The Gold Standard

At PING, it's not just business, it's personal. Always has been. Also true for the players who play them.

- MICHAEL BAMBERGER

BE CAREFUL WITH FIRST LOVE, my father once told me. It only comes once. That has to be true but I’m here to tell you: I got it right my third time around.

My first serious relationship was with a set of Wilson Staff irons, stamped Dynapower on their backs, with red dots on their soles, along with the words Fluid Feel. Wilson Staff was the crown prince of elite irons in the mid-1970s, and I saved up for months to buy this secondhand set for $100.

Later, I replaced them with a set of made-in-Japan PRGRs, blade irons with a dull matte finish, as handsome as a club could be, though part of the attraction was their space-age shafts, black graphite and chosen to match the player’s swing speed. These PRGRs cost a fortune but I was a bachelor and what else would I spend my disposable income on?

And then I fell for PING. It wasn’t love at first sight. The courtship unfolded over time, during an extended honeymoon of a kind. (It had no ending date.) Christine and I were married in the fall of 1990, and in February of 1991 we flew to France, where I had a one-week caddie tryout with an American journeyman on the European Tour, Peter Teravainen, a Yale grad with an economics degree and a mind that ran to numbers and logic.

It was a period of heightened awareness for me: Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” was playing in the cab we took to JFK; our Pan Am flight to Paris was choking in cigarette smoke. On our first morning in Saint-Raphaël, Christine gave me a ride from our sagging hotel to the course on the back of moped and through a misting rain. Breakfast was a chocolate croissant, out of a bag and still warm. Etc.