Matt Kuchar’s golf ball, if it behaves especially well, can earn him millions next week at the Tour Championship. Riches beyond compare are on the line at East Lake, as is a potential hometown-ball-makes-good story.
For a moment, put aside the famous golfer. Consider the dimpled center of his universe: The little ball that he chases around the world, that he is commanded to follow through high grass and short, into the woods and onto the beaches. The missile that flies impossibly far at his hand yet so drunkenly off course at the bidding of amateurs. The white dot against the blue sky whose majestic arc inevitably inspires the simple-minded in the gallery to yell, “In the hole!”
Kuchar’s ball begins as one of the thick fillets of rubber stacked high on a metal production table in a Covington factory.
Not a particularly noble beginning, but birth can be a messy business. In this case, it looks like someone just butchered a synthetic whale.
But this spongy mass is a vital essence; it is the raw material from which the solid core of the Bridgestone Tour B330-S is molded.
“The core is the engine of the golf ball,” said Corey Consuegra, one of our guides through the Bridgestone factory 25 miles east of Atlanta. “It controls the speed and spin. Our most critical technologies are on the inside of the golf ball.”
How vital, you wonder? They say when they jiggered the formula for their Tour-edition balls, adding something called Hydro Core technology, Kuchar picked up another six yards on his drive. That’s big for a player of relatively middling length (Kuchar ranks 140th on Tour).
Worth note is that this is good Georgia-made goo, cooked right here in Covington from recipes each as highly a secret as any for a championship barbecue sauce.
Earlier this year, Bridgestone, a Japanese company that trades largely in tires, moved all its premium golf-ball manufacturing to Georgia.
In a symbolic celebration, Consuegra, the company’s director of golf-ball marketing, picked up several dozen hot off the line and drove them to Augusta for Kuchar’s use at the Masters. The balls rode shotgun, strapped in by both lap and shoulder harness, safer than eggs going to market.
They initially worked very well, with Kuchar one off the Masters lead after three rounds. But then they turned on him — he shot 74 on Sunday and finished six back of Bubba Watson. When a golf ball gets stubborn and refuses to go to its home in the ground, there is simply no reasoning with it.
Kuchar, the former Georgia Tech star, will be the lone player in the select 30-man Tour Championship field playing the Bridgestone ball, the only one able to give the hometown product a local airing. Others in the company fold, Brandt Snedeker and Hudson Swafford, didn’t make the cut.
Kuchar’s golf ball is a phenomenon of both physics and industry. It passed through a dozen different mechanical stages — each adding another layer to this polymer onion — was inspected like it was a crown jewel and tested like it was an airliner’s rivet before making it to the first tee at East Lake.
A short-attention-span review of the manufacturing process, some of the steps so protected and proprietary that an AJC photographer could not shoot them:
- Roll out the core goop (not a technical term) in a high-tech pasta machine, then extrude it into slugs that resemble oversized wine corks. Load the plugs into another machine that rounds and vulcanizes the rubber.
- Feed the cores into a device that applies a single urethane cover — many other balls are two-piece, and Bridgestone brags quite a bit about the one-piece construction of its Tour-level ball.
- Before the balls are labeled and another coat of urethane applied, put each ball through a mechanical inspection for cosmetic flaws. Deconstruct and recycle the rejects.
- Overhead, balls at various stages of completion roll along an open curving track system, giving the factory a Willy Wonka-meets-Ben Hogan feel.
- At the end, before the balls are mechanically stuffed into their sleeves and then their boxes, eyeball each one for a final time. There remains one job for the human eye and touch.
An inordinate amount of science has been devoted to the production of a mere golf ball. It’s something of a paradox, like the image of Fred Couples in a lab coat.
Out back of the Covington factory, hidden behind a long row of shrubs, is the testing center. Assembly-line drab gives way to bright practice-facility green. This one comes with a driver-wielding robot and a NASA-like array of computer screens. Not a one of the 330 dimples on Kuchar’s ball has gone unstudied.
No one wants to come up with a golf ball that flies shorter and more erratically. The technology of both ball and club design has pushed courses to the limit in an attempt to keep up. The dimensions and scale of the game have been radically altered. And in response, the manufacturer only wants the ball to go even longer and straighter.
“Minimize the mistakes, maximize the distance and give more control around the green,” Consuegra said, summarizing the ball-maker’s creed.
If only those old-timers at the Royal and Ancient would lighten up, they could go ahead and put in the plutonium core and get it over with.
Granted, Kuchar’s ball is not for everyone. “If you need forgiveness, you can’t play what those guys play,” said Dan Omstead, the plant supervisor.
If your clubhead speed is subsonic and you don’t hit every shot flush, odds are you need a slightly different composition. No one-size-fits-all.
The search for the perfect golf ball for every golfer is big business. An $800 million industry in the United States alone, of which Bridgestone takes its share behind industry-leader Acushnet (Titleist).
The Covington plant employs 150 workers, and it churns seven days a week, day and night. From it comes “several million dozen balls annually,” Consuegra said, playing coy on the exact number.
One of those millions will be Kuchar’s at the conclusion of the Tour Championship, its brief competitive life exhausted, its only reward being spared the watery or woodsy final resting place of so many of its brothers.
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