TaylorMade

The first metalwood came out of a rented building in McHenry, Illinois that had previously assembled televisions, and it was a 12 degree stainless steel driver at a time when everyone else was still shaping persimmon. Gary Adams borrowed twenty-four thousand dollars against his house to build it, and TaylorMade started in 1979 with three people on the payroll. The company calls that first head the Pittsburgh Persimmon. By 1985 nearly every metal wood in play on tour carried the name, and the business is now run privately out of Carlsbad, California, from Fermi Court, with more than two thousand staff.

Breaking from persimmon set the pattern, and the driver has stayed the centre of TaylorMade's operation ever since, most recently through carbon-fibre faces built from around sixty layers of composite that weigh far less than a comparable titanium face. Twist Face, Speed Pocket, Inverted Cone and Moveable Weight all came from the same place. Irons run under the P Series, from the hollow-body P790 out to the P7MB blades and the P7TW model Tiger Woods worked on, and the Spider has been the putter line since 2008. Fitting happens at The Kingdom in Carlsbad, and the web shop runs a loyalty programme, trade-ins and a subscription option on top of the usual custom orders. It's a lineup built around speed, and it doesn't pretend otherwise.