Callaway

Big Bertha was named after a First World War siege gun, which tells you roughly what Callaway was after in 1991: a driver head about a quarter larger than anything else on the shelf. It became the best-selling golf club in the world inside a year and pulled the whole industry toward oversized steel heads. Ely Callaway Jr., who had run the textile giant Burlington Industries and then built a winery in Temecula, sold the winery, bought a small hickory-club maker in 1982 and pointed it somewhere else entirely. The company is based in Carlsbad, California, on Rutherford Road, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange.

Two things carried it from there. Odyssey, bought in 1997, has led the tour putter count for a quarter of a century, and the White Hot insert is why. The other is a machine-learning approach to clubface design, running tens of thousands of virtual prototypes to arrive at a face shaped in ways no one would draw by hand. Irons carry the Apex, Rogue and Paradym names, with Ai in a model name marking a face that came out of that work. Jailbreak braces the head, OptiFit turns the hosel, and if you're being fitted it'll be at a Callaway Performance Center.