Thank you for your support!

I want to thank all of my readers for their emails the past twenty-four hours on the subject of yesterday's blog, the apparent dishonesty within the golf equipment industry. I was glad to see that over 80% of the emails I received were from readers who agreed with me that money paid by equipment manufacturers to tour players has ruined the game!

What the golf equipment manufacturers have done in the last fifteen years is force each tour player to decide if his goals are to win more tournaments and leave a legacy of being a great champion, or to make more non-prize money by signing to play a specific company's equipment for millions of dollars per year. Seldom do the two goals reach the same desired result.

When each of our PGA Tour stars retires and leaves their legacy for the future to remember, what will that legacy be?

Will Jack Nicklaus be remembered as winning the most major championships in a single career, with even more second place finishes than his victories?

Will Tiger Woods overcome his recent mistakes he has made in his personal life over the last few years and return to focusing on his golf, and winning more majors? If he can clear his mind of non-golf related problems, and concentrate on winning again, he will pass Jack's eighteen majors and be the all-time major winner.

And what will Phil Mickelson's legacy be twenty years from now. For years he was the best player in the world to not win a major. Then he finally won the Masters, and now he has three majors. In my opinion he should have eight to ten major victories by now, minimum, but Phil lacks the determination to win in my opinion that Tiger has shown for years.

For example, golf is a unique game in that each player may choose from a wide variety of equipment to use as his arsenal on the course. In most other sports like football, baseball, basketball, hockey and most other team sports, every player uses the same equipment. Managers and coaches of each professional team look for the very best of the best who are coming up from the college ranks to play for their team. The best players get the biggest contracts as far as money is concerned.

In golf, as in tennis, each player has to choose what he wants to play as far as his equipment is concerned. Does he play what is best for him, with the goal of winning tournaments, winning majors, and winning the most prize money? Or does he choose to take the most money that is offered to him by equipment manufacturers, regardless of whether that equipment is going to give him the best chance to win?

In golf, that kind of decision in my opinion will define the player, define the man, and determine what his legacy will be to the great game of golf!

There are 156 players that tee it up most every week on the PGA Tour, but only a few are usually involved in discussions by the media each week as to the outcome of that week's tournament. This week it appears that the media is giving Tiger and Phil the best odds to win the Memorial.

I disagree. I think it is far too soon for Tiger to put his personal problems behind him for him to win this week. Tiger does have one thing in his favor, though. Tiger has always chosen to play the very best golf equipment he can find to suit his game. When he negotiated his equipment contract with Nike, he insisted he be able to play the putter of his choice, which right now happens to be a non-Nike putter.

When I was active making golf equipment in the late 1980's and early 1990's, most tour players could choose to play the most important clubs regardless of who's name was on the bag, whether they played Spalding irons, Titleist irons, or whatever. The player was usually free to choose which driver, wedges, and putter he wanted to play, because those were the most important scoring clubs.

That is why we at Probe Golf designed a driver face with more curvature on it, to keep the ball in the air 2 1/2 seconds longer than any other driver. The Probe out-distanced all of the competition by thirty yards due to its increased curvature. It took the rest of the golf industry three years to copy the Probe design, which was superior to the flatter faces of all the major manufacturers.

The driver set up the rest of the hole, so a small equipment company like Probe could specialize in making a superior driver and own a niche in the market. Many tour players used a Probe driver because it was longer than any of the competition, especially on the Senior tour where the players were more interested in performance than in manufacturer's money to play a certain driver that would cost them victories and prize money.

We did the same thing in designing a superior putter, for the same reason. A player might sign for a lot of money to play Titleist irons, for example, but they could use the putter that made the most putts for them, despite whether or not they had a contract to play the irons for some other manufacturer. So, we designed a putter that was unlike any other putter in the world, to do things on the green that no other putter could do, such as making the ball break or not break a certain predictable way, instead of guessing how it would break.

As my blog yesterday proves, Phil Mickelson is playing certain golf equipment that he is paid a lot of money to play, and it is apparent to me that his decision to do so has cost him major championships. If that is the legacy Mickelson wants to leave, then he has made the right choice. But if he wants to be remembered as playing the best he could play, and win majors, he will have to start looking for a better driver, to hit more fairways, and he will have to find the best putter he can use to make more putts.

As demonstrated yesterday in my blog, his having an attorney who threatens other manufacturers' reps if they try to show Phil what it will take in the form of a new putter to make more putts is not going to leave a positive legacy in the minds of knowledgeable viewers.