bma725

Look how long it took them to get there. Honda first came to the US with motorcycles in the 1950s, they brought their first car in 1970....but it wasn't until the late 1980s/1990s that they went from being considered a nicer low end car to being considered one of the best. Even today Hyundai has image problems, its still behind companies like Subaru, Mitsubishi etc in terms of how the public perceives them. The product may be getting better, but perception still has them at the low end. Its not a question of lack of knowledge, its a question of caring. The vast majority of US golfers don't care about their equipment, they don't want to/can't afford to spend the kind of money required to play higher stuff, they don't have any interest in making a committment to the game that usually comes with investing a lot of money in products. You mention your buddies, I assume these are people who play and or practice fairly regularly. Doing that puts you/them in a very elite group, because most of the golfing population in the US doesn't do that. Most people practice rarely if at all. They play a couple of times a year...and even thats a maybe. Thats the problem with judging the US golf community, because its size and demographics are grossly skewed. When the NGF or USGA or whomever does these surveys, the guy who plays 4 times a week, the guy who plays 10 times a year, and the guy who played once in his life 3 years ago all get counted equally. But there's far more of the latter two groups than the first one, and the first one is the one who does most of the buying of big name new clubs. So even if they get all the knowledge of all the high end Japanese stuff, there still is a limit based on the number of people.

Its not a question of Japanese manufacturers not trying to bring their high end products over here, rather its a fact that many Japanes manufacturers have tried and failed at it because the US market won't go for it...and the manufacturers end up harming themselves so much in the process that they have to all but abandon the US. In the 1980s and early 1990s scores of Japanese manufacturers tried to come over, Daiwa, Yonex, Yamaha, Maruman, Kasco etc. None of them were successful with their high end stuff, the market just wasn't willing to spend that much. The lower level Daiwa and Yonex stuff did well, but the expensive stuff bombed so badly that it killed the product lines. Even Tourstage for example was harmed by bringing its high priced stuff over, when they first came in 1986. The market just wasn't willing to support it. The planned expansion of the line, and the import of more clubs was scrapped, because they couldn't get the purchases they were looking for. The US market is a very unforgiving market. You can't get high prices for stuff with no background, ie a company can't come over and start selling drivers for $600 and irons for $1200 without being somewhat established, the consumer won't go for it. But on the flip side, a company can't come over and try to start small with lower level stuff and then gradually build its way up to high priced stuff. Consumers very rarely forget a companies initial image, and if that initial image was of a company that made lower priced stuff that was perceived as lower quality....no matter what they do its very hard to change that. Lastly, while you may not want to believe it, there are very few people willing to spend a ton of money on clubs. The overwhelming majority of US golfers are people who buy their clubs at rummage sales, or discount stores or buy the complete set of 14 clubs and bag/pull cart at a mass retail sporting goods store and own that set and only that set for as long as they play golf. The number of people who actually go to golf shops, and buy new clubs frequently is minute. The number of people who fit into that group and would willingly spend $100s if not $1000s more is even smaller. For any manufacturer to be succesful catering to that group of people they would have to dominate the market, and get nearly all of them to play their clubs and only their clubs. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth their while. And that kind of monopoly is just not going to happen.

The C on the hosel doesn't mean its a Clarke. The C is just a batch identification stamp they put on right after production. If you get a club with a C on it, that generally means it was never hit by anyone, and probably didn't even make it to a tour van. Its a fairly common designation really, they've put it on the 200s, V-Steels, Rescue Mids, multiple drivers.....and it has nothing to do with Darren Clarke. There is a Darren Clarke model, but it will say DC not just C.

Don't know about the putter, but the grip is the Winn grip that everyone on the European Ryder Cup team got. Its Yellow and Blue with a logo somewhere near the top. He's been using it on everything since the event.

I really like the shape of #3, but I'd never put one in the bag. To me how the back of the club looks is just as important visually as the shape, and I can't stand the back of the wedges.

It might be, but it would be hard to get funding. No equipment company would want to support a magazine that shows someone playing clubs that are different than what they tell people he's playing. I've got a friend who's a former mini-tour pro, and he ran into a problem of his sponsor not wanting people to realize what he was playing. He'd previously been with TM, during the Burner era of clubs, so the orange coloring in the cavity was very noticable to anyone paying attention. He then switched sponsors, and didn't switch to different clubs right away so they made him paint the cavity of his irons black so no one could tell what he had.

Make it a heel shafted model, and its exactly the same as the Ray Cook Gyro2 thats been out for awhile. There's got to be more ideas out there for how to do these high MOI putters, they're all starting to look the same.

The Clevelands ARE NOT new. This is a set from 4-5 years ago, not the protos for the CG2. They are real forged as opposed to form forged, in addition to the combo there was all a straight blade set and a full cavity set. They've been floating around Ebay and Yahoo Japan for years, but they're nothing new. The blade in fact is a take off of one of the early blades Cleveland made in the 1980s when they were starting to become a real company and not a vintage club replica company. Nice sticks, rare for sure, tour issue for sure, but not new.

That doesn't look like the new driver to me. Looks like one of the many protos of various sizes that were out around 2000. Justin Leonard and Bernhard Langer both used them briefly but reception wasn't great overall so they never went anywhere. FWIW, someone on another board was saying the 2005 Hogan driver has been scrapped yet again, and is now being redesigned. Just last week reps were in shops showing people the demo heads, two models both over 400cc, pretty non-descript other than the traditional Hogan Speed Slot. But reception must not have gone well so now they've cancelled plans to release them by the end of the year. They did the same thing last year, a smaller Hogan driver with some weird weight thing in the back was supposed to come out at the same time as the Hogan Hybrid and even made it into the European catalogue. But in the same manner it was scrapped. Supposedly they are going to combine the two designs and have a head ready for early next year

Honestly I would bet he doesn't have a choice. Tiger if he wanted to right now could go and start playing any companies stuff he wanted, and his deal with Nike wouldn't be voided. With the amount Phil signed for and the boost Callaway is hoping that provides, they almost have to force him to play nothing but Callaway owned products. That said, I'm one of the people who thinks the putter doesn't really matter that much for him. He's used a Bettinardi in the past, he won with both a Futura and a Napa this year, he's used Del Mar's and Santa Fe's and that Yonex blade before. At his level it doesn't particularly matter who make it, he's pretty much just telling Bettinardi exactly what he wants and getting it, the same way he did with Scotty.

Hey Mike, I think it would be the MP32's the 33 & 37 are more rounded everywhere in my opinion. In terms of shape at adress the 32s probably are the closest. In terms of looks at the muscle the 37 is probably closest, with the 32 not really having one, and the 33 being much higher.

To me it looks like the old weight plug/port that Wilson used to put on some of their irons, that was made famous on various models of the Walter Hagen irons from back then.

Its pretty understandable why there isn't much posting, just look at the header. This site at its core is about import equipment, and honestly thats not a huge discussion piece at other places. You're not going pull users off the GEA, GO or other places to talk about Import stuff, because there's no one there talking about import stuff. BSG was the only place that had it, and most of the people that were into import stuff there are now here. Outside of import stuff, this site isn't big enough to get the amount of posts of other places. The GEA has over 100,000 registered members, BSG and GO are in the 10s of thousands. Thats well over whats on here. Now think about how many of the people on other forums are really active...its a small percentage. Less people to draw from, less participating, less action on the forum. Its still pretty early though, only BSG became big quickly. GO took years after those guys left the GEA to get big, and it had taken the GEA awhile to get big as well.

He modified that eventually to allow posters from GolfOpinions, the GEA, and maybe DoubleGolf.com. Basically not guys from here, or FGI or Ham and Egg...though I don't think theres a lot of FGI or H&E guys that hang out on BSG.

The Wilsons you speak of I think are the Gooseneck blades. The had sort of a rounded channel in the back, with no muscle to make them forgiving. They made several different models of the Goosenecks the most popular coming the late80s early 90s. Hogan also made similar ones, the Apex Channelback irons, also known as the 1997 Apex. If you look at the recent PRGR blades they are almost exact knock-off of the Hogans.