Martin Kaymer on the 16th hole during a practice round for the US Open Championship on Wednesday at The Olympic Club in San Francisco. Kaymer is just one of the pros the golf club manufacturers stand ready to assist with their fleet of mobile workshops. Photo: Ben Margot/Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO — “We’re kind of like a Nascar pit crew,” Wade Liles, the head technician in TaylorMade’s Tour Truck, says of his job. Liles is busy stripping grips from the golf clubs of former University of Nevada golfer Scott Smith, who played his way into the US Open in a series of qualifiers. “A lot of what we do is maintenance, but sometimes there’s something much more drastic.”
Photo: Mark McClusky/Wired
Liles has been at TaylorMade for 25 years, and this truck is his baby. He and his boss sketched out their dream mobile golf workshop five years ago, literally on the back of a napkin. After the truck was built to their exact specifications, the napkin was framed and mounted on the wall.
Every major golf company has a truck like this, a rolling clubhouse and club-building facility to meet any needs a Tour player might have in the run up to a tournament. Changing grips is the most common task, and a tech like Liles can do a set in minutes. But that’s just the start. Want to build up a 3 iron to help with the tight fairways at San Francisco’s Olympic Club? Sure. Looking for a different grind on your wedge to handle the thick rough? No problem. Want a driver that promotes the left-to-right ball flight you’ll need? You got it.
Every truck has its own quirks. In the Callaway van, you see cubby holes for each of the company’s top players, with the gloves, balls, hats and other accessories the player prefers. If Phil Mickelson needs new gear, it’s stowed for him here, right by Ernie Els and D.A. Points. In the TaylorMade truck, there’s a section where custom grips for various players are stowed, to make sure that a player like Martin Kaymer has the heavily corded model he prefers.
Photo: Mark McClusky/Wired
Liles finishes the grips on Smith’s clubs and moves on to his next order, building a backup driver for a player that’s identical in every way to his current gamer. Liles measures the club for length and its swingweight, which shows how the club is balanced. He goes into his storage area, pulls the correct graphite shaft from among thousands on the truck, then cuts it to the correct length.
Then, some fancy magic. The epoxy used by club builders to attach the head to the shaft usually takes 24 hours to set. Liles has designed custom thermal cells that wrap around the hosel of the club and set the adhesive in three minutes. After attaching the head, checking that the loft and lie of the club are correct and putting on the correct grip, the club is done. Elapsed time? Seven minutes.
The tour technicians see some players more than others, just based on how much they like to tweak things. “We might see a guy once a month,” says Liles. “Some we see once a year.” And some they see even more often. Bob Estes, who’s been on the PGA tour since 1988, has been in and out of the van several times, looking to adjust his putter to help him cope with Olympic’s scorchingly fast greens.
He waves to the technicians and heads back out to the practice green. Liles waves back. “We’re just here to help these guys play as well as they can,” he says. “If you don’t take advantage of that, well, I don’t know. It’s just a no-brainer.”