TaylorMade Golf is celebrating 40 years of “innovation and performance” in honor of the company’s first metalwood release in 1979.
As part of the ad campaign, the OEM behemoth assembled its all-star cast of staffers — Tiger Woods, Dustin Johnson, Rory McIlroy, Jason Day and Jon Rahm — to film some videos of the best players in the world hitting a club from the late 1970s.
While getting to see the guys pound the Pittsburgh Persimmon some incredible distances, another “B” roll video made its way onto TaylorMade’s YouTube page that gives a cool look into the kind of gearheads these players are as well as the technology gap between the likes Woods, 43, and the youngest on set, Rahm, who is 24.
Speaking to Golf.com last month, Woods described a two-day fitting process to find one or two drivers worthy of making there way into his bag. With the advances in launch monitors and adjustability, those changes can be made in 20 minutes.
“I hit each single one about three times or so, and then we sort them out that way,” Woods said of his old testing and fitting process. “Then we re-test them again. That takes two days and I’m so friggin’ tired. Now it’s like click, back in and hit again. ‘Let’s go this way, let’s go that way.’ And all the sudden I have a new driver in 20 minutes.”
Explaining to the younger staffers what Woods would do even before the marathon fitting sessions, all five stopped in their tracks to hear Woods explain the manual tweaking that he and others would have to do in order to get their clubs as close to their specifications as possible.
“If you didn’t like it, you’d take it over your knee and bend it, and adjust it,” Woods said at the TaylorMade shoot. “You’d keep bending it to how you liked it. And then you’d grab more heads and hit it like that and then say, ‘OK, I need to bend this one just like that.’ That was your loft and lie.”
The players needed to be told to keep walking to get the shot the directors were looking for, but it’s pretty cool to see just how invested and interested these guys were in the process that Woods and others before them had to go through.
