Dr. V’s Magical Putter: The remarkable story of a mad scientist and the politics of sex and money
The remarkable story behind a mysterious inventor who built a "scientifically superior" golf club
by Caleb Hannan on January 15, 2014
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/01/essay_anne_vanderbilt_dr_v_s_magical_putter_grantland_s_expos_of_a_trans.html
Digging Too Deep
Grantland’s Exposé of a trans con artist privileged fact-finding over compassion.
Strange stories can find you at strange times. Like when you’re battling insomnia and looking for tips on your short game.
It was well past midnight sometime last spring and I was still awake despite my best efforts. I hadn’t asked for those few extra hours of bleary consciousness, but I did try to do something useful with them.
I play golf. Sometimes poorly, sometimes less so. Like all golfers, I spend far too much time thinking of ways to play less poorly more often. That was the silver lining to my sleeplessness — it gave me more time to scour YouTube for tips on how to play better. And it was then, during one of those restless nights, that I first encountered Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt, known to friends as Dr. V.
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Barney Adams, the founder of Adams Golf, the last truly successful independent club manufacturer, is unapologetically pessimistic about other small companies’ odds of survival. “We got lucky,” he says. “Our success was tied to one club.” Adams had been a custom club fitter constantly on the brink of bankruptcy until he built a club called Tight Lies. Adams’s creation was billed as a fairway wood, but many consider it to be the first hybrid, a half-iron half-wood that combined the best features of both. Adams exploited his finder’s advantage for as long as he could, but today every clubmaker has its own line of hybrids. In 2012, Adams Golf was sold to Adidas, which already owns TaylorMade.
Adams’s assessment of golf’s demographics and his conclusions about what they mean for the business are brutal. “Look at the average age of today’s golfer,” he says. “Half are over 40. How does that forecast into the future? If you look out 50 years, golf becomes squash.” The outlook is more grim, says Adams, for designers who make only putters. “In the history of the golf industry there’s never been an independent putter company that hasn’t gone broke,” he says. The only path to success involves being bought by a larger company. And to do that, Adams says, you need a story to sell. A story that can usually be reduced to five simple words: “Mad scientist invents great product.”
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