The Wow Factor

2008-05-29

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By Steve Pike

I wasn’t there at the beginning of Adams Golf, but I do have some fond and vivid memories of Barney Adams’ little golf equipment from Texas. Most notably, an early summer day in 1998 when “Barnyard” and I lunched at the posh Four Seasons restaurant in New York City. Adams Golf was just about to go public on the NASDAQ Exchange and Barney, as usual, was in fine form. He even thought about approaching former First Lady Barbara Bush, dining at a nearby table, about how her husband liked his Tight Lies fairway woods.
 
Fortunately I was able to persuade him against the idea, although I’m sure the three Secret Service agents would have been equally as successful. Unfortunately, that story didn’t make it in Adams’ new book “The Wow Factor,” subtitled “How I turned one great idea and my unbridled enthusiasm into a golf revolution,” but many other stories are in the 254-page chronicle of the life and times of Barney Adams.
 
Actually what ol’ Barnyard did was turn a metal wood upside down and invent the Tight Lies.
 
“What I did was think of all the clubs I hit well with the ball on the ground and applied whatever characteristics I thought would make this design work,” Adams writes. “It really was as simple as that.”
 
The hard part became getting the public to successfully embrace Tight Lies metal woods, which it did in the late 1990s, and to try and keep control of a company whose success had outgrown its infrastructure. That is, with the Tight Lies, Barney Adams had created a monster. His challenge was in how to keep feeding it.
 
By his own admission in the book, Adams didn’t do a very good of that at times and by the middle of 2000, he had turned over the role of company president to Chip Brewer, who had been Adams Golf’s sales manager.
 
Adams chronicles it all in the book, including his failed marketing alliance with Nick Faldo, but the book isn’t all about the ups and downs (and up again as it is now under Brewer) of Adams Golf. As one would expect from ol’ Barnyard, the book is filled with stories about his travels, his views on life and business and his views on today’s golf industry. There’s even a brief history of club design in which Adams traces the roots of the square driver to 1892.
 
Although it could have been edited a little bit tighter, “The Wow Factor” is a good read for anyone familiar with Barney Adams, Adams Golf or who want to learn more of the insights of feeding a monster of his own creation.