My Field Trip to Nike Golf's Ft. Worth Facility, Part 1

Coming upon the exit for the Nike Golf facility in Ft. Worth, Texas, it is really difficult to spot where exactly the facility actually is.  All I know is I'm sitting in the same passenger seat that Suzann Pettersen sat in a few weeks prior. 

After crossing over a fairly poorly maintained overpass, the car crossed over into what looked like a quiet residential area.  Immediately on the right is an understated building, clearly marked - albeit in small font - that this is Nike Golf's Texas home. 

Pulling into the parking lot, I notice a set of three greens and some turf.  It's a new addition to help round out the now 26,000 square foot facility.  Nike's athletes and others that make their way through the place known as The Oven use the area to practice pitching and chipping at various lengths.  Employees use it to have contests, sometimes with a friendly wager.   That's not where the tour starts, though, and it's a good thing because the famous Texas wind is blowing 27 degree air right into my face.

My Tour guide for the day (and the guy whose care I was in) is Brad Simpson, an Oregon State alum who grew up with Nike's main campus in his backyard.  After getting involved with the organization in college, he moved to Nike Golf to work their tour van for a few years.  Now he is a part of some 42 employees at the Ft. Worth base.  Another 300 or so work up in Oregon at the mothership for the rest of the golf operation - apparel and golf balls.  Here in Ft. Worth, it's all golf clubs.

The lobby of The Oven is generally quiet throughout the day.  There are groups of people that come through for fittings, or Nike employees come for training on new products, or athletes repping Nike come through for equipment specing and testing.  I'm one of perhaps some 300 people per year that come for the full tour and a complete fitting.

The lobby area of the facility is adorned with artifacts of Nike Golf's past and present.  There is a clubhead timeline of the development of Nike equipment to the present.  Parallel to it is a timeline of Nike Golf's bellweather events.  Though Nike has been in the golf business since the 80s with Seve Ballesteros, its true advent came when it signed Tiger Woods in '96.  Even with all of the backlash he is currently facing, Nike could hardly have a bad word to say about the man who made their building relevant.

As for the question, "Why Ft. Worth, Texas?" that answer relates to another golf legend - Ben Hogan.  When Hogan Golf moved from the legend's hometown to Georgia, a small handful of its club designers ciphoned off to create their own company.  Nike Golf contracted with this team to create and sell their designs.  Much of that original team is still with Nike today, but their original agreement included an acknowledgment from Nike that their Oven would be where Hogan became a legend.

Walking the halls of facility, there are photographic monuments to their players that have won majors with their equipment.  Three years ago, it would have been just Tiger Woods.  In '08, Trevor Immelman joined the walls.  This year, Stewart Cink and Lucas Glover were added.

Brad and I got into a discussion of their younger players, like Pablo Martin and Anthony Kim.  Martin had just won in South Africa.  AK, Brad predicted, was set for a big '10.  I told him that I hoped his spooking at the AT&T National in July didn't derail him.  We both agreed that Kim acts like a young guy - but since both Brad and I are young, too, we could totally understand his occasional lack of focus.

With a key fob swipe, we go through a set of double doors into the real part of the facility.  We begin in the equipment research and testing lab.  This is where Nike measures physical specs of its equipment and does some research into its competitors.  Some of the research is for USGA compliance, and the lab has a lot of the same equipment that Dick Rugge has in Far Hills.  Cameras that look inside of club heads, Coefficient of Reciprocity testers, and other goodies that equipment geeks love adorn the modest lab.

A few rooms over, Elizabeth is creating molds of Nike's 2010 iron grooves.  She then scans them using a common office scanner with a USGA template to send to New Jersey for analysis and approval.  It is the same process that Rugge and his team use to analyze groove molds sent in from the field.

Brad and I move onto the prototyping area.  Nike recently purchased a printer that can actually print molds into layers.  Taking design ideas from CAD software, the printer can create real live, testable prototypes in a matter of minutes.  He tells me that the printer is almost always running.  With only a nominal cost to printing out new ideas, it seems like a waste to not be constantly trying to unearth new concepts.  For some reason, there's a crockpot in the room.  And I'm pretty sure it's used to cook the molds because whatever liquid in there is not boiling potatoes.

Walking toward the grind shop, there are two rooms on the left of the hallway.  One is the durability research testing.  It's a simple room that holds two golf ball-firing cannons that are constantly going.  They shoot golf balls at the face of their equipment and that of their competitors to test the quality of equipment against long-term use.  Every major manufacturer has one of these kinds of rooms.  Right after it is the inventory room.  It contains thousands of club parts, but they are almost all parts that are accessible by consumers.  For Nike, it is extremely rare that a club one of their athletes play doesn't at least start as a club you could buy off of the shelf.  The difference between them and us is their access to the room on the right - the grind shop.

The grind shop is Mike Taylor's baby.  This is where the Tour magic happens.  The room is filled with equipment spec sheets for professionals and high-ranking collegiate players.  Sheets for Justin Leonard, Trevor Immelman, Suzann Pettersen, and others adorn the room.  They sit on wheeled carts that hold clubheads, shafts, and grips that match the specs devised by the players.  For the record, Justin Leonard plays a 48 degree pitching wedge.

Taylor and his small staff work with players to customize Nike equipment to the aesthetic standards of Tour players.  In the same way that certain equipment fits our eye, some pros have even more specific requirements.  Some like a certain roundness to their clubs.  Others like their initials on their wedges.  The range of preferences can vary, but Taylor and his staff cater to them with tedious work and the same attention to detail that the player supply.  The room is even stocked with equipment they have previously made for other players as a guide to future work - including that of players who are no longer even on the staff.

In the room next door to Taylor's is where some work very important to Nike's future is happening.  This is where Nike's new line of Method putters (Brad's in this video) is being assembled for distribution to sales reps that are working with their elite clubs and retailers.  The putters are being crafted by hand from a block of medal that is cooked in a mold they have set.  The craftsmanship that goes into the creation of these putters is something I could watch all day.  But the goal isn't just to serve this very select group of people.  It is also to create molds and processes that can then be distributed around the world to Nike's manufacturing facilities so that these putters can get in your (and my) hands.

The final room of this first part of the Tour is where the staff assembles clubs that are on order from their players.  Taking the same spec sheets, Nike staff are ensuring assembly is perfect.  The process to assemble these clubs - like any other process at Nike - is heavily documented.  This is a QA step with which I am familiar in my project management life.  It's important and prevents mistakes.  Component parts are throughout the room, awaiting assembly. 

There's also a spare email from Lanny Wadkins laying around in front of the guy known as Nike Rob.  Rob used to be one of Nike's tour reps out on the road.  There was also a Rob with Mizuno Golf.  Despite no competitors nearby, the staff still sometimes refers to him by his road name.  There's good music blarring to help pass the time, though sometimes there are TVs broadcasting sports from around the world.  Apparently the staff has a lot of soccer fans.

Before Brad and I leave the room, he shows me what serves as their motivational posters - wins with their equipment over the last two years.  Nike leads in a lot of categories, no doubt thanks to Tiger Woods, but they do lead.  Brad says it helps him keep in perspective just how far they have come as an equipment company.

Having gotten their view of what they do and how well they do it, it was time to do some testing and fitting of my own.  In my next report, I'll talk about my fitting for some Nike Golf 2010 equipment - before it even is manufactured for the public.