MyTurn
by JIM DUCIBELLA
Keeping the Equipment
Industry Honest
Adam Beach has a simple goal in
life. He wants the golf consumer
to know the truth about balls,
clubs, bags—and not what you
read in a magazine ad that costs a fortune
or see on television or hear from some
touring pro who may not even play the
stuff he’s hawking.
Ten years ago, his Yorktown-based
company—MyGolfSpy.com—took on that
challenge. In many ways they’ve kept
equipment manufacturers looking over
their shoulder and changed the way they
do business. The company’s site draws
710,000 appreciative readers monthly.
“There were no checks and balances in
the golf industry,” Beach said in explaining
why he and a dozen employees got started.
“No one was keeping the golf equipment
manufacturers honest. Day in and day out,
marketing scales started to tip, meaning
marketing was becoming more important
than the performance of the products. I felt
like we needed to get that back in balance.
“The goal is to completely change the
way golfers buy equipment and make them
have confidence that they’re getting the
right product.”
Let’s say you buy a dozen balls produced
by a company that’s made them for years.
Surely every ball is the same, right?
Fat chance, Beach said. Cost, (lack of)
oversight and integrity are the reasons.
The Callaway Chrome Soft ball is but
one example. MyGolfSpy.com literally
tests every product it reviews 10,000 times,
using humans and robots. The Chrome
Soft ball received just fair marks, strange
given the success of the ball in consumer
markets. When they cut open the balls,
they found some cores were off center and
the interior material was inconsistent.
Callaway at first protested, but ultimately
came to Virginia, saw the thoroughness
of the tests, and adjusted their process.
They stressed that they were not trying to
put over anything on the public.
“It’s easy to make a good golf ball once,”
Beach said. “Where do you stand when you
have to make that ball a million times, making
sure that the quality is as good as the first
one. There’s a cost involved in that because of
the oversight it takes. Then you have integrity.
The situation we ran into with Callaway
is they knew the problem existed centering
their cores for years and chose not to do
anything about it in my opinion. They put
marketing before performance.”
Quality control is even worse with lower-tower
balls, he said.
Obviously there are fewer testing protocols
for bags than balls and clubs. For
instance, Beach cautioned that more pockets
doesn’t necessarily make for a better
bag. It’s all about how well they serve the
player’s needs.
“It is phenomenal to see the lack of effort
and thought that goes into probably 75 percent
of golf bags.” he said. “Generally, they
are outsourced to manufacturers overseas
that don’t put the golfer first. Oftentimes
we see three pockets stacked on top of each
other. Looks really cool.
“Ultimately, a golfer only uses one of
them because the other two are jammed
up against each other and are pointless.
It even becomes hard for them to get their
hands into them.”
Just so you know, MyGolfSpy.com accepts
no ad dollars from major golf manufacturers;
smaller companies with proven track records
for quality are eligible for testing as well.
When he started MyGolfSpy.com, Beach
wasn’t some big name known to everyone
Adam Beach’s
MyGolfSpy.com
aims to provide golf
consumers with
honest product
reviews based on
exhaustive testing.
in golf. He was a Yorktown High grad who
played baseball at Christopher Newport
University and dabbled in long-drive contests.
He sold golf equipment online.
“My first goal was to build trust, my currency
was trust with the hardcore golfer,”
he said.
A ball test that proved that a Kirkland
Signature ball performed on par with the
Titleist ProV1, at one-third the cost, was
the bridge that carried him from the hardcore
golfer to the average player.
“It opened people’s eyes for the first time
in a long time that there were alternates to
the ProV1,” Beach said. “It dropped a major
domino in the golf ball industry.”
A cynic suggested that Beach’s work
exposed manufacturers as either callously
lax in oversight or deliberately deceitful
towards the public. Too harsh, he said.
“I don’t want to throw everybody into
those categories because I think there
are some that do it better than others,” he
said. “But there’s a lot of B.S. allowed in the
industry in how they market products. And
some companies ride up to that line a lot
closer than others.”
MYGOLFSPY.COM
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V IRGINIA G OLFER | M AY/J UNE 2020
vsga.org