fitting protocol that we have people folks evaluate their shortcame right. So we're constantly upgrading the facility and the technology. The putting lab was not even built when I started here, right, So we developed the
putting lab. Camera technology, we've added launch monitors have come a long way since we first started kind of developing product and advancing all the technology that's at the proving grounds. So we're constantly upgrading the facility. Technology is always advancing our three d motion capture system is only about a decade old, and we've used that to generate a ton of insights. But with that we've had to have new
skill sets of employees. I think the people is what makes the difference here at the proving grounds and with our company. We've developed this culture where the people are cure. You come in, you go play golf on the weekend, you have a frustration with a certain issue, you come into the office on Monday morning, and you're motivated to go solve that problem, right, And that's the culture here.
It's interesting because we've talked to a lot of employees over the last couple days in terms of that mix, because you want to have a plus handicap golfer that has played at the highest level, and you also want to have people that don't play golf at all, and you want to mix that in terms of what you're going to get out of the best possible employees.
Is that mix.
You talk about a ven diagram of really two different camps. And so you're going to go out and play golf on Saturday and you come back on Monday and go this ball, did this weird thing off the face of my club?
Let's figure out why.
And you can lean on people that don't understand what a flyer is and don't understand what hitting a golf shot fat is, but they understand the science behind what you're talking about.
Yeah, we have some great meetings where we have synergy. Some of our funnest meetings are PhDs literally, you know, aeronautical engineers PhDs and astrophysicists that are in a room with folks like me. I'm an engineer too, but I'm like, I'm bringing in my golfer perspective, right, and the conversations we have are so healthy that they can take a look at it from a very what's called a first principle standpoint, like what is the physics of what's going
on here? How can we get down to that? Having that level of understanding, then you got me on the other end, wearing my golf hat where I'm like, hey, I don't know why it happened, but let's figure it out. If this happens a lot, right, you know, and this is a big problem for the golfer.
What are we trying to accomplish with this podcast? In your mind, what is the point of this and what are you hoping that the listeners get out of this.
Yeah, I would love to empower the listener, educate them on what goes on at the proving grounds, and help empower them on what's important for them to go look at when they're evaluating new equipment. Right, And I think, Shane you said it really goes make the complex simple, don't be intimidated by the fitting process. Give them some very important insights. What do you look for when you're
going to evaluate new equipment? And then understand some of the cool you know, tools and technologies, get some really fun stories of how we solve those golf problems, like what's the engineering insight and then how do you evaluate that in the fitting process, and you know everything in between learning from our tour players and being able to interview some experts in some key areas and go deep on a few topics. I think we're gonna go We're gonna have fun going deep on some physics topics.
Some personal questions for you. You've been around for a while, what's your single favorite ping club ever made? And you can't, I mean, you can say the latest stuff, but I'd like you to get a little deeper in this history.
You know what I'm saying.
I so I kind of trust my instinct on this one. I would say the answer putter, okay, because it's the most copy putter in golf, and it put us on the map as a brand. The answer putter, Gotta go with that one.
You've been involved in a lot of clubs. You've been a lot of a lot of like innovative work. I mean, the Targulators are something you worked very hard on. Is there a club that you're the most proud of that you've been a part of in your time here at Ping?
Who?
Man? I think a couple fun ones come to mind. I mean my first one was fun. The Rapture Hybrid. Okay, the last driver I was.
You were telling me.
You were telling me the first time you saw the Rapture Hybrid and a store. I mean you were like almost like an author with their book, you know, and diplay stand aby it, pointing people towards the hybrid.
Watching them look at it, watching them go hit in on that.
I can get that for you.
I still get goosebumps kind of thing about that moment. You know, that was really fun. The G four I worked on the G four ten driver in the G thirty. So I would say the G thirty was probably my favorite because that was when we brought in turbulators for the first time. That was a fun project to give folks two miles an hour club at speed for free. When I say for free, I didn't have to sacrifice, make it smaller or do anything else, and they look cool.
Was really fun. And then we and that's really whenhere we brought that concept of three simple driver models to
the market. We had an s FT we kind of brought that concept to the market that turns over and then we introduced the lst LS tech at the time is kind of what we called it in it not only did have turbu but it had this kind of scratchy face on it which reduced the spin and so that driver had a ton What really put us on the map in terms of being a driver company, and that's kind of what we're you know, we're very strong in drivers right now and that that kind of started it.
What's the oldest club you currently have in your bag and what's the newest club you've put in your bag?
Oldest club would be my potter. I gotta catch, I gotta catch long putter I've probably been using that thing like five years, okay, five or six years.
Does it ever get taken out? Does it ever get part closet?
Oh? Yeah, okay, that thing goes in the closet. I think every every every player puts their putter in the closet for a little while. Uh so that thing, that thing's in there. And I had to make some modifications with with the anchoring rule and all that stuff to shorten it, tweak the liingole a little bit. But I got that thing pretty dialed. And then newest one in the bag, newest one G four thirty Driver and three wood, and I'm absolutely loving both of them. Driver is my favorite.
Oh, I've been obsessed. I've been obsessed. I think I ten yards with the four thirty.
It's so good.
Yeah, when you're you're so, what's going on in terms of things here at ping? You know what's coming down the pipeline. How hard is it not to always be tweaking the bag? How hard is it for you to be content with what you currently are playing?
Yeah? No, it is tough. It is tough. I've tried to almost put a little rule for myself, like, hey, let's get fit early in the season. My season is like US opened locals generally speaking, until you know our section championship.
You're thinking like maybe like late April, early May, basically through September.
Yep, okay, exactly through September. So in the winter I'll tinker around with all kinds of stuff, you know, go out there in the winter. But then I kind of say, hey, this time of year around you know, March April timeframe, let me get my clubs dialed and not and give myself permission to tweak them a little bit, but let's not stray too far. And we have a lot of tour players that are like that. They'll come in at the beginning of the season and get pretty well dialed.
They'll make a little micro tweaks throughout the year, but they won't do anything too exotic or too crazy.
What's the wildest thing a tour player has asked to have built over the years of you being here in terms of a club loft, Maybe something that you would have never in a million year's thought where player might be interested in having in their bag.
Oh man, that's a good question, I think. I mean. We were talking to Christian Pana, our tour rep the other day about high loft at fairwy woods, and we've built like Daniel Chropra built in elwood ellwood, like lobwood yel for lob that he used in the major championships to gouge it out of the rough. So I was a little bit shocked by that.
I mean, is that, like, what what's the loft on an elle?
I think that thing had thirty loft right and in kind of a knife's edge, and but he I remember he hit it out of the rough and could just gouge it out there. So that one was kind of shocking. But we've had a lot of interesting requests over the years, but it comes from their own friction, like hey, I'm out playing the rain, I see this happened, or what have you? Hey, help me solve that problem.
You mentioned playing the US Open at wing Foot back in twenty twenty and you said players are hitting some thirty two percent of the fairways. Yeah, and you were thinking yourself, more loft on a wood helps, you know what.
I feel like, that's that's a thought.
Maybe not every golfer would have and that instance, but you know, you mentioned l wood in seven Woods and even nine Woods at times for tour players, it's so interesting how you can change and tweak your bag slightly depending on the golf course and what that golf course is asking.
Yeah, absolutely, I mean wing foot, you get in the rough there?
Holy, I find your off ball first?
Yeah, yes, correct, hopefully.
There's a spot there. Yeah, exactly, good caddy.
Yeah, So you know, the PG the majors are next level, even for the tour players. You get to a major and they have to do things very different that the everyday golfer. You'll never even need that, you would never even need to be in that type of scenario, but you'll get. You get players like Victor Hovelin putting a seven wood in the bag for two holes at Augusta this year, and they were awesome. You know, on thirteen
and fifteen. He hit him like when I was watching, it seemed like every round and he hit on the green you know, a bunch of times and made a bunch of birdies on those two holes. If he would have been hitting his normal driving iron, he'd be toasted on those two holes.
So interesting to watch the tour players switch week to week. Yeah, I mean, obviously they have so many information about their golf games. And they can gain some information about what works best for golf courses in particular. But I always find that so fascinating. You always we creep up closer to the open and everybody move into that drive and Iowa, everybody's.
Trying to get sound low and find the fairway.
Yeah, so you know, a lot of times it's it's the three wood hybrid, driving iron, seven wood, nine wood. They're just mixing and matching, depend on the conditions and occasionally they're changing the bounce in or grind on their on their wedges right specific to those conditions.
Yeah, very very interesting.
As you can see, we're outside, it's nice, it's it's it's relatively warm in Phoenix. You can check out everything if you follow Ping on social. All these clips will be on video and things like that, and also on YouTube. That is Marty Jerts and I'm Shane Bacon. This is the Ping Proving Grounds Podcast.