Golf Asia — January 2018

44 GOLF ASIA

GOLFING

GEARGUIDE

like a crack had appeared in the wall of

hype that surrounds every new product

launch by the famous golf brands.

All that big name endorsement doesn’t

come cheap. Titleist, Nike, Adidas and

the other mega brands spend fortunes

on advertising and player contracts. This

effectively creates a barrier to entry for

smaller companies who can’t afford to pay

the likes of DJ, Rory and Jordan to speak

on their behalf. Acushnet’s response to the

Costco story was to file a lawsuit, accusing

Costco of infringing on 11 patents and

engaging in false advertising.

According to the business news site

Quartz, in 2015 Acushnet sued five small

golf-ball makers. The co-founder of one of

these companies said under guarantee of

anonymity, “We weren’t infringing. But we

couldn’t afford to fight the case.” Instead,

his company settled the 2015 claims with

Acushnet by agreeing to get out of the golf

ball business altogether. But Costco is not

a small start-up; it’s a big, powerful player

in its own market. So Costco’s lawyers

responded to Acushnet in kind by saying

it had done nothing wrong and that the

company had never publicly compared

the Kirkland ball to Titleist’s product. This

has kept the lawyers busy as they dance

around the topic of what is and what isn’t

Acushnet’s intellectual property.

Yet Costco’s foray into the ball market

seems limited not because of legal threat

but production capability. When the

demand for the Kirkland ball started to

spiral, Costco’s supplier, Nassau Golf,

couldn’t make enough of them at the low

price that made them attractive in the first

place. The irony is that golfers are now

buying old batches of Kirkland balls on

eBay for about the same price as a new

box of Titleist Pro V1xs.

CHIPPING AWAY AT CREDIBILITY

A further challenge to the Pro V1

supremacy came at the official press

conference before this year’s Player’s

Championship at Sawgrass. The source of

the attack came not from a rival ball maker

but from one of the most famous golfers

in the world, who had grown up hitting Pro

V1s around his home club, Portrush.

“I wasn’t really happy with the golf

GOLFING

GEARGUIDE