According to a company source, DeChambeau and the company have “amicably” parted ways after the eight-time PGA Tour winner made the move to LIV Golf.

The break, in many ways, makes sense. LIV is a direct threat to the PGA Tour and Bridgestone has been a longtime partner and tournament sponsor of the PGA Tour. Bridgestone also continues to have star power in Tiger Woods, Jason Day, Fred Couples and Lexi Thompson.

DeChambeau signed with Bridgestone when he turned pro in April of 2016 and re-signed with the company in April of 2020, going on to win that year’s US Open at Winged Foot using the company’s Tour B X ball.

Despite the parting, expect DeChambeau to continue playing Bridgestone’s balls for the immediate future and possibly beyond as the golfer’s relationship with the company went beyond that of product endorser during the six-year affiliation. “I have a much deeper role in mind with Bridgestone. I want to be a bigger part of their R&D process and help develop golf ball technology for the future of the game while pushing the limits of golf ball designs to benefit the full spectrum of players,” he said upon re-signing in 2020. “I feel at home there because of their genuine commitment to science and technology.”

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The post The Open Championship 2022: LIV Golf’s Bryson DeChambeau and Bridgestone have ‘amicably’ parted and he’s no longer a staff player appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By E. Michael Johnson
Editor’s Note: Twenty years ago, Tiger Woods put a Nike Tour Accuracy golf ball in play at the Deutsche-Bank-SAP Open in Germany, igniting a chain of events that caused a paradigm shift in the golf-ball industry in a little more than five months time. The below article is re-printed from the May 31, 2010 issue of Golf World that commemorated one of the seminal moments in the game in regards to equipment.

• • •

It was May 2000 when Hal Sutton heard that Tiger Woods had changed from a wound Titleist Professional 90 golf ball to Nike’s solid-core, urethane-covered Tour Accuracy sphere. Said Sutton, “That can be a very dramatic change in a person’s life.”

As it turned out, Woods managed just fine with the new ball. It was the golf-ball industry that underwent the dramatic change after Woods first teed up the Swoosh-logoed ball in competition 20 years ago yesterday—May 18, 2000, to be precise—at the Deutsche-Bank-SAP Open in Germany.

In early 2000, the golf world was abuzz with talk of the ball going too far. The focus, however, wasn’t so much on the ball, but on new drivers with excessive spring-like effect, including those that exceeded USGA rules. Nearly lost in the outcry was a win by Paul Azinger at the Sony Open in Hawaii using the Nike Tour Accuracy.

The lack of excitement over the Nike ball was understandable. Despite Callaway generating some interest over its multilayer, urethane-covered Rule 35 ball a few weeks earlier, market-leader Titleist continued to produce wound golf balls for the game’s best players.

Paul Severn

What the industry didn’t know was that Woods had been testing the solid-core ball since January 1999—nearly 18 months before he put it in play. According to Rock Ishii, Nike’s director of product development for golf balls, Woods saw his driver spin drop 600 to 700 rpms but asked the company to tweak some aspects of the ball. In 2000, before the Masters, he hinted to the company that he was going to put it in play “soon” but did not say when.

“Honestly, I was surprised he put it in play during the season,” said Ishii. “Tiger usually makes his changes during the off-season. In early May 2000 we had another session with him that went well, but Tiger said he still needed some time to adjust to the ball. I went back to Japan and by the time I got off the plane I had a message saying he was going to use the ball in Germany. I went to Germany and Tiger finished third, mainly due to a 7-iron on the 70th hole that flew the green and went in the water. I thought he might stop using the ball after that, needing more time to adjust to the distance gains.”

Instead, Woods used—and won—with the ball at Memorial. Still, Ishii wasn’t sure the ball would be used at the U.S. Open. “Tiger asked me to make him a couple hundred of the balls so he could take them home and practice with them so he could get ready for the U.S. Open,” said Ishii. “That’s when we knew he would play it. We also knew after he won so convincingly with it that it would probably signal a paradigm shift in the market and on tour.”

Matthew Stockman
Woods at the 100th US Open

That it did. Woods not only won Memorial and the U.S. Open (a mind-blowing 15-shot victory) but went on a run in the U.S. that saw him win six of eight events after the switch, including the British and Canadian Opens. Woods’ success had other players curious—which resulted in companies paying notice.

One such situation was Titleist and Davis Love III. Love tested the Nike ball prior to the 2000 British Open at St. Andrews and was mulling a lucrative deal from Nike. Titleist lured him back into the fold with a 10-year, full-line contract.

“As far as we’re concerned, we’re at war and Love was our Midway,” said Acushnet chairman and CEO Wally Uihlein at the time. “Anybody who thinks we’re lying and dying. I’ve got news for them. We’re beefing up, we’re not backing off. We take very seriously any threat to our franchise and any attempt to derail our position in the marketplace.”

Actually, Woods’ switch to the Tour Accuracy might’ve actually strengthened the Titleist ball franchise. Although already in the planning stage, Woods’ success with the Nike ball, and the subsequent desire of players to see what all the fuss was about, forced Titleist to get in the multilayer urethane game sooner than it had anticipated.

“I’d like to see what you have in R&D coming out,” said Phil Mickelson (a Titleist staff player) to Uihlein at the 2000 U.S. Open. What Titleist had was a “Laboratory Test Ball,” which would become the Pro V1. Uihlein acknowledged at the time that his talk with Mickelson was a key in the decision so start production of the ball.

“It would be foolish and naïve to think that 30 days after a discussion I had with Phil Mickelson that voila, something falls out of the white-coated laboratory that represents a magic elixir.”

The Pro V1 prototype was first shown to a large number of players at the 2000 SEI Pennsylvania Classic, generating so much talk that Golf World likened it to, “a carload of teenage girls on its way to an ’N Sync concert.”

A few weeks later the ball debuted in Las Vegas with 47 players putting the Pro V1 in play (the previous week only one Titleist player, Corey Pavin, had used a non-wound ball), including winner Billy Andrade, and the stampede to solid-core balls was on. By March of the following year nearly percent of the tour was using solid-core balls, a number that became 100 percent by the end of 2002. Vijay Singh’s win at the 2000 Masters was the last of the men’s majors won with a wound ball. The paradigm shift found its way to the consumer market as well, where golfers could now purchase tour-level balls that flew farther but didn’t cut and the Pro V1 became perhaps the best-selling ball in history.

A very dramatic change, indeed.

The post How Tiger Woods sparked a dramatic shift in the golf-ball business appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

That, however, is where the similarities pretty much end. The new Tour B line isn’t merely a continuation of the previous series with a subtle tweak here and there. Rather it is a complete reimagining of the line, save for the names which will remain Tour B X, Tour B XS, Tour B RX and Tour B RXS to cover a wide swath of swing speeds, launch conditions and feel preferences.

The new line started with pondering a question every golf-ball designer has dealt with since the modern-ball era began in 2000: How to increase driver distance while enhancing greenside spin? The result usually coming in the form of some sort of compromise between the two.

Fortunately for Bridgestone, it’s a company used to dealing with rubber-based products and has more than 900 rubber and polymer engineers worldwide. Bridgestone leaned on that expertise—along with the input of 15-time major champion Tiger Woods—to try and decouple that problem and arrived at a new cover formulation in the process.

Named “Reactiv” by the company, the cover utilizes an “impact modifier”—an additive to the urethane that acts as a shock absorber on slow-impact shots, thus delivering more spin. It’s also highly resilient on longer shots with faster swings for more distance. In short, the cover behaves differently dependent on the force of the impact. Impact modifiers have been used in automotive, electrical and electronic industries for similar dual purposes.

“It’s a new technology that we have been working on for several years,” said Elliot Mellow, marketing manager for Bridgestone golf balls. “It’s not easy to work with, so it took some time.”

All the balls in the series will feature versions of Bridgestone’s gradational core design that gets firmer as it moves to out toward the cover to produce better energy transfer and less spin. The core also is slightly larger than the previous version and slight changes have been made to the dual-dimple pattern (smoother edges on the larger dimples) to create less drag for better performance in the wind. The three-piece balls also contain the company’s “activation acceleration mantle” layer.

As for Woods, he has spent two years testing new balls for Bridgestone, offering feedback at every level. During a test session in February, 2019, Woods told Golf Digest, “My main thing with the guys at Bridgestone is I know my feel at impact and I know where the ball needs to be in my window and if it’s not there, I can tell them where it should be and they’re going to be able to tell me the reasons why it’s not and how we address it.”

While Bridgestone staffers Matt Kuchar and Bryson DeChambeau already have the Tour B X in play, Woods will be teeing it up for the first time in competition at the Farmers Insurance Open.

“Working closely with the R&D team I’ve been able to take ownership of this design more than any other ball spec in my career,” Woods said in a statement.

Of course, not everyone swings like Tiger Woods, which is why in addition to the Tour B X and Tour B XS which is designed for players swinging 105 miles per hour or more, the company will continue to produce the Tour B RX and Tour B RXS for players swinging less than that. Fred Couples and Rocco mediate are expected to us the RXS version on the PGA Tour Champions.

Tour pros, of course, have immediate access to ball fitting any time they want it. To help provide as close to that service as possible to everyday players, Bridgestone—long a proponent of ball fitting—also is introducing its VFIT service where golfers take a video of their swing, send it in and receive a ball-fitting recommendation. The video is of a driver swing and needs to be shot ion a specific manner so an algorithm can calculate the player’s launch conditions from which a ball recommendation will be made, usually within 24 hours. For more information on VFIT, click here.

The post Bridgestone Golf leans on its institutional knowledge—and Tiger Woods—in the development of its Tour B ball line appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By E. Michael Johnson
It took a while, but Tiger Woods tied Sam Snead’s PGA Tour all-time mark for victories with 82 with a victory in the rain-delayed Zozo Championship. Woods fired a final-round 67 to hold off Hideki Matsuyama by three shots.

As is often the recipe for a Woods win, the 15-time major champion combined superb iron play with timely putting. Woods ranked T-4 in greens in regulation, hitting 76.4 percent of his greens for the week. He also cashed in on a good number of those opportunities, ranking first for the week in putts per green in regulation at 1.638, including a key birdie conversion on the par-5 14th hole to boost his cushion to three strokes over Matsuyama.

Woods’ P7TW irons boast a traditional, muscleback-blade look that Woods has favored throughout his career. When it comes to irons, feel, not distance, is paramount for Woods. To achieve that feel, TaylorMade employed tungsten to produce a deeper feel.

Woods has used the same iron specs since he was a kid, telling Golf Digest in 2017 he only changed the lie angle at times when a swing change called for it. He also pays close attention to sole design. Repeating that sole shape is made easier by TaylorMade using milling instead of a standard forging. Forging requires a fair amount of handwork, but the soles of the P7TW are CNC milled—a process similar to the company’s Milled grind wedges—to remove any inconsistencies from a hand-grinding process.

Among the distinct aspects of the sole grind on the P7TW irons is a slightly flatter sole radius and slightly more bounce (depending on the loft) compared to typical designs. In addition, the groove on Woods’ P7TW irons is narrower than typical designs, and there are more grooves on the face. The shafts are True Temper’s Dynamic Gold X-100 and the grips Golf Pride’s Tour Velvet cord.

Of course, then there is Woods’ Scotty Cameron by Titleist Tiger putter. Woods’ Cameron is made from German stainless steel. At one point, Woods had 1/4-degree of loft added to the putter to bring it back to its standard 4 degrees. In this era of somewhat heavier flat sticks, the club’s 326 grams is a touch on the lighter side, although its swingweight of D7 is pretty much standard for a blade putter. The club’s markings include a single sight dot and a red “cherry dot” on both the face and in the back cavity. The putter also has a blank sole, with “Tiger” engraved on the left bumper and “Woods” on the right bumper. The club features a Ping grip with the “Ping” name blacked out and was re-shafted twice over its first 10 years. The Newport-shaped putter has been in the bag for the better part of two-plus decades for Woods and he has won 14 of his 15 majors with it.

And now as many PGA Tour wins as anyone in history.

Tiger’s Bag in Japan

Ball: Bridgestone Tour B XS
Driver: TaylorMade M5 Mitsubishi Diamana D+ 60TX), 9 degrees
3-wood: TaylorMade M5, 15 degrees
5-wood: TaylorMade M3, 19 degrees
Irons (3-PW): TaylorMade P7TW
Wedges: TaylorMade Milled Grind (56, 60 degrees)
Putter: Scotty Cameron by Titleist Tiger

The post Winner’s bag: Tiger Woods’ equipment at the Zozo Championship appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By E. Michael Johnson
Tiger Woods’ five Masters victories have spanned more than two decades and coincided with what many consider to be the Golden Age of golf equipment technology. Certainly Woods’ use of the multilayer, solid-core Nike Tour Accuracy TW ball was a paradigm shift for equipment used by tour players and the distances they hit them.

Woods’ Masters career has also seen players go from drivers in the 260 cubic-centimetre range to 460 ccs, and in Woods’ case, the move from steel to graphite shafts in metalwoods. A few things have stayed constant over time for Woods, however. He continues to use a Scotty Cameron putter, and he only carries two wedges in his bag along with his pitching wedge when most players use three and a pitching wedge.

Even at 43 years of age, Tiger still hits those muscle-back blade irons better than any human on earth. Here’s a look at the equipment that Woods has won his five Masters titles with.

Tiger Woods’ equipment through his five Masters titles:

Tiger Woods tees off on the 15th hole during the 1997 Masters. (Augusta National)

1997:
Ball: Titleist Professional 90
Driver: King Cobra (True Temper Dynamic Gold X 100), 9 degrees
3-wood: Titleist PT15, 15 degrees
Irons (2-4): Mizuno MP-29; (5-PW): Mizuno MP-14
Wedges: Cleveland 588 RTG (56, 60 degrees)
Putter: Scotty Cameron by Titleist Newport TE I3

The clubs Tiger used at the 1997 Masters Tournament (Augusta National)

[divider] [/divider]

Dom Furore/Golf Digest, Golf World

2001:
Ball: Nike Tour Accuracy TW
Driver: Titleist 975D (True Temper Dynamic Gold X 100), 7.5 degrees
3-wood: Titleist 970, 15 degrees
Irons (2-PW): Titleist 681 Forged
Wedges: Titleist Vokey (58, 60 degrees)
Putter: Scotty Cameron by Titleist Newport 2 Tiger

Tiger Woods and Stevie Williams during the 2001 Masters. (Augusta National)

[divider] [/divider]

2002:
Ball: Nike Tour Accuracy TW
Driver: Nike Forged Ti (True Temper Dynamic Gold X 100), 9.5 degrees
3-wood: Titleist 970, 15 degrees
Irons (2-PW): Titleist 681 Forged
Wedges: Titleist Vokey Design (58, 60 degrees)
Putter: Scotty Cameron by Titleist Newport 2 Tiger

[divider] [/divider]

Tiger Woods watches his tee shot on the 15th tee during the final round of the 2005 Masters. (Photo by David Cannon/Getty Images)

2005:
Ball: Nike One Platinum TW
Driver: Nike Ignite 460cc (Mitsubishi Diamana Blue Board 83), 8.5 degrees
3-wood: Nike T60 Ignite, 15 degrees
Irons (2-PW): Nike Forged Blades
Wedges: Nike Pro Combo (56 degrees), Nike TW Blade (60 degrees)
Putter: Scotty Cameron by Titleist Newport 2 Tiger

[divider] [/divider]

2019:
Ball: Bridgestone Tour B XS
Driver: TaylorMade M5 (Mitsubishi Diamana D+ 60TX), 9 degrees
3-wood: TaylorMade M5, 15 degrees
5-wood: TaylorMade M3, 19 degrees
Irons (3-PW): TaylorMade P7TW
Wedges: TaylorMade Milled Grind (56, 60 degrees)
Putter: Scotty Cameron by Titleist Newport 2 Tiger prototype

The post Masters 2019: The winning clubs Tiger Woods has used for all five of his Masters titles appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

The list is Forbes’ annual ranking of America’s wealthiest celebrities.

Tiger Woods ranked in a tie with author James Patterson for ninth at $800 million, which positions himself in the years ahead to have a go at adding “billionaire” to descriptions of him.

Lest he get too cocky, Michael Jordan is worth more than twice as much, at $1.7 billion, fourth on the list.

Just ahead of Tiger is Diddy at $825 million, while Kylie Jenner, the wunderkind who is the sole owner of Kylie Cosmetics, is No. 5 at $900 million.

George Lucas is a runaway No. 1 at $5.4 billion.

Last year, Woods was ranked eighth at $750 million. Woods’ improbable comeback from injuries, capped by a victory in the Tour Championship, already has paid dividends to his bottom line in 2018 and is likely to continue doing so into the future. Last month, it was announced that Woods has signed a multi-year deal with Discovery Inc. to provide content on its streaming video platform, GOLFTV.

He also has endorsement contracts with Nike, TaylorMade, Bridgestone, Hero MotorCorp, Monster Energy and Kowa, the latter a Japanese pharmaceutical company.

The post Tiger Woods’ net worth is $800 million, $50 million more than a year ago, according to Forbes appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By E. Michael Johnson
Tiger Woods won the Tour Championship using a game that was working in every area. Even with a 30-player field, it’s impressive to rank among the top 10 in every strokes gained metric, including being in the top five in strokes gained/off the tee; around the green; putting; tee to green and total.

Such a performance is not only testimony to Woods’ resolve in coming back from career-threatening injuries, but also how Woods re-worked almost his entire bag during the course of 2018, something the normally reticent-to-change Woods fully embraced.

The process got into full gear with a test session last December at Medalist Club in Jupiter, Fla., and Golf Digest was on hand to watch. Woods had signed with TaylorMade nearly a year earlier, but due to injuries this was his first full-blown opportunity to try the company’s gear, including its new M3 driver with Twist Face technology.

The driver testing revealed the best of the old and new Tiger. Finicky as ever about the look and ball flight, but open to trying new things, including working with the adjustable features of the club—something he had been loathe to do throughout his career, using mostly drivers with glued-in shafts. This continued into the season as Woods used the M3, originally putting the two movable weights in the center and back heel position (neutral flight with slide draw bias) before moving them both to the center track with one weight forward and the other somewhat back. The weights forward sacrifice some forgiveness, but add speed and make the club much more workable—a desirable trait for a player who shapes his shots like Woods. He also changed shafts at the start of the FedEx Cup Playoffs, putting in a Mitsubishi Diamana D + white 70-gram shaft—an updated version of the Mitsubishi shaft he used with much success.

All this trial and tweaking finally paid dividends for Woods late in the season. Coming into the FedEx Cup Playoffs Woods ranked 134th in strokes gained/off the tee. In the three Playoff events leading into the Tour Championship Woods ranked 17th, 38th and 23rd, respectively in the same statistic.

Woods also added new irons to his bag, TaylorMade’s TW Phase 1. The irons are almost an exact replica of the muscleback blade irons Woods has used virtually throughout his career. Woods tried prototypes of the irons at the test session, but felt the ball flight was too high—a non-starter for one of the game’s best iron players. “If I look up and don’t see the ball right there—I mean, right where I expect it to be—then we have a serious, serious problem,” Woods told Golf Digest several years ago about his ball flight with irons. Eventually TaylorMade matched up the center of gravity location to what Woods had been using and also brought in former Nike employee Mike Taylor, who worked on Woods’ irons and wedges when he used equipment with a swoosh, to make sure the irons were just so.

Of course, Woods was also getting used to a new golf ball, Bridgestone’s Tour B XS after years of playing a Nike ball tweaked specifically for him. The Tour B XS is the spinnier version on Bridgestone’s tour ball line, which makes sense for Woods who long has said he’ll take as much spin as he can get in a ball and that it’s his job to take that spin off when necessary.

Woods also swapped out his wedges during the year, changing to TaylorMade’s Milled Grind wedges at the Memorial, leaving his trusty Scotty Cameron by Titleist putter as the lone holdover club. But even the Scotty got the heave-ho for a bit as Woods went way outside his box on putters by trying a true mallet—TaylorMade’s Ardmore 3—in competition for the first time, putting it in play at the Quicken Loans National. Woods then would have a one-event stint with the company’s TP Black Copper Juno at the Dell Technologies Championship before returning to the Cameron he has won 13 majors with.

And now another Tour Championship and a pretty compelling comeback story to go with it.

What Tiger Woods had in the bag at the Tour Championship

Ball: Bridgestone Tour B XS
Driver: TaylorMade M3 460 (Mitsubishi Diamana D + white 70), 9.5 degrees
3-wood: TaylorMade M3, 13 degrees
5-wood: TaylorMade M3, 19 degrees
Irons (3-PW): TaylorMade TW Phase 1
Wedges: TaylorMade Milled Grind (56, 60 degrees)
Putter: Scotty Cameron by Titleist Tiger

The post How Tiger Woods’ evolved approach to equipment played a role in his comeback win appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By E. Michael Johnson
Brandt Snedeker used an opening 59 and a 72nd-hole drive out of bounds by C.T. Pan to win the Wyndham Championship, but to say Snedeker backed into the win would be shortchanging the Tennessean who now has nine wins on the PGA Tour.

That’s because although Snedeker’s well-known prowess on the greens was mostly absent on the weekend. Snedeker hit 17 of 18 greens Sunday, helping him not only avoid the big mistake, but also putting him in good enough position to cash in six birdie opportunities—including one at the last to put a capper on the round—for a final-round 65 and his second Wyndham title.

Snedeker’s irons are Bridgestone’s J15 CB, a cavity-back players iron model. Interestingly, Snedeker does not use steel iron shafts like most tour pros, instead opting for Aerotech Steelfiber shafts that weigh 95 grams (about 30 grams less than standard steel shafts) with a stiff flex. The Steelfiber is a graphite shaff that is designed to perform like steel but with the dampening and weight benefits of graphite and is also used on the PGA Tour by Matt Kuchar, among others.

Another tip of the equipment cap also belongs to the Titleist Vokey prototype 60-degree wedge that Snedeker used to produce a nifty up-and-down from greenside rough for a critical birdie on the 15th hole. In all, Snedeker ranked second in strokes gained/tee-to-green for the week.

And more importantly, first on the leaderboard at day’s end Sunday.

What Brandt Snedeker had in the bag at the Wyndham Classic

Ball: Bridgestone Tour B X
Driver: Bridgestone JGR prototype (Graphite Design IX-6X), 9.5 degrees
3-wood: TaylorMade M3, 15 degrees
5-wood: TaylorMade M3, 19 degrees
Irons (4-9): Bridgestone J15 CB; (PW): Bridgestone J40
Wedges: Bridgestone J15 (51, 55 degrees); Titleist Vokey prototype (60 degrees)
Putter: Odyssey White Hot XG Rossie

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