Cobra

Watching catamarans skim across Sydney Harbour gave Tom Crow the idea for a sole with rails on it, and he put it on a club called the Baffler in 1975, when golf had no name for it yet. Crow was an Australian Amateur champion who moved into clubmaking, and he started Cobra in 1973 near San Diego before settling the company in Carlsbad, California in 1977. Rails are still on the soles. It took another two decades for utility clubs to become normal equipment.

Cobra tends to get to things early, and two of those bets stuck: single-length iron sets built to one length across the bag, and a grip sensor, made with Arccos, that logs every shot. More recently it printed a putter and then irons in metal, using internal lattice structures that can't be cast or forged. H.O.T. Face uses machine learning to spread ball speed across the hitting area, while the DS-ADAPT hosel takes loft and lie separately and Smartpad sets the head square at address. KING TEC and OPTM are the family names on the metalwoods. Fittings run indoors at the Carlsbad performance centre and outdoors at Encinitas Ranch, with a network of certified fitters for everyone who isn't in Southern California. Five majors fell to Cobra clubs in the 1990s alone, and it's never been the solemn one in the category.