The Sad Story of MacGregor's Demise

[GolfSpy Barbajo]

All the talk of vintage clubs got me to scouring eBay and come home with a set of MacGregor VIP Foil 1025 MC irons.  They should be here by Saturday - the eBay pix show about what you'd expect from a set of irons at least 15 years old, but I can't wait to hit them.

 

But the whole thing made me look for an article online that I had read a year or so ago while doing some research for an article, and I wanted to share it with you. It was originally published in the Nov 28th, 2009 issue of GolfWeek Magazine, and is an interesting read, especially now that Golfsmith is also dead and buried....

 

 

 

MacGregor: Demise of an American classic

 

This story originally ran in the Nov. 28 issue of Golfweek

ALBANY, Ga. – Jack Nicklaus can't forget the sweet sound of persimmon.

 

For years, whenever he opened a golf course, he hit his ceremonial tee shot with a persimmon driver, autographed the club's crown and had it mounted in the clubhouse. The gesture showed his sentimental side for when woods were made of wood and the expression “hitting it on the screws” meant something. And it harkened back to his MacGregor days when he underscored the company's slogan, “The greatest name in golf.” His weapon of choice: the MacGregor Tommy Armour 945.

 

Remember when woods clinked rather than clanked? Whether they had a warm chestnut, antique cherry or dark pecan finish, wood drivers caused golfers to gush in a way they never would about titanium. Listen to John Cook rhapsodize about his MacGregor M-85 driver:

 

“She was blond, shallow-faced, with a keyhole insert. The grain was so tight on her. She had a knot right on the tip. That's how you could tell she was a solid piece of wood.”

 

MacGregor Golf, which began making clubs in 1897, pioneered many of the advances in golf equipment. Lest anyone forget MacGregor's prowess as a maker of forged blades, the company passed down from one generation of its heralded craftsmen to the next the proper technique for grinding irons. Starting as a round billet of soft carbon steel, a raw forged iron head went through nearly 50 stages of sculpting before it was crowned with the MacGregor stamp. 

 

There was a time when the MacGregor name carried clout. It said, Byron Nelson once won 11 tournaments in a row with me. It said, Johnny Miller shot a U.S. Open-record 63 with me. It said, 59 major championships were won with me. Its place as part of the very foundation of the sport in this country seemed to be drawn in indelible ink.

 

Yet golf's second-oldest brand in the U.S. – after Spalding – is gone as we've known it. A year ago, MacGregor mothballed plans to reintroduce a line of VIP irons, began a fire sale of its inventory and sold its intellectual property to Golfsmith in May for $1.75 million. A retail chain buying MacGregor? Not too long ago, such a notion would have been as preposterous as Radio Shack acquiring Sony.

 

How could MacGregor be reduced to a store's house brand? Sometimes, success is lost in transition. The brand changed hands many times, with each new owner switching strategies so often that, before long, the innovator became the imposter.

 

A book could be written on what allowed upstarts Ping, TaylorMade and Callaway to usurp MacGregor's market share. But before its demise, the company created a legacy that forever would be cherished.

 

• • •

First, some perspective: MacGregor had the most-played irons and woods on the pro circuit for decades. Think back to the 1975 Masters, when the last four players on the course – Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Tom Weiskopf and Tom Watson – all carried the Kelly green-and-white MacGregor staff bag. So did Ben Crenshaw, David Graham and later Curtis Strange.

 

 

 

“Forget about my era,” says Weiskopf, who signed with the company in 1964 for $1,500. “Think about the era before us. To be part of that tradition meant you were special.” 

 

It's a tradition that descends from Armour, The Silver Scot, who stamped the soles of his personal MacGregor woods “L.F.F.,” an abbreviation of his motto: “Let the f—er fly.”

 

MacGregor signed the fabled trio of Jimmy Demaret, Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan for a combined $5,000, arguably the best bargain in golf history. Demaret joined at the 1937 U.S. Open. On June 1, 1939, Nelson agreed to a handshake deal and grabbed a new set of MacGregors off the rack in Armour's pro shop. Two weeks later, Nelson won the U.S. Open. The then-unheralded Hogan was the best investment of all.

 

“He was nearly broke and needed to get to Pinehurst for the (1940) North & South,” Toney Penna recalled years later in the company's unpublished history, “MacGregor: The First 100 Years.” “I had $500 on me but offered him $250 in case he wanted more. He took the $250 and won the North & South.” 

 

It was Penna, a Tour winner known as “the sweet swinger,” who recruited the greatest names in golf to play under the MacGregor banner. The advisory staff also included future Hall of Fame members Jack Burke Jr., Craig Wood and Louise Suggs. 

 

By the 1950s, Penna had risen to chief designer. He was taught the basics; the rest he invented. His creations such as the Eye-O-Matic, a two-colored fiber insert that pointed out the club's sweet spot, and the four-way roll face helped the average golfer hit the ball better. 

 

Some of his innovations became industry standards. For instance, Penna's MT irons from 1950 were compact blades with an unusually wide top line that were shallow from top to bottom. Penna lowered the center of gravity and put 1 degree less loft on each club, predating by some 30 years what would become common practice.

 

The MT's wild popularity spurred MacGregor to shelve its tennis business to create more space for club production. Business flourished in the 1940s and '50s. 

 

Some observers point to MacGregor's sale in 1958 to bowling behemoth Brunswick Corp. – whose golf-crazed president decided to diversify the company's holdings – as the beginning of the end for MacGregor. The best move made during Brunswick's decadelong ownership of MacGregor was signing Nicklaus after a heated bidding war. First Flight Golf, an upstart company, offered Nicklaus a then-unheard-of $100,000 contract.

 

“Don't lose him,” MacGregor's president ordered, matching the offer.

 

But the signing of Nicklaus, the face of the company for more than three decades, only masked MacGregor's long slide into oblivion.

 

• • •

 

 

On any given day Jack Wullkotte locks himself in his Lake Park, Fla.-workshop, where he sanded the persimmon woods that he made for Nicklaus' ceremonial shots. Wullkotte, who turned 80 last month, is one of the oldest living links to MacGregor's heyday. He was there 60 years ago when they wheeled Hogan around the plant after his car accident. 

 

Wullkotte joined MacGregor in 1947 and is part of an illustrious lineage of precision club shapers. They had to be; they were working for a finicky and demanding bunch, the kind who could discern a single-layer difference of masking tape under their grips.

 

“There was always this DNA on how to make an iron going all the way back to the beginning of the company,” says Jim Bode, MacGregor's former vice president of research and design and a 25-year company employee.

 

Wullkotte has served as Nicklaus' personal clubmaker and repairman since the day Nicklaus broke a 6-iron at the 1963 Greater Jacksonville Open. Their pairing now is a part of lore: Nicklaus' pilot flew the club to MacGregor's custom shop in Cincinnati for emergency surgery, but it was closed for the week. Wullkotte was the only employee who hadn't yet left for vacation, and he negotiated a full day's pay for an hour's worth of work. His next paycheck bulged with an extra $32.

 

“That's what I got, $4 an hour,” Wullkotte says. “It was a coup for me.”

 

In 1967, Wullkotte left MacGregor after 20 years to join Penna, who had begun his own equipment company with the financial backing of Perry Como, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. At the '64 Masters, MacGregor gave Penna a proper send-off, hailing his achievements and presenting him a golf club engraved with a number: 17,936,732. It signified the quantity of clubs made during his tenure.

 

Without Penna's ingenuity and the loss of much of its skilled labor – resulting from the company's move to Albany, Ga. – MacGregor began suffering from a noticeable decline in product quality.

 

 

 

No one was more distressed by the slide than Nicklaus. In 1974, Nicklaus personally employed Wullkotte to oversee MacGregor's operations. Wullkotte remembers Nicklaus reading the riot act to the staff: “Nicklaus said, ‘You people are building the worst golf clubs. I'm embarrassed to go into pro shops and see my name on this stuff.' ” 

 

From that day forward, every club had to pass Wullkotte's inspection. Nicklaus also hired Tour player David Graham as his chief designer. Graham followed Armour and Penna in the company's tradition of “player-craftsman.” With a sense of awe undiminished with passing years, Weiskopf maintains he never met a pro who knew more about club design than Graham.

 

“He could bend your clubs in a doorjamb,” Weiskopf says.

 

If Graham's success as a player is overlooked, his abilities as a club designer largely have been forgotten. He and Nicklaus co-designed the VIP irons, which Graham used in winning the 1979 PGA Championship. The tandem also created the Jack Nicklaus Limited Edition irons, which Graham used in his 1981 U.S. Open victory. (Nicklaus won the 1980 U.S. Open and PGA with prototypes of the Limited Edition.) There may never be another major winner who designs his own clubs.

 

Throughout the company's history, MacGregor's custom shop housed the best grinders such as Will Sime, John Huggins and Ernest Airy, who crafted clubs for Hogan, Nelson and Demaret. But none compared with Art Emerson.

 

“He could grind a club and never make sparks,” Graham says.

 

MacGregor wooed Emerson back from Penna's shop in 1971 to open a custom-design department in Albany. Upon his return to the company, Emerson sat in the lobby filling out paperwork with another new hire, a 20-year-old dressed in a polka-dot shirt who didn't know a golf club from a hood ornament. Emerson quickly recognized that the young man had a gift, a touch that couldn't be taught. Emerson embraced “polka dot” as his apprentice, staying after hours to pass along all that he knew. The pupil soon surpassed the teacher.

 

“Polka dot” is Don White, now 58, the last in the line of MacGregor craftsmen. The world's best players traveled to see him in the sleepy Southern town of Albany – self-proclaimed quail hunting capital of the world – and White answered their every request. 

 

 

 

Chi Chi Rodriguez regularly flew his jet there from Puerto Rico and once sent his pilot solo to pick up a completed set. Ray Floyd asked for a slight rocker at the heel and toe. Weiskopf requested zero bounce on his irons. Crenshaw simply wanted “the Nicklaus grind.” White would grind irons used to win 13 majors. 

 

“I do it by eyesight,” White says. 

 

It's an explanation that Rodriguez insists grossly understates White's talent. Observing him at work, Rodriguez says, “was like watching Leonardo da Vinci paint the Sistine Chapel, or Hogan practice. 

 

“They are artists.”

 

When Rodriguez left MacGregor in 1993 to join Callaway, he told White, “Come with me,” and offered personally to pay him a salary of $100,000. But White, a confirmed son of the South, declined.

 

• • •

All the craftsmen in the world, however, couldn't have saved MacGregor.

 

But with their help, the company kept pace with its rivals into the early 1980s, when a staff of more than 400 worked at The MacGregor Center, a 300,000-square-foot mill house on Slappey Boulevard. It ran at full tilt – three shifts per day, six days per week – making persimmon woods and forged irons. But by the late '90s, a seismic shift in the marketplace had a profound impact on MacGregor. Club production had moved to Asia in an effort to drive down labor costs. The result? MacGregor scaled back to a site one-tenth the size of its previous headquarters. 

 

The industry's move overseas was preceded by three of the most important golf-club innovations of the past 40 years: the advent of investment-cast irons, metal drivers and oversized titanium drivers.

 

MacGregor fumbled all three.

 

 

 

Cast irons did away with the need for forging or expert grinding. MacGregor resisted the new production method because it was bent on retaining tradition in design and materials. It took MacGregor until 1974 to finally introduce a cast set, five years after Ping debuted its K-1 irons and after every other major company had produced a cast model.

 

Likewise, MacGregor refused to acknowledge the metalwoods revolution. In 1988, metal drivers outnumbered persimmon woods for the first time on the PGA Tour, ending MacGregor's stranglehold on the driver count. During a nine-month span in 1989, MacGregor's woods production plummeted from 1,200 per day to 50 per week. Soon after, one of its core products became extinct. 

 

Even when MacGregor moved swiftly to capitalize on the coming titanium trend, it suffered a demoralizing defeat. In 1992, MacGregor released the T-920, America's first cast titanium-headed driver, but it never made inroads against Callaway's stainless-steel Big Bertha, which ruled the day. Fast-forward to 1995 when Callaway followed with the launch of its Great Big Bertha titanium driver. It sold more than 250,000 units in its first year. 

 

In contrast, the T-920 sold 2,500. 

 

“Callaway signed an exclusive deal with Ruger (foundry) and bought all the raw titanium they could get in the country,” says Bode, the former MacGregor VP. “Next thing you know, Callaway has invented titanium drivers. What do you do? You just grin and bear it.”

 

MacGregor scored its final hit in 1986 with the ZT Response, an unconventional, oversized putter designed by Clay Long, which became an overnight sensation when Nicklaus used it to win the Masters that year. The company took 5,000 orders for it the Monday morning after his victory and sold 350,000 units before discontinuing the model. 

 

Nicklaus, who gained a controlling stake in the company in 1979, sold 80 percent of his interest for a reported $30 million in 1986. Frustrated with the company's direction, he dumped the rest in 1992 and formed his own equipment company under the Nicklaus name. Longtime company insiders believe Nicklaus was the last owner to net a profit out of MacGregor.

 

Nicklaus, who began playing the company's clubs when he was 11-years-old, says of MacGregor's demise: “It's a shame in many ways. MacGregor was a name and a company that was at the head of the industry for 40 or 50 years. Then things changed.”

 

In the years that followed, MacGregor chased dollars by selling clubs more suited for value-priced retailers, relinquishing its premium-brand stature. In 1998, the company reversed course yet again under new owner Barry Schneider. A business maverick who transformed his family's flooring-installation company into a $300 million business, Schneider decided there was only one way to stop the erosion of MacGregor's reputation. He closed 98 percent of the company's distribution, mostly low-end retailers, forfeiting millions in revenue.

 

Schneider tried to rebuild MacGregor by returning it to its forged-blade roots. At the time, he said repeatedly: “I don't want to be the biggest, just the best.”

 

One believer in the reclamation was Greg Norman, who went from paid endorser to paying the bills. (Norman long had an affinity for the brand. Even when he was a Cobra spokesman in the '90s, he had White grind irons for him that were stamped with the Cobra name, White said. The clubs were nicknamed Mac-Cobras.) 

 

“This is by far the biggest business deal I have ever made,” Norman said when he purchased an undisclosed stake in MacGregor in November 2006.

 

But the audience for classic blades kept shrinking, and Schneider grew impatient.

 

Seduced by the success of MacGregor's high-tech metalwoods, designed exclusively for Japanese golfers, Schneider introduced the same product in the U.S. The MacTec woods featured “the high-octane supreme of titanium alloys” and an ultra-thin crown. But it flopped.

 

By 2008, Schneider was gone, ousted in a company reorganization. Recalling what amounted to be his quixotic effort, he says, “I under-estimated the strength of the existing brands in a consolidating industry.”

 

Norman assumed the title of board chairman. Employees supported the move, noting Norman's business track record surpassed his Sunday performances at the majors.

 

“Everything he touched turned to gold,” White says. “I thought we were going to come back the way we did (under Nicklaus) in the '80s.”

 

MacGregor jettisoned MacTec, revived the MT irons and intended to resurrect the VIP line in '09. Then the economy tanked. The company halted its plans and cut sales jobs. In the clearest signal that Norman had realized the futility of his quest, he signed an endorsement deal with TaylorMade in March.

 

“The survivors in this game right now . . . are Wall Street brands,” Norman said. “We got out while we could.”

 

White's lathe stopped spinning May 29. No one was retained when MacGregor was sold, leaving White two weeks shy of his 38th anniversary at the company. Banished to early retirement, he has fixed his house, fished, and played golf with a handmade set of forged irons engraved “Don O Mite.” 

 

With grace and good humor, White has endured MacGregor's slow, sorrowful fall. But sometimes he forgets that the clubs he made have been reduced to collectors' items. The Albany facility where once they were tested is overgrown and unkempt. 

 

On occasion, White still drives to the one constant in his life, the office, for no reason at all. 

 

Some habits are hard to break.

 

 

 

Editor's note: The MacGregor name, however faded, will live on in a new line of golf equipment to be released from its latest owner, retailer Golfsmith International.

 

The thought of MacGregor being relegated to a so-called “house brand” is bound to distress loyalists, who fret MacGregor will become a low-cost alternative. Typically, retailers don't invest as much in R&D as equipment makers and rely heavily on Asian foundries for manufacturing.

 

David Lowe, a Golfsmith vice president and a former MacGregor ambassador, confirms MacGregor clubs will be made overseas, but adds “it will be much more than people expect.”

 

He remembers as an assistant golf professional in the early 1980s receiving his first MacGregor staff bag embroidered with his name. “It was one of the best days of my career,” he says. 

 

Golfsmith acquired MacGregor to serve as its flagship brand. It will be sold exclusively in the chain's 74 stores and Golfsmith's Web site and catalogs. In Europe, MacGregor will be distributed through various retailers. Golfsmith is reviving some of MacGregor's storied products: The VIP will be its premium forged offering ($799 steel); the Tourney, a mid-priced cast iron ($599 steel, $699 graphite). Golfsmith plans to unveil the MacGregor brand with bags, balls and accessories this holiday season. The clubs officially will debut in March.

 

[GolfSpy Barbajo]

Further reading -- an interesting recap of the company's history up through 2004:

 

http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/macgregor-golf-company-history/

 

See any parallels to what's happening in the golf world today?

[GolfSpy Barbajo]

And this is a long one - - but a detailed history of the company through 1979, with many lessons to be learned. 

 

http://persimmongolftoday.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/MacGregor_History.pdf

[Kenny B]

Great history read!  Thanks for putting it in one place.

 

You will absolutely love the VIP 1025 V-foils.  I play the 1025M.  They are very forgiving for a muscleback.  I thought about getting the 1025C in the mid- and long irons, but the 1025M is so easy to hit, I didn't think it was necessary.  I reshafted them last year from the DG S300 to the UST Proforce 95 graphite, and that made them playable for me again.  I just got too old to play steels anymore.

 

I also have a set of MacGregor M685 cavity back, newer clubs than the 1025M that Greg Norman played.  I was going to reshaft them, but I did a test between the two and the 1025M was much better for me.

 

Good luck with them and enjoy!!!

[JudgeSmails]

great read

[GolfSpy Barbajo]

Another GolfWeek article - this one on MacGregor's struggles in making a decent golf ball.  Ain't history grand?

 

 

Looking back: MacGregor's golf balls

Jack Nicklaus won in spite of it. Jimmy Demaret swapped it out after his first hole. Ben Hogan just flat-out refused to use it. Unlike MacGregor's beloved woods and irons, its golf ball was an object of contempt.

 

MacGregor began selling a golf ball under its name, but produced by a third-party prior to World War II. After the war, MacGregor adapted a machine devised to automatically wind baseballs to begin manufacturing its own golf ball.

 

The decision backfired.

 

According to the company's unpublished history, “MacGregor: The First 100 Years,” the first plant manager in the new ball department happened to be a heavy drinker, and “mistakes were made with the first batch to market.” MacGregor never recovered from this poor first impression, though the company continued making balls into the late 1980s.

 

 

“They sold a better ball at Woolworth's (discount retail stores),” said Jack Wullkotte, a 20-year veteran clubmaker with MacGregor and Nicklaus' longtime personal repairman. He said several staff players – including Demaret, Mike Souchak and Bob Toski – resorted to trickery to avoid using the ball. In order to pass muster with the Darrell Survey report, which tracks equipment usage at professional events, and fulfill their contractual obligation, they teed off with a MacGregor Tourney ball and switched to another brand's model after they finished the first hole. (The one-ball rule wasn't in effect in that era.)

 

Hogan wouldn't stoop to using the MacGregor ball even that long. The company gave him permission to play another ball until MacGregor felt that its ball was at least equal to the competition, according to Bob Rickey, MacGregor's vice president of marketing and a company employee from 1946 until 1974, in his manuscript “History of MacGregor.” 

 

Improvements were made. Fellow MacGregor staff pro Jack Burke Jr. won the 1952 Vardon Trophy with the ball.

 

“It went in the hole just fine for me,” Burke Jr. said recently.

 

So with a residue of hope, company officials tried yet again to switch Hogan into their ball. They invited Hogan to MacGregor's Cincinnati headquarters in early June 1953 before the U.S. Open. He spent three days there. During his visit, MacGregor offered to sign Hogan to a lifetime deal. There was one caveat: He had to play its ball.

 

Hogan wasn't easily swayed. He cooperated and observed a variety of tests. A mechanical driving machine called “Iron Byron” blasted shots with the top-of-the-line MacGregor Tourney as well as Hogan's preferred Titleist model. On the last day, MacGregor's president pressed Hogan for an answer and asked if the driving machine had persuaded him that the Tourney was suitable for his use in tournament play.

 

“Up to this time, Ben had uttered nothing more than a grunt the entire three days,” Rickey wrote. 

 

What happened next is part of Hogan lore. Tom Weiskopf, who signed with MacGregor in 1964 and played the same set of its irons for 17 years, picks up the story recorded by Rickey: “Hogan took his time as he often did. He puffed on his cigarette. Then he replied, ‘If you think that driving machine can hit a ball straighter than me, I suggest you enter it in the U.S. Open.' ”

 

Hogan walked off and never renewed with MacGregor. He won the U.S. Open that year, using a Titleist Acushnet DT ball No. 4, and followed with a victory at the British Open to complete the Hogan Slam. After playing out the final year of his MacGregor contract, he resigned rather than play a ball unfit to his exacting standards. One year later, Hogan started his own golf equipment company.

 

Hogan wasn't the lone staffer who considered the MacGregor ball to be inferior. According to Rickey, Demaret, Doug Ford and Dow Finsterwald all resigned from MacGregor on the eve of the 1957 Masters rather than accept an ultimatum to “play the Tourney or else.” That week, Ford slipped on the Green Jacket after using a Dunlop Maxfli.

 

In the years that followed, MacGregor leaned heavily on Nicklaus' success to persuade golfers that the Tourney was a superior ball. For a dozen years, the company sold Nicklaus golf balls in bulk to Firestone Tire for it to use in a variety of promotions. MacGregor ran its own contests as well, giving consumers and club pros the chance to win new cars or trips to the Masters. It provided handsome bonuses for its salesmen. But try as it might, MacGregor couldn't sustain sales success with its ball.

 

“It appears more dollars and effort were spent with less return on the golf ball in the Sixties than any other (MacGregor) product at any time,” Rickey wrote.

 

For all its shortcomings, a MacGregor ball was used by Nicklaus for his 18 major victories. But that didn't mean he, too, didn't voice his displeasure with the ball at times. Wullkotte recounted the story of the time Nicklaus returned from competing in the 1975 Hawaiian Open and met with the MacGregror ball staff to approve an upcoming ball line. Before they could get started, Nicklaus interrupted and assigned them a more urgent task, according to Wullkotte. Nicklaus told MacGregor's staff that he was dumbfounded when Tom Shaw and Art Wall Jr., two notorious short hitters on Tour, outhit hit him by 15 yards during a practice round. When Nicklaus hit one of Shaw's Titleist balls, he regained his edge.

 

Nicklaus, according to Wullkotte, threatened: “If you don't have a better ball for me to play by the Masters I'm going to play the Titleist.”

 

The MacGregor R&D team hopped on the task and reconfigured the ball ahead of Nicklaus' deadline. Shortly before the Masters, Nicklaus was paired with fellow long bomber Jim Dent. Nicklaus outdrove him all day.

 

Wullkotte chuckled, recalling Dent's punchline: “Looks like they got that mother fixed, huh Jack?”

 

Perhaps the most damning evidence of the MacGregor golf ball's inferiority comes from Frank Thomas, who for 26 years directed testing of all golf balls used in competition as the USGA's technical director. To make sure the balls used on Tour were the same as those originally submitted for the conforming ball list, Thomas collected sleeves of balls from Nicklaus and Weiskopf for testing at the 1977 U.S. Open at Tulsa's Southern Hills Country Club.

 

When Thomas put the Tourney through its paces on “Iron Byron” at the USGA's test center in New Jersey, he said the MacGregor ball veered 2-3 yards to the left; the next one turned a little more; and some moved as much as 15 yards off target. Having never before seen such an inconsistent ball flight, Thomas stopped the test.

 

“I thought something must be wrong with ‘Iron Byron,' ” Thomas said recently in a telephone interview.

 

But the machine operated properly, and the results of MacGregor's re-test were identical.

 

At the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, following Thomas' retirement, he revealed to Nicklaus the startling results of the '77 test. Nicklaus told him he wasn't surprised.

 

“He knew it wasn't a very good golf ball,” Thomas said. “It just shows how good he really was. I truly believe he would've won several more majors if he had played a better ball.”

[fozcycle]

Thanks John, I really enjoyed the McGregor read. On another note, I found a VIP 3 iron Head in great shape a few weeks ago, alongside the cart path on #9. I'm considering the broken shaft removal and inserting a new shaft, then playing it instead of my 2 Hybrid, just for kicks.

 

 

Sent from my iPad using MyGolfSpy

[Liberty Ball Markers]

I have talked myself out of restoring an old set of VIP's so many times...

 

This might have just lit the fire again!

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using MyGolfSpy

[downlowkey]

But the whole thing made me look for an article online that I had read a year or so ago while doing some research for an article, and I wanted to share it with you. It was originally published in the Nov 28th, 2009 issue of GolfWeek Magazine, and is an interesting read, especially now that Golfsmith is also dead and buried....

All really fun reads. Thanks for sharing. It's amazing how much Nicklaus won playing those Macgregor farm eggs. Really puts any bemoaning of modern equipment into perspective.

[Kenny B]

Thanks John, I really enjoyed the McGregor read. On another note, I found a VIP 3 iron Head in great shape a few weeks ago, alongside the cart path on #9. I'm considering the broken shaft removal and inserting a new shaft, then playing it instead of my 2 Hybrid, just for kicks.

 

 

Sent from my iPad using MyGolfSpy

It would be a good "driving iron" depending on the shaft you put in it.  FYI, the hosel is tapered .355

[Justin H]

Thanks for all the reading material!  I guess I should look into going even further back than I have been thinking...I had been looking at a set of these:  

 

 

I'd like a center shafted Bobby Grace mallet to go with it too...they made beautiful clubs, and put up a fight at the end.  Anybody else remember the Aaron Baddeley advertising campaign? 

[Miboy62]

Great read, Thanks!

[deejaid]

I was familiar with the article about their history and demise but hadn't heard about the ball problems. Thanks for sharing.

 

Be careful with those 1025 CM's. They might give your current gamers a run for their money. I don't want to admit it but I probably hit my cheap Mac CB 92's better than my KZG's. The KZG's are so nice, probably more forgiving due to the larger head, but the Mac's are so accurate.

 

Personally, I find turf interaction the most important aspect of choosing my irons. The KZG's have more of a radius on the sole, the Macs are flat. I'm not sure if the 1025's have the old school Mac sole Grind or if they are more modern.

 

Those 1025's should be a lot of fun.

 

 

Sent from my iPad using MyGolfSpy

[mega]

I had heard the ball testing story before. The other articles were good reads and I do remember the AB ads.

 

When those 1025cm's came out I really liked them and wanted a set, remember hitting them and thinking they were best feeling clubs I had ever hit at that time...

 

Sent from my SM-N920V using MyGolfSpy mobile app

[JohnSmalls]

This thread was a great read.  The ball problems are ironic with the revelations since #finditcutit and the MGS ball test.  Seems somethings do change and others don't in the golf equipment industry.

[Betty Rene]

Hey John, Guess what I have? Yep, THE Cray McGregor Tg20 Titanium original 1992 10.5 loft 1 golf club! 

[RobotDoctor]

Here are some woods from MacGregor's pinnacle period (early to mid 50s).  It was a matter of great pride to own and game one of these beauties.

 

[Tom D.]

The wooden woods were the genesis of the term, "hitting it on the screws" ...