68 http://www.popularmechanics.co.za _ AUGUST 2017
T
Everywhere, the inventors make
their stand. One guy staked his
retirement on a “revolutionary”
new tee.Tuesday in January now and I’m stand-
ing on the main concourse of the Orange
County National Golf Centre watching a
man ride a golf bike, which is pretty much
what it sounds like: a bicycle with a built-in
golf bag on the back. Never seen that before.
He’s making wide, comfortable circles and
eating popcorn. I stand for a while next to
a gum-chomping assistant golf pro from
southern Maine, with his arms folded
across his chest.
“What do you think?” I ask. He answers
without taking his eyes off the golf bike.
“I’d want one,” he says. “I like mountain
biking.” He nods. “But if I brought one of
those back with me to my club, the greens
keeper would hang me.” Now he’s shaking
his head. “We have a rule against bikes on
the course. There’s a sign specifically about
bikes.”
The bicycle floats its loop on the conven-
tion carpet once more. The rider wears a
tie. It is a hypnotic sight. “Everybody’s got
an idea,” the assistant golf pro from Maine
says. We stare.
Pretty soon, he cracks his gum convinc-
ingly. “Makes you want to sing ‘Raindrops
Keep Fallin’ on My Head,’ ” he says.
I squint and stupidly look up. Rain? But
- no. Ahh, of course. Butch Cassidy. He’s
right. When I look back to him, he’s disap-
peared into the crowd.
You have to have a badge to get into this
vast, vaguely muffled space. There is some
noise, to be sure. Music blares from speakers,
robot golf bags prowl the wider aisles. More
than a thousand vendors represented –
garage-based inventors and massive cor-
porate vendors and everything in between.
All of them talking, selling, pitching. The
place gives off the energy of the casino
floor of the Bellagio. Minus the drapery.
The badge asserts that the wearer is on
one side or another of the professional game:
a member of the PGA – a teaching pro, or
club pro, swing coach, short-game coach,
putting coach, strength coach, brain coach - or someone with something to sell to those
guys: golf balls, golf tees, swing-training
devices, golf carts, Segway-like golf carts,
golf bikes, golf bags, robot golf bags, simu-
lators, weighted clubs, poker chips, flight-
track analysers, gloves, launch monitors,
artificial-intelligence-driven wireless cad-
dies, socks, shoes, insole liners, rubber
three-piece shoes and, of course, golf clubs,
drivers, hybrids, rescue clubs. Putters plat-
ed in gold, putters made of acrylic, putter-
face inserts. Head covers, lead-tape dis-
pensers, ball markers, protein bars, protein
shakes, protein gum. An indestructible tee.
A shade generator. A microbially safe steer-
ing-wheel cover for rented golf carts.
If it has been thought of, it resides in
these rowdy quarters.
It takes two and a half hours to walk
every aisle and row of the golf show, stop-
ping only for the occasional conversation
or sales pitch. With golf, distance is a part
of the game and patterns emerge. The most-
talked-about devices at the 2017 show are
launch monitors, tee-side electronic panelsthat track the trajectory and flight of any
shot – even if you hit it into a net three
metres front of you – by gauging the ele-
mental mechanics of every swing, includ-
ing club speed, launch angle, swing path,
ball position, spin rate and angle of the
club face.
And this year’s buzzed-about launch mon-
itor is the TrackMan A/S, a Danish prod-
uct: iconic orange and black panel, like an
iMac without a screen, that uses radar and
swing data for teaching pros and course
designers. Retailing for a little over R240 000,
TrackMan is more of a high-end institu-
tional teaching tool than a toy for a techie
golfer. Those are available, too, though. Like
the remarkable Arccos system: inserts in
the grip of a club (these are even built in to
the new line of Cobra drivers) record the
data for every hack a golfer takes in a con-
ventional round and collects that over
every round. That data is then fed into
proprietary Microsoft software that spits