Tiger’s Clubs Won’t Make Your Game Better November 2006

by Daniel G. Shafer
Images by Adrienne Gammiere

John Riley grew up around the custom golf club business. He knows what will help you…and what won’t…when it comes to putting the right equipment into your hands.

Many golfers choose their clubs based on their endorsement by a well-known touring pro, but John Riley of Monterey’s Riley Golf says he “wouldn’t send any of my customers near a course with Tiger Woods’ clubs. They’d never be happy or successful.”

Riley says that, “If you’re serious about your golf game — and I don’t care if you’re a beginner or if you’re an eight-handicap player — you really owe it to yourself to look into getting a set of clubs built just for you and your style of golf.” While most people think custom clubs would be prohibitively expensive, Riley says that for about the price of a good set of clubs — somewhere in the $1,200-1,500 range — he can provide a completely customized setup.

Many golfers limit their choices to off-the-shelf clubs, but some of the more serious players will find a fit in the Ping Golf Club system of colored dots. “They have black dots, green dots, and so forth,” Riley says of the company with which his father, John Sr., began his club-manufacturing career as a close associate of founder Karsten Solheim. The dots are a system that provides the golfer with information about the specs belonging to a particular club.

Riley Golf opened for business in 1980 and is currently meeting the need for custom clubs of 23,000 golfers. “A great many of our customers are repeat buyers,” Riley says. “We’ve sold far more than 23,000 sets of clubs over the years, but not everyone stays in contact with the company after they make their purchase. The 23,000 represent those with whom we have ongoing contacts.”

Factors for a Fit
Every Riley Golf customer is seen by someone from the company before a club is built or sold. Many people come to Riley’s headquarters in Monterey for their fitting, but the company has representatives all over the United States who are trained and equipped to do mobile custom club fitting.

The primary factors Riley takes into account when he approaches a new custom club fitting are:

• The kind of golfers involved. What are their handicaps? Do they swing hard or more gently? Do they have a tendency to hook or slice? “A player with a 120-mile-per-hour swing is going to need a heavier shaft that someone who swings the club more slowly, for example,” he says.
• What benefit the golfers are seeking. “I ask them what they want to get out of a new set of clubs and then I also think about that question,” Riley says.
• What are their swing mechanics? Riley has equipment, both in his shop in Monterey and in his mobile setups around the country, to analyze the golfer’s swing in order to focus on things like where their center of gravity is (and where it should be), where balance points need to be incorporated, and other such measurements.
• How much divot they take. “I have to design the ground contact portion of the clubs to match how they hit down and through the ball,” Riley points out. “This can be a critical design decision and often makes a huge difference.”
• Where they put their weight
• The type of shaft they are most comfortable using
• What materials will give the best combination of outcome considering all of these and many other factors.

Overall, Riley says, his focus is less on the swing itself than it is on what his customers do as they make contact with the ball and follow through. “That’s one big difference between what I can do and what a pro can do for you,” he points out. “I can’t help you with your hand position or your swing, but I can eliminate the possibility that having the wrong equipment for your style of swing and level of play is holding you back.”

Riley has to be quite careful with his assessment of a customer’s game and his or her goals. “If I make a club that doesn’t work for you,” he laughs, “you know where to find me and I’m absolutely going to hear from you.”

Who Comes to Riley?
The vast majority — something like 80% — of Riley’s customers are regular golfers who have handicaps in the range of eight to 25. Most are adults, but, “I do some fitting for kids whose parents want to be really supportive of the youngster’s passion for the game.”

He points out that for most young players, “Grabbing your father’s set of clubs and hitting the course is probably not going to work most of the time.”

Riley feels he can offer the greatest benefit to the golfer who loves the game, is passionate about it, plays it regularly, but isn’t in the top tier of players. “The guys who can truly benefit from and who need the additional game help that the right technology can give them are the guys who don’t have the talent to play scratch or near-scratch golf,” he muses.

The driving range is a source of constant interest and ideas for Riley. “I can watch a guy hit a few shots at a driving range and then I start asking myself what I could do to his equipment to help him hit better,” Riley says. Then, laughingly, he adds, “I take a peek into his golf bag and I almost always see two or three clubs that he should just throw out right now because they’re not only not going to help him, they’re going to hurt his game.”

While he designs new clubs to help players get more out of their game, he has to be on constant guard against violating the rules of golf, rules which he points out can be “pretty amorphous.” For example, one of the key rules about golf clubs requires that they be “plain in shape.” His father ran afoul of that rule when he was designing a new putter. “He put a red dot on the putter and then a layer above the dot, he put a hole. The idea was that if the golfer could see the entire red dot, then he had the club aligned properly vertically,” Riley says. “The golf rules makers outlawed that design, saying it was an ‘aid to the golfer.’“ On another occasion, John Sr., by then in the Monterey area, took a whole new approach to designing a club with a perimeter-weighted head. “That design was outlawed after he had developed it.”

Over the years, Riley believes, there’s been a kind of tug-of-war between equipment designers who try to improve the clubs and the rules people who force them to roll back changes.

“That holds golf back a bit, it seems to me,” he says.

Riley says that while he has no problem with the need for rules to keep the game honest and the playing field as level as possible, “The rules have to be a lot less vague in many cases.”

How It All Started
Riley has been playing golf since he was about eight years old, growing up in England where his father was one of the best golfers in the country. One year, the Walker Cup selection committee passed over Riley Sr. for what his son says were “primarily political reasons. He wasn’t part of the ‘in’ crowd.” Riley Sr. voiced his frustration during a round of the British Open to U.S. pro Bill Johnston, who was then the head pro at the Phoenix Country Club.

“Johnston told my father that the real land of opportunity for golfers wasn’t England but the United States, so in 1960, father and son pulled up stakes and moved to Phoenix, where the elder Riley became an assistant pro under Johnston and started his interest in golf equipment and design.

After leaving Ping, Riley founded a company that would later become the well-known Lynx Golf Company. While he ran that company, he designed what has become yet another classic club, the Lynx Master Model. From there, he moved to form another new company, Pinseeker, where he came up with a design that has changed the face of golf forever.

“Dad invented the world’s first metal woods,” Riley says. “He made the initial prototypes for the new technology right here in Pacific Grove. It was a radical design change at the time, although today metal woods are in common use.”

Over the years, the Riley family, which came together as Riley Golf in 1980, has seen and been responsible for numerous major changes in the world of golf equipment. Most notable among these have been improved graphite shafts (thanks, the younger Riley says, in large part to the U.S. space program), the perimeter-weighted irons his father designed, and a lower, deeper center of gravity in overall club design. That shift in gravity was a technique that Riley Jr. and his brother Andy designed together 20 years ago.

“Andy is still in the family business with me,” Riley says. “He spends most of his time designing tooling and manufacturing masters for new clubs with me at the store here in Monterey.”

It’s not clear whether Riley Golf will continue beyond the eventual retirement of the two brothers who operate the company now. It was founded as a family business, but Riley Jr.’s two sons, Kevin (13) and Dylan (8) “seem more drawn to baseball now than to golf,” he says. “When they do go to the range, like most young golfers, they don’t want to practice chipping and putting, where golf is really won or lost. They just want to see how far they can hit a ball.”

Riley lives in Carmel Valley with his wife, Kelley, who is a veterinarian with a well-established practice in Marina. °