AUGUST 2017 _ http://www.popularmechanics.co.za 69
PING G IRONS
In its quest for distance and forgiveness,
Ping has created a mainline performance
club with four times the face flex, higher
shot flight and increased MOI.BIION GOLF SHOES
Great shoes. These are golf shoes, boat
shoes and classy street shoes rolled into
one. No spikes, no laces. A lazy man’s
dream.OCTOBER GOLF GEAR BAG
I can never find my keys in the four pock-
ets in my pants. So the typical golf bag,
with its menagerie of zippers and storage,
presents a particular nightmare of lost
essentials. Using military technology,
October offers the ability to modularise
the layout of your bag – one pocket or fif-
teen – depending on how you most prefer
to lose your wallet.ARCCOS
You put a subtle sensor in the end of your
club, you take your chops at the ball and
the Arccos system collects remarkably
complete data on every shot, on every
course you play. After five rounds, it uses
your collected data to make club sugges-
tions through your smartphone. Like a
good caddie, it can make you a smarter
golfer. But you have to listen. – TC ITHE NEW GEAR
The conveyance of clubs
is a central puzzle. Travel
bags, staff bags, stand-
up bags, battery-powered
rolling carts, pull carts,
golf bikes and the classic
two-man cart are bought
and sold by the fleet here
at the convention.out the best club choice for a given shot on
a given course (using GPS technology, a
previous year’s big-ticket bet). The smart-
phone displays it, allowing golfers to
tweak their swings and fuss less over club
choice and future shot selections. The soft-
ware learns your game. The caddie moves
to your front pocket. Better golf follows.
By mid-afternoon, I’m sitting with three
engineers from Ping in a faux lounge set
up in the Ping product area. The first is a
handsome British PhD. The second: also
handsome. The third is a design engineer.
American. Weirdly good-looking as well.
Ping was started by an engineer, Karsten
Solheim, in his garage in 1959, they
remind me. “We’re still fundamentally an
engineering company,” Engineer 1 says.
So if the measurables remain largely the
same from year to year, how do you create
something new with each season? How do
you help a golfer hit it better? “We’re
always talking about the Moment of
Inertia,” he says. MOI is a performance
measurement taken at the bottom most
moment of the swing, when contact is
made, measuring the resistance of the club
to being twisted at the moment of impact.
This is the Ping lounge and the idle chit-
chat of engineers. “We’re very proud of the
fact that ours is among the longest in the
business,” says Engineer 1. MOI is an
assertion of forgiveness. “It’s essentially a
measure of the club’s resistance if you
don’t hit it perfectly,” says Engineer 2. To
help the golfer hit it better, they examine
the misses. Perfection is easy to model.
Besides, no one hits it perfectly.
Engineer 1: “These are games of misses.
Tennis is a game of misses. Golf is a game
of misses. We examine ways to affect that
moment.”walk the midway. A caterer
hands me a small empanada.
A Russian woman sells me
a thermolite bracelet to
promote negative ionisation
in the bones of my hand. I tell
her I have a bad right shoulder
and she puts the bracelet on my left wrist
and hangs on my bad shoulder. I do not
buckle. No pain. It feels like a trick. But I
buy another.
I lose a putting contest. I hit a bucket of
balls into a virtual driving range. I am
handed a beer. I then win a putting con-
test. I am handed tees, hats, wristbands,
23 ball markers. Energy bars are chopped
into samples. Music blares at one table.
Silence rules at a nearby putting green.
Brand names pile in the skull. Iceblock