Episode 27: In the Archives (Feat. Rob Griffin)

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.

Welcome back to the Ping Proving Grounds podcast. I'm Shane Bacon. That is Marty Jertsen, and this is a very very important thing to tell you off the bat. If you're listening to the podcast, pause the podcast for a moment and then open it back up on YouTube, because I will say, Marty, it's gonna be a visual medium. Today. Rob Griffin is with us. We are in the archive room. Rob, this is where I would say the magic happens, but

Well, I've been at Ping since nineteen eighty six. I did leave for three years, but I came back. And when I started, I was the company's photographer, so I shot all kinds of stuff for the company, tour events. I thought I was going to shoot a lot of tour events turned out. I was shot more product okay than anything. But then I left in two thousand and two. I came back in two thousand and five. My hair had turned white, so they said I could be the historian.

That was all it took. On the rest today, Yeah, it's gotten a little wider. You can do. You can get the archive room, you can have that. What what are the club's day back to? I mean you're talking like I was looking around as before we got going, and I was picking out clubs I played when I was a junior golfer. What year are some of these clubs dating back to?

Well as far back as maybe late fifty eight, nineteen fifty nine.

Unbelievable.

And how many there are in here? I don't know.

Exactly, but you can guess.

I guess, yeah, there's more than a few thousand, okay. And we actually have three other rooms over in another building, and in one of those rooms is full of clubs.

So there's what year do they push you? Do they push you to that room like on an office space situation.

Oh yeah, but that's over there where there's no there's no heater cooling.

That's right, Okay, Okay, you don't want to be there in the summer.

You don't want to be there in the summer. But that's where most of the wooden woods are actually, which is not a good maybe not the best thing, but that's where most of the wooden woods.

Are rob I think one thing that US engineers have heard a lot of stories about through the family, through John Solheim when we're working on product development, is about Carston the originator. Give a little insight to the listener about him, maybe some of the fun pro I mean, I love looking at some of the from fun prototypes that he made or welded together, tried, you know, had his technicians go make real quickly. Give us a little insight into Carston and what made him tick. Well.

Carsten's whole thing was he was trying to make the game of golf easier for the average player. That was his whole goal in life was to build a golf club that would make the game easier to play. He was a great problem solver, always trying to think how to improve his golf club or design a new putter, things like that. So you know there's a driver up here that's the square stainless steel square driver, and you know he just wanted to see how will that work?

I mean, but I mean you're talking about a square driver that was built in the nineties, yeah.

Or probably sometime in the early nineties and.

The early nineties. So, you know, you think about the innovation of golf and how we go through these ebbs and flows with certain designs. I mean, Marty's been, you know, so influential in that over the last twenty twenty five years. But some of the things that you have on these ricks, I mean, you're showing me an upside down putter from years ago. A lot of the ideas were just simply will this work or will this name?

Yeah, let's see what happens. You know, Alan even told me one time that when Alan had an idea, Carson would ask him, have you tried doing it? Just backwards of that, have you tried doing that? One hundred and eighty degrees just to see what happens.

Yeah, I think Carston was the originator of what we're still doing today, which is trying things fail and learn from your failures, right, And he really started us on that journey, rob And it is fun to look at all the well you could call it a failure, but quote unquote, you know, failures that are learnings that we've you know, continued to build upon.

Right.

Oh, absolutely, no, I mean, he he wasn't He wasn't afraid to fail. He wasn't afraid for something.

Not to work. How did the process of starting an archive room begin? Because I can only imagine you had a lot of these things laying around somewhere and you might as well display what you're saying, seventy years of golf clubs in this room, right.

Well, the way the original idea of this started in the mid nineties and we had a historian. Her name was don Wingert, and she had actually been John's assistant administrative assistant for a while quite a while, and so she became the first historian and she did a lot of great work. I fall back on stuff that she's found, and she kind of did the initial organization of it, and a lot of the putters that I have are because she went up to shipping and grabbed a bunch of putters.

You know, we need this for the archive, right, like.

These white putters over here, which we didn't sell very we hardly ever sold. I'm almost positive that she went up to shipping and then we're up there and she says, I'll take all those stuff like that. She really got to start, you know, She's the one that got it started. So much of what I have done since then, I've fallen back on stuff that she had done.

Rob.

I think one of the one of the things that a lot of people don't know about is how influential Louise was in uh the entire company, especially some of the the the naming of the answer putter. She was a lab technician for for in the research industry, well dynamics.

Actually she worked for Convert and she worked in the wind tunnel and her job title.

Was computer, just computer computer.

She was a math whiz, and so her job was to take the data that these engineers got from the wind tunnel and to somehow or other condense it into something they could really use. And that was you know, that's one of the jobs she had. And then later on when they were in New York, she actually worked for a government agency, the Dairy Board or something like that. And so, you know, she was very smart in terms

So is the story on that was it was drop a letter to make it fit on the putter? Was that how it went?

Yeah, so Carston, you know, Carston came home from the La Open in January of sixty six and Arnold Palmer's putter was the most popular putter out there at the time, the eighty eight oh two, and so Carston came home and he told Louise he needed to find an answer to Arnie's putter. So within days Carston had a drawing, he had a sample and it was get He needed to go to the engraver to have the plates engraved to put the name on the putter. This started a few days before he had to go, and he said,

One whiffs was considering what that name has done in the lineage of pain exactly.

So they went back and forth a couple of days, and then the morning that he was supposed to go, he had his appointment to go to the engraver. They woke up and you know, he said, you know, I still need a name for this putter. And she said, I told you call it the Answer. And he goes, well, that's too long. It won't fit. And she said, we'll drop the W. It'll sound the same anyway.

And there you go, and there you have it.

Yeah, how do you low? So you're talking initially in terms of archival stuff, it was go grab a club and let's put this to the side so we don't forget about this putter or this prototype. I'm assuming that process is a little bit more computerized if you will these days, how do you go about making sure every club from ping is in the room, every new club gets a spot in your room.

I placed an order just like a customer. Okay, that's literally what I do, because I had tried other ways. People would say, oh, yeah, I can get you that, I can get you that, and it never it wouldn't show up half the time. And so we just went to the idea of just well, place an order just like a customer.

And if you need a new driver, do you just place two? Is that's kind of how it goes. You just say I actually need two of those drivers for myself. It's what I'm saying. I just I got to have just an extra one just in case it doesn't quite work. It's not how it goes. They keep an eye on that.

My badge doesn't let me walk out the door.

Marty. When you look around this room, I mean you see clubs that you designed. How cool was that to kind of you know, see your clubs that you started as you know, mocking on a paper and working on a computer, to next to the square driver from the nineties or the white putters that maybe didn't make the team.

Yeah, it's it's incredible. And one of the funnest projects I had where you know, coming into the archives and learning and getting the history was working on the Answer iron. So we worked on a forged iron that had a milled cavity in the back, multi material and the original answer iron we're looking at over here. Rob can kind of tell the story of a little bit is getting some forge blanks and then Carston and Allen I think Alan worked on milling.

Yeah, Alan did all the milling on the forge. They'd get the forge blanks for the sixty nine irons, which was the first model that they did. We got the heads from golf Craft. Yeah, and golf Craft became titleist, but they got the heads from golf Craft. They get him here. Then Alan would mill out the cavities. It had a dual cavity that one did, and then you know, to Carston's design and then they would send they had to send the heads back to golf Craft to be chromed.

And that cavity made him more forgiving, giving higher moment of nursia. That's what I loved about Carson is A he was not afraid to try some wild ideas and B he thought from a physics based kind of first principles approach. Uh, Rob, I want to go back to that, Louise a little bit working in the wind tunnel, because fast forward to golf club design. Yes, we I'm looking at the turbulator design that we developed in a wind tunnel, right and having that kind of in our company DNA,

So, yeah, when Carson first decided he was going to build his own wooden wood, you're right, he wanted it to bey aerodynamic, Swing it faster, hit it farther was his idea, of course, and so he checked into you know, he had worked on his design, then he checked into having it tested in a wind tunnel. And there was two problems. One was it was expensive. The second one was the deal breaker, and that was it was going to be several months before they could get him in line to.

Have it tested.

And also if he had to do a redesign is still going to be longer after that. So Carson was not the most patient person in the world. So he decided he had figured out how to do his own wind tunnel testing. So what he did is he got ahead and he put a short shaft in it, and he attached spring gauge to it, kind of like you'd weigh a fish with only probably a little higher tech than that, but a spring gauge like a machinist might use.

Rob, do you look at Marty and you think he needs to do more of this when he's kind of testing out some of his new age stuff. Get behind the wheel of a car, let's get the get on a bicycle or a motorcycle and just see how passing go with the club in hand? Or do you like the way he goes about his business today?

As far as I know, he goes he knows what he's doing perfect.

As far as I know, Rob, we have so many unbelievable items. I know you've picked out a few that you really like. And a reminder to everybody watched this part of the podcast because it's going to be important, But do you have any clubs that you can pull out or any of the ones that you you know that you've pulled the side that are really notable.

Yeah, so I thought we'd talk about, you know, since the answer is the you know, best putter in the history of golf. And so this is the hand drawing he did for the answer. Putt it the first drawing.

This is his drawing.

This is his drawing. He did this drawing. And when I first saw the drawing back in the nineties, when they found it in his desk drawer and they brought it to me so I could photograph it and make copies. And when I first saw I thought, that doesn't look like an answer. It looks like the Ping pal to me. And then his second drawing he made two days later, and it's dated and signed.

YEP, January fourteenth, nineteen sixty six.

Right, and then witnessed the fifteenth and on this you know, so now it's starting to look a little different, the drawing does. And on this drawing it says sample made the fourteenth, January fourteenth, and so this is the sample that he made.

So this is from sixty six, I mean, this is the January.

Fourteen, sixty six. So this started out as a Ping sixty nine putter this head, and it even was drilled for a shaft already, so he just took one that was already drilled and then he modified it and braised or welded this answer style hozzle onto it. So's the that's the prototype for the answer.

Is this the most mimicked golf club in the world? Is that fair to say?

I think it is?

Okay?

Yeah, I think easily. And unfortunately nowadays a lot of people don't realize that Carston invented the answer design.

So we have the podcast that's we're doing this, that's why we're doing yellow people.

And so this is like one of the very first castings of the answer putter, and we know it's one of the first ones because the hozzle is much thinner than the answer is. Yeah, you can see that, and I think when they got their first casting they realize Carson really that when he put the shaft in and the ball bearing and he had to drive the ball bearing and it would bend this.

Yeah.

Yeah, So Marty is someone that does this now, you know, for your life's work, if you will, what is it like looking at things like this from the sixties, thinking what it must have been like, you know, for Carston and any designer out there having to go about their business and the sixties trying to make golf clubs.

I think in talking to Rob about the timeline of when Carston went out and realized there was a problem to solve looking at his brain, was thinking I could bring in some physics here to help the everyday golfer, right right, And how quickly he got that to market was is absolutely incredible.

Yeah, if you don't want me asking you, Marty, how long does it take you to go from idea of a golf club first look at it, and then it's to market? I mean, what's the timeline for you nowadays in twenty twenty three.

Yeah, I mean a lot longer than Carston got the answer out into players' hands. I mean a year, a year and a half, yeah, okay, yeah, somewhere in that timeframe, you know, for like a big scale project. But the fact that he could, you know, put so much effort, passion, and he could make things, get things done, do them and really bring in these physics principles of putting offset right.

Absolutely offset with such a I mean that's his innovation.

Yeah right, yeah, Rob, what's the let's call it the most unique golf club in the archive room. You could maybe go weirdest, you could go strangest, you could go most different. Now you didn't show me the upside down putter, which is my winner already. Okay, Well, because I just liked the idea of can we make it upside down? Sure?

This is probably the This is what a lot of collectors feel as the holy grail of ping collectibles. Okay, this is the Ping trainer.

Uh this what's the do you know?

Do you know roughly a year for this?

This would be from like sixty two three. Okay, there's supposed to be. This one's not quite complete. It doesn't have there's a wire that comes to a point back here, okay, and there's two movable weights here. The idea of the trainer is that where the wire comes to a point, you put a piece of like felt, and you dip it in ink, and then on butcher paper you hit

Just a bummer. We don't have like video like we have video today of this. I mean, what an unbelievable video this would have been of just like adding the lead. I just love the creativity of how can we find a solution to a problem? Right, and I mean just hearing the stories is basically his life work was finding solutions into a problem. Exactly.

So the trainer he came out with in sixty two so that he could people could see what he had seen, you know when he did this. And also he called it the trainer because he suggested that people put the weight in the center and hit putts, and then after they do that for a little bit, then move it to the heel and toe and they'd see how much better it was.

Yeah, And so you know.

I think he was thinking he might could do this with a putter, but then he turned out, of course you can't have you couldn't have movable weights. Then yeah, say so, But it became the trainer. It sold for twenty two fifty It was in the ads and the magazines and stuff, and he only made one when somebody ordered one.

And so.

A few years ago once sold at auction for twenty two thousand, five hundred dollars.

Wow. Yeah, and it's it.

Literally, I don't we don't know how many he made. My guess is it's less than twenty.

Okay, yeah, so you say, holy grail. It's really the holy grail. I mean, there's not many of these things.

Collect for pink collectors. This is one of This is kind of the holy grail.

Yeah.

Carson was such a great storyteller, and he found very unique ways to show the value of the physics that he's uh right, he's bringing in.

Yeah, I'm always yeah, you know, he would show the one a putter. Uh, he would demonstrate that to people with two sugar cubes and popsicle sticks.

Yeah, exactly, A little you do a little more than that, now, Marty, I think.

Or or you know the bonamic shaft. Yep, yep, the ball namic shaft. He would demonstrate to people with a paper clip. He would take a paper clip and bend it like the balamic shaft to show him how the balnamic shaft worked.

I mean, I mean, Marty, like, we've talked so much about innovation in terms of what you're doing now, and I mean, I'm so impressed with kind of the ping's ability to push the app world forward. I just think that what you guys have done and what's coming has been very, very impressive because you're trying to solve a problem. Yeah, for the golfer at home, the technology is there, but

Absolutely. We us and engineering. We talk about that all the time, and I think it's shows the importance of a lot of us that are designers are working on the product. We play golf, we feel the pain of the game or just like Carston and we're trying to come in and solve those you know, it's kind of personal. We want to if we could solve it for us, we can solve it for everybody. So we draw a lot of inspiration from that, and it's it's weaved into the fabric of the company.

I mean, John encourages people like Marty and young engineers to come in here, yeah and look around, just just look, you know, yeah.

Ask some full ideas away. What's interesting is you were showing me before we got going. I mean there's seven woods and drivers over there that are fifty inches long, fifty five inches long that are probably thirty years old, right, yeah.

I mean yeah, so yeah, we have Weggie Winchester's five foot long driver, but you just win the long drive content back in the early eighties five foot long.

Yeah, yeah, real, Yeah, we're still trying to figure out driver length fitting today. You know what's the sweet spot of how long should you well that ever goes.

Ex Stan Marty, we'll ever get to a place where it's where USGA says it can go longer than what is it forty five right now? Forty four and a half.

Yeah, well it's forty six is the condition of competition rule, but usually that's only in play PGA Tour events and things of that nature, but still remains at forty eight. So there are a good number of golfers that do good with over forty six inch driver because our drivers are so forgiving from a moment of inertia standpoint, Rob. One thing I wanted to ask you about was the

Right, that's that's that's a good question. We'll talk about the shaft first, the ballnamic shaft. So the balnamic shaft is actually have a con It has a compound bend and it's right here. It's kind of under the grip. It bends towards the player and away from the target, and so it's actually easier to see looking from the other end, so you can see how it bends. And just like you were talking about offset, yeah, Carstan's idea was this aligned the player's hands with the ball, not

Yeah.

And you can actually if you do this yourself, you can feel you can feel that in your fingers. You can actually feel the vibration, the vibration change. So that's the balnamic shaft. And so one of the first people to play this club with the balnamic shaft was Joel Goldstrand, and he told a story about you know, he got his set of clubs with the shaft balnamic shaft, and

Say, yeah, kind of an answer in more than one way, right, yeah, exactly, Rob. Do you have a favorite club in here, like you personally have one? Maybe it's just maybe it's a different looking club. Maybe it's one that not many people know much about. Is there one here that kind of stands out to you?

Boy?

I don't know if I have a favorite club. I know the most favorite club that people like to like to see when they come in. WHOA is a croquet putter?

You know what? I'm not an engineer that hasn't been in the shaft. Yes, it does almost positive.

So Carston did this bend himself with heat. He had to use heat to get it to bend like this, and see if I can get it to Well's stand up on the right, stand up by itself.

Yeah.

So yeah, so this was you know, croquet putting was pretty popular there for a while, and one of the reasons the USGA changed the bend and chef rule was croquet putting.

That was part of it.

And they also put in the rule that you couldn't straddle the line. Yes, yeah, but yeah, so this is I don't know if it's my favorite, but it's when people come in and I show them things.

This is a big hit. One thing to notice on this is the.

The pistol grip.

Pistol grip yep. So give us a little insight into how that came to be. See that, Shane, I see this bad boy.

It's heavy too.

Yeah, it is heavy. So Carston's first putter's uh, the Redwood City putters made in Redwood City. They had a leather grip, a leather wrap grip, and they did that. The way they made that grip was they actually had a kind of heavy paper, like Kraft paper kind of stuff. And with that paper and white glue, they built up an underlisting and so you had to put put a layer on and have to dry overnight, and they put another layer, have to dry and so it took three or four days to do a shaft to do a grip,

Yeah.

So that that grip, that PP fifty eight grip, and I think you can tell me because I don't know for sure, but most of all of our putter grips are now designed kind of that way.

Right, Yeah, so we we that was Carson's ingenious way, you know, when they changed the rule on the bend in the shaft to get that physics effect right, And now we've done a lot of research, which turns out a lot of the research we do to today, Shane just proves what Carson Carson. So now we use that as a fitting variable that if we need to change how the putter rotates and match it perfectly to someone's stroke, we can put them in a grip that as like

Really, Yeah, Rob, you talk about ordering clubs these days for the archive room, what do you do about clubs that didn't make it in here in the sixties and seventies, but you want to acquire them, you want to add it to the archive room, but maybe you don't have one here. How do you go about finding those golf clubs and acquiring them?

Well, generally we will try if people come to us, don't I try not to go out looking too much, but people will come to us with something, okay.

And I mean, do you still get surprised, Like, do you still have people that say, I've got this club that you don't have in the room?

I do.

I occasionally do. And it's usually a variation of something because early on Carston did what a customer wanted.

Carston would do that for people sometimes.

And so occasionally you do get surprised, Like there's a putter right here that I don't think Murdy's ever seen. So this is a one a putter, but a fella asked to have one heavier, and so Carston actually, uh raised another piece of bronze. Oh, made it deeper and heavier and it has a little flange.

I have not seen that, right, And.

So yeah, so there's this this came a guy you know, called me up and said he had this putter and so what we like, what we'd like to do is trade, you know, trade new equipment. We don't want to purchase outright if we can help it, but sometimes we do. And uh, you know another putter that came to us was George Answers, George Archer's answer putter that we believe

Can I ask about the golf ball? Sure, because nowadays there's a lot of variations of golf balls that are different colors and they have different patterns on them. I mean, this was the og This was the original golf ball that had different variations of colorways and all that. What was the reasoning for the ping golf ball?

Well, Carston, when he decided he wanted to build his own golf ball, he actually bought a company Truce Fear, I think that's the name of it. He bought them and moved all their equipment and actually their head engineer designer came and came to work for Carston. I don't know exactly how he came to the idea of the two color ball, but he called it stroboscopic because he liked the idea. You could see it spin and this

You know.

As we went on, you know, we had yellow and white and pink and white, and red and white and different standard colors. With our customization process that Ping has had for a long time, we started doing custom colors for people. We would try to match a color to somebody's logo and we also could pad print logos on.

God okay, I I mean again like in twenty twenty three, this is what you're seeing, what you're talking and we're doing this back in the in the eighties, right.

But anyway, so the two color balls are very collectible, some of them, and depending on the color and stuff, people get all carried away about it. The ball collectors are different than the club collectors.

Got to deal with both parties.

Yeah, sometimes the ball collectors have kind of I understand, and there they want to know how many colors we made, and we don't know because we were custom mixing colors. To match logos, right stuff and so but yeah, so the two color ball was and it's a great putting aid is you guys probably know, And.

I will, I will draw mine. So I will get the tool and draw half a golf ball with the sharpie. I mean, you know they sell golf balls now that you can do that with. But yea, yeah, I mean I will, I will do that. I'll also make my four year old do it too. And it's not a straight a little here.

Before there, before anybody else was doing the two color ball like they are now. When Lee Westwood came here for a visit one time, uh been, I don't know, maybe ten years.

Ago, yeah yeah.

And one of the things when he was here he asked for he asked for a two color.

Ball for practice. Yeah yeah yeah.

So yeah, so we found him one.

R Rob Fast forward to today. Uh well, Carson was kind of famous. He has a video where he's famous for saying that, you know, the golf ball is like the tuning fork for us. It tells us what to do on the clubs. And so fast forward to today, we made a golf ball fitting wrapp software solution, you know, inspired by the name Baldnamic. I know that, you know, just golf ball's flight Carston Aerodynamics. Let's bring it all in and so that that's how we kind of have

And it's funny you say that because just the other day John said something to me where he said, well, you know, the golf ball is what you know because I asked him about the golf ball. I asked him how what he felt about, like the golf ball being cut you know, the USGA wanted to cut back on flight or the distance and all that sort of stuff, and he said, well, the ball is our tuning fork.

They used the same.

Phrase, Carson, And so that's it's really interesting and your ball app is is pretty cool. When James Lee fit me over there. For clubs, we went through.

The Marty will run you through it. We've talked about acquiring clubs and finding golf clubs. Are there clubs that are missing? Do you have any? Do you have any clubs that you could I mean, this is a PSA. It's a podcast for goodness sakes, So let the people know what we need what we need.

Well, yeah, we're missing. We have some holes. We have a few holes one of them, and most of the older stuff I have, although I'll say any I will say any older club, Redwood City address club or Scott Stale address club. I'm always interested in seeing pictures because Carston did do variations just like I showed you, So I'm always interested in those. As far as one that's missing from our collection, I don't have a ping sixty nine W putter with a Scott Stale address. Okay, I've

Get them all.

So so some mod you're saying, some more modern.

More modern, so G two putters, G two, I, G five I putters, all of the I have some of those, but not all of them. And there was a number of those.

Models, Yeah, there were, Yeah, we had a lot of models that right.

Oh yeah, that's something that works.

So so, I mean, I know I'm joking about a p s A. But if somebody had a club and they were interested in showing it to you, how do they get ahold of you?

Oh? They can just they can just call the main number.

Main ping customer service.

Customer service number. They can ask to speak to me.

Yeah.

Can I call and just ask to speak to you every now and again just to chatter? Okay, just making sure that's good. I was gonna say we could actually maybe get the direct line after the pod. What is your role with the Ping Putter vault, because I can only imagine that you're somehow involved in the gold Putter Vault that considering you're the archive guy, you probably have some involvement over there as well.

Well.

When we were working on the book, you know, our ping book, the History.

Of and you picked that thing up with one arm.

Yeah, yeah, seven pounds, so the putter went ping. When we were working on this book, Jeff Ellis that wrote the book, he actually discovered a number of wins that we had missed and so.

We weren't in the vault.

We won in the vault, and we had we the player didn't have a putter either, we just that, you know, and so we we went back and tried to pick those up, and we we picked up a good number of them, but we haven't actually some of them we have been able to pick up. So my involvement, my involvement over there is pretty minimal. Sometimes if we need a gold putter, what's happened in the last few years, and sometimes we needed we need putter heads to make

It's true technology, Chase, right, We're talking about full circle technology here, right.

Because nowadays when we do putters, don't we don't have the molds and we can't make another one ten years later. We used to be able to. So it's become a little bit of a problem. We need to get those the players to always use them.

We're current model. There you go, it's the PSA for them. Rob. When you sit in your office and you sit in here and you're here every single day looking around, what does it say about your experience with ping. What has that been like throughout your life.

Well, I always tell people when they call me and they are asking a lot of questions, and they'll say, boy, I really am sorry to bother you. So no, no, you're no bother at all, because I learned. I learned as much from them as they learn from me.

I really do.

So I really enjoy talking to people when they when even emailing. Although I'm a terrible type, but I enjoy talking to people about the equipment, and you know, just talking about what we're talking about today, what Carston did and didn't do. And I'm constantly learning things about Carston I didn't know, or about Carston or Louise I didn't know. So it's, uh, it is just a constant learning thing for me, and I enjoy it a lot. Otherwise I probably would have retired a long time ago. Maybe, but

One of my favorite putter projects I worked on coming in here, Rob was working on the Dale Answer. So when we remade the Dale Answer, and maybe you could tell the story of the difference between the answer and the Dale was I think in you know, the collectors called the Dale Head otherwise known as the Dale Answer. Where the name Dale come from? What was that little well, the issue on the putter.

Yeah, so.

The Scottsdale answer the putters the answer putters made with the Scottsdale address. There were two masters for that. Those are sand cast putters, and there were two masters. Carston made the first master, and he asked Allan to make the second master. When Alan was making the second master, cutting on the toe ballast, YEP, the back of the putter cutting on the toe ballast, the mill slipped a little bit. Well, he didn't want to start over, so he decided what he would do on the other side.

I might as well lean into the mistake.

And so when he showed it to Carston, Carston said, no, that's okay. So there's two masters, and so any any putter, any any answer putter with a Phoenix address that's made from one of those masters. Because when they first moved to from where they were doing Scott Steale address putters, which actually wasn't in scott Steele, but I was in the county and the Scott Steal was the closest peel,

It's a Dalehead, Alan Dale Solheiman Dale. So when I was working on the dale Head in the Answer or a Vault two point zero, we relaunched the dale Head but milled. We came in here, got a dale Head Answer three D, scanned it, brought it into our CAD software, and I matched up every little nuance of the mistake on both sides, and a bunch of the nuance there.

So cool. I mean, I love I love the marriage of you know, the Vintage Club with the New Age Club is so cool and I feel like I feel like you guys have done that for a long time. It's like marrying that.

Yeah. Yeah. So.

One of the one of the things Alan's really proud of too about his you know, putters made from his master, is that he saw Seve someplace one time and Sebe was talking to him about the Answer and told Alan he'd like to get a dale Head with with that what what they then called flat Soul, which was the master from Alan's Allen's Master. Sevie would like to get

Sevy's got a few putters in the in the ball, in the ball, I've seen him.

Rob, We've talked about ping collectors. So I got to ask you this as we kind of wind down, what do we talking in terms of most expensive club in this room?

Well, we don't like to get into value. You know, as a ping employee. Ping employees actually are not allowed to appraise or value on vintage ping equipment. Now, we have some things in here that are priceless, okay, and so the original these two original drawings, they're priceless, right, Yeah, the the prototype for the answer, that's a priceless item. You're not going to replace that for any amount of money.

So the answer is priceless. I feel like, yeah, priceless. And there's multiple items in that in that regard.

And all that we have all these hand drawings by Carson, many more than this. Yeah, you know those those sorts of things are Yeah, they're just priceless.

And that's so cool, Marty. You have anything else? We're up who you're.

Rooting for this yere Sons or Pelicans? Pelicans of course.

And why well, my son is the vice president of basketball operations for the New Orleans Pelicans.

When he goes to another team, what do you do with the old team stuff? Is it like you donated so it stay? You keep it?

Yeah?

Because he was he was GM of the Cleveland Cavalist right when they won the championship.

So you can't get rid of that. Are you talking about priceless? There you go, that's priceless stuff in your version of this room. I caddied years ago. It's St. Andrew's. I caddied there after college when I got out of school, and I had a lady show up one day and we're on the first team, and she was wearing this shirt and I had all these course logos on, you know, brand logos on the shirt, and I was like, that's

Lots of fun.

Yeah, thanks Frev. Always fun.

Yeah. This is the Ping Proving Grounds podcast.