NEWS FROM THE TOUR VANS
BROUGHT TO YOU BY GOLF PRIDE, THE #1 GRIP ON TOUR
In 2000 at the Invensys Classic at Las Vegas, the future of golf began.
That October at the desert tour stop, Titleist introduced its new solid-core Pro V1 golf ball. An avalanche of tour pros in the Las Vegas field – 47 in all, including winner Billy Andrade and runner-up Phil Mickelson – made the immediate switch to the ball that would change the game.
“This is the future,” Mickelson told his final-round playing competitor, Stewart Cink, who was reluctant to make the leap from the comfort zone of his wound-core Titleist Professional.
Back where it all began at TPC Summerlin, Titleist kicked off its 25th-anniversary year with a launch of its new Pro V1 and Pro V1x at last week’s Shriners Children’s Open, where 23 players (nine Pro V1; 14 Pro V1x) put the new 2025 models in play last week. The introduction celebrates a quarter century of breakthrough golf ball innovation.
Even Titleist wasn’t fully prepared for what it was releasing on October 9, 2000 for competition. The original Pro V1 model arrived at TPC Summerlin in 60 dozen white boxes. Mac Fritz, Titleist’s then senior vice president of tour promotion, expected roughly 20-25 early adopters would put the new ball in play the first week.
The 47 players who made the immediate leap marked the single greatest pluralistic shift in equipment usage in the history of the PGA Tour. Not even Titleist’s new GT drivers and woods this summer could generate that much blind-faith conversion.
Andrade hadn’t won in more than two years, and he credited his fourth victory that resuscitated his career with his ball switch.
“I remember I was not having a very good year entering that event,” Andrade said. “I was around 160th on the money list, and there were only a few events left. I had already sent my check in for Qualifying School. I was desperate. I vividly remember the first time I put [the Pro V1] into play during a practice round. The ball was 20 yards longer than the Tour Prestige that I was playing at the time. I chalked some of it up to altitude, but the distance, in addition to the overall performance of the ball, was like nothing I had ever played.”
After finishing runner-up on launch week, Mickelson foreshadowed his infamous “inferior equipment” statement in 2003 regarding Tiger Woods (who switched to Nike golf balls in May 2000 before the Pro V1 launch) with the kind of declarative statement for which the left-hander has always been known.
“I’m playing a game right now that is different from any game I have ever played,” said Mickelson, who three weeks later won the Tour Championship with the new ball. “I honestly believe that if you are not playing this golf ball, then you are at a distinct disadvantage to the entire field.”
Titleist had tirelessly solicited feedback from tour players to land on the original model for the Pro V1 – merging the performance and control that wound balls provided with the distance increases of its solid-core, surlyn casing and a 392-dimpled urethane cover.
Its most memorable prototype testing session took place with Davis Love III at Ocean Forest Golf Club near his home in Sea Island, Georgia. The traveling test crew was instructed to return to Connecticut with all 12 prototype balls. A range hole was set up with a cross ditch about 340 yards from the tee. After Love consistently rolled out drives with the Pro V1 to Fritz’s feet standing 300 yards away (the Titleist Professionals he alternated hitting never came close), the testing team asked Love to “tee it high and let it fly.” Love’s next shot sailed over Fritz’s head and into the ditch. Exhaustive searches (including another visit to the ditch a day later by Love and his son, Dru) failed to recover the ball – making it officially the first lost Pro V1 in history.
The Pro V1 continued to take the game by storm as players started taking down scoring records on a nearly weekly basis at the start of the 2001 PGA Tour season. By the 2001 Masters, 42 of 45 Titleist ball players in the field teed up a Pro V1. Retief Goosen and Karrie Webb won the first majors with the new ball, in the 2001 U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open, respectively.
The Pro V1 phenomenon went beyond the stunning tour conversion and success. Recreational golfers created immediate consumer demand, prompting Titleist to accelerate its planned spring 2001 market launch to a more immediate public release in December 2000 for golfers in the Sun Belt regions of the United States. After just four months in golf shops, Pro V1 was the best-selling golf ball in the marketplace. Titleist says it took more than two years and a new ball manufacturing plant in New Bedford, Massachusetts, for the company to catch up to demand. According to Golf Datatech, Pro V1 has been the No. 1-selling golf ball every month since.
The Pro V1 is really where the modern distance debate launched in earnest, prompting Jack Nicklaus to go on lengthy tangents about reining in the golf ball and eventually forcing the USGA and R&A to declare that it is going to set new standards to dial back distance in the golf balls by 2030.
It’s been an eventful quarter century for golf’s Pro V1 era.
Scott Michaux