Ping: Attached to a Brand
- Alice Watson
- Jun 29
- 7 min read
Updated: Jun 30
Max Homa’s switch from Titleist to Cobra at the start of the 2025 PGA Tour season got me thinking about golf brands and our attachments to them.
Whilst in the men’s professional game it might not look like a big deal to change equipment manufacturer when your game’s not firing on all cylinders, it seems baffling to onlookers to jump ship when you're at the height of your powers and already a multi-millionaire.
Justin Rose’s departure from TaylorMade to Honma Golf in 2019 as the reigning Fed-Ex Cup champion comes to mind, which after an early win saw him tumble from the No.1 in the official world golf rankings to 14th in less than a year.
And perhaps unsurprisingly, there are historical precedents. Payne Stewart’s transition from Wilson to Spalding in 1994 saw him plummet from 6th on the money list in 1993 to 123rd the following year.
Some pros are locked in to multi-year endorsement deals which require them to play specific clubs and balls, refreshing their bags every time the company brings out a new product.
This was brought to the fore at the recent PGA Championship at Quail Hollow when Rory McIlroy was forced to exchange his prized TaylorMade Qi10 driver for the newly launched Qi35 - a move that lasted mere weeks after a disastrous loss of form off the tee.
Other players are ‘free agents’, carrying round staff bags filled with a mixture of club brands that reveal no allegiance to a single company.
Adam Scott is an illustrative case. The Australian currently plays with a Titleist driver, TaylorMade fairway woods, Miura irons, Vokey wedges, and a L.A.B Golf putter. And he plays a Titleist ProV1 ball.
Keeping up?
This rotating carousel raises the question of why some professionals put all their chips in one basket, while others take a more scattered approach to their tools of choice.
Often there will be lengthy personal histories behind a golfer’s affiliation, with a manufacturer having first offered them an equipment deal as a rising star in the amateur ranks. This gesture breeds loyalty, not to mention familiarity, with players developing a preferred feel and look cultivated over many years.
It is striking to note that behind-the-scenes, professionals can be quietly working with a company in R&D, co-creating a bespoke set of irons, woods or wedges that customers won’t find on the shop floor.
To celebrate McIlroy’s career Grand Slam victory in April, TaylorMade offered a limited release of his custom set of P730 Rors Proto irons that were specially made when he signed with the company according to his preferences in look, feel, and performance. Prior to this, I wasn’t aware he was playing a set unavailable to the general public!
Bryson DeChambeau is the more obvious example with his unique and experimental approach to club design. It’s a methodology that left Cobra, his previous endorser, exasperated and has led to LA Golf giving his out-of-the-box theories and ideas a whirl.
Manufacturers know that these signings matter because fans commonly want to play the same clubs as their idols, donning their merchandise and putting their logos proudly on display.
One only needs to think of the legion of young orange-clad Rickie Fowler devotees who arrive at tournaments dressed head-to-toe in striking Puma golf gear!
Interestingly, the emergence of golf influencers means that companies are now signing content creators, as well as golf professionals. Callaway, for example, recently signed the ForeBrothers, as well as Andy Murray; Adidas just struck a multi-year apparel partnership with Sky Sports Golf; and American Golf has signed PGA coach and rising social media star Georgia Ball.
Brands, then, are increasingly recognising that eyeballs are trained on other storytellers and mediums outside of the professional game.
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This got me thinking about my own allegiance to Ping and the significance of corporate brands in shaping a sense of identity, community, and belonging.
My first ‘proper’ set of standard-length clubs came from Ping and I have stayed true to a full set ever since, albeit with the occasional stray to an Odyssey or Scotty Cameron putter.
Prior to my first bag of Ping i10 irons and G10 woods, I can remember loving my Golden Bear and Ogre Masters junior sets. But as I fell in love with the game and began to take it more seriously through county and national development squads, I entered the world of custom fittings and alighted on Ping along with many of my contemporaries.
Gainsborough in Lincolnshire is Ping’s European fitting centre and it also happened to be the location of our England Golf training sessions; an alchemy that sparked a relationship with the brand that endures to this day.
In the spirit of the WITB feature of popular golf magazines (an acronym that stands for ‘What’s in the Bag’), I use a Ping Rapture driver and woods, i25 irons, Glide wedges, and a MyDay putter; all of which sit in a Mr Ping Hoofer Lite golf bag.
It’s quite an old-school set up technology-wise and I should probably think of having my set checked for lie angles and so on since I was fitted for them in my teens, but as a rule of thumb I like to think that wayward shots are my fault, rather than the clubs’.
I’ve since come to learn that Ping stands out in the competitive equipment market place.
Ping was founded in 1959 by Karsten Solheim, a Norwegian-born mechanical engineer who originally worked for General Electric, in his garage in Redwood City, California.
On taking up golf aged 42 at the encouragement of his co-workers, Karsten became fascinated by club construction. Driven by a personal quest to roll the ball better on the greens, he applied principles from his engineering work to the design and build of a perimeter-weighted putter that was more forgiving and easier to use.
The name ‘Ping’ was very simply inspired by the sound it made when striking the ball.
Genius, and it stuck.
A few years later the prototype 1A putter emerged as a ‘mass-market’ version of Karsten’s fledgling design. Despite securing some early victories on the PGA and LGPA tours, he initially struggled to secure widespread uptake with players seemingly using Arnold Palmer’s Wilson 8802 putter instead.
Back home, Karsten told his wife Louise that, “I’ve got to find an answer to Arnie’s putter” - a watershed statement that would lead to hurried sketches of what would become the most popular putter in golf’s history.
Namely, the ‘Anser’ - so called after Louise asked, “Why don’t you call it the Answer?”, in response to her husband’s quest for a competitor to Palmer's favoured club [1].
“That’s too many letters”, Karsten replied. “It won’t fit”.
“Well, take off the W”, Louise retorted. “It’ll sound the same”.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
What began with humble beginnings in a Californian garage soon transformed into a major equipment powerhouse, expanding from putters to every club, piece of clothing and accessory you could think of.
Strikingly, it’s the only ‘big’ golfing manufacturer that remains family owned. This means, the Solheim dynasty claim, that they retain full control of the business and are not beholden to external shareholders or private equity investors who demand an endless search for ever greater profits and an annual release of new clubs irrespective of innovation or stagnation in technology development.
They have signed high profile professionals from Tony Finau and Viktor Hovland in the men’s game to Leona Maguire and Jennifer Kupcho in the women’s.
Ping has also recently struck a sponsorship deal with content creator Erik Anders Lang and you can watch a short documentary about Ping’s history that they released together last month [2].
As an admirer of Lang’s storytelling and longtime user of Ping clubs, this is a welcome partnership that marries two meaningful elements of my golfing identity.
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It's not lost on me that is the precisely the point and desired outcome of marketing in a capitalist society.
In her groundbreaking thesis ‘No Logo’ published at the turn of the century, Naomi Klein persuasively documented the neoliberal, hyper-globalised shift in marketing from selling a product to selling a brand. That is to say, an experience, a lifestyle, a philosophy [3].
Marketeers recognised that products should take a backseat to brands which could conjure a feeling, driven by a carefully curated set of values, beliefs, and attitudes.
Brands were not necessarily about ‘things’ but a way of life.
Of course, these grand narratives depended on key storytellers and performers, hence Nike signing big-name athletes and L’Oréal signing Hollywood actresses.
Brands therefore leveraged people’s emotional connections to sports, entertainment, food, and beauty, and tapped into the affective realm of meaning, attachment, and imagined futures.
Without obscuring the undoubted drive for capital accumulation, the clear commodification of ideas, and alarming growth in inequality, there remains something important and possibly less nefarious about the relationship between our identities and chosen brands.
Put simply, many people like them and project their sense of self and desired aesthetic and future through them.
Brands can tangibly deliver on their promises by bringing people together, forging communities, instilling confidence, and inspiring performances. They help us to craft a particular style and emulate those we admire.
Pinning your allegiance to a golf brand, for example, can evoke particular histories and memories (think of Tiger Wood’s oscillating Nike ball at the 2005 Masters which cinematically dropped into the hole on its final revolution), reveal which technologies you trust and are proud to play with (Titleist says top-quality traditionalist), hint at which players motivate and move you (a flat cap says Bryson, as much as Ben Hogan), and speak to which communities you might be part of (a Broken Tee Society bag tag says you’re a reader of The Golfer’s Journal).
A victim of corporate mythology, maybe, but conscious, too, that many draw pleasure and belonging from being aligned with a brand in ways that aren’t exclusively or necessarily driven by continuous consumerism.
You might be propelled in golf to delve into the archives and seek out footage of an early professional; read a blog or book about a player or club’s history; listen to a podcast tracing the evolution of a specific technology or company; or simply head out onto the fairways in a refreshed and newfound frame of mind, focusing purely on the joyous ‘Ping’ as your putter strikes the ball.
Our attachments and obsessions are driven by stories, people and objects, and without them, our identities, relationships and lives just might not be in technicolour.
