The Future of Golf Equipment
What Callaway’s Dr Alan Hocknell doesn’t know about golf club design isn’t worth knowing. The man with a rather appropriate PHD in Collisions has been with Callaway for 22 years and is now the head of product development for clubs and balls. His team of 120 skilled engineers is now responsible for creating some of the most innovative products to make their way on to the course.
Hocknell is also one of the driving forces behind Callaway’s groundbreaking use of artificial intelligence, which is employed to great effect in the latest Mavrik range of woods and irons. It’s just another example of the brand’s out-of-the-box thinking, which allows it to make some of the best-performing products on the market.
What made you go down the route of artificial intelligence when it came to research and development and what are the advantages of using it?
We’ve been working on building our simulation and analysis capability for quite some time. We can build detailed models of the driver in the computer and we can simulate the impact of the ball. But we wondered if there was a way to refine that process, taking the computer and teaching it how to learn to design golf clubs. We thought it might actually come up with some answers that were different to the ones we were thinking of. So we hired some more people, took an in-house approach and worked out how to take our core simulation capability and add it to this AI engine that allowed the computer to essentially do it for itself. With drivers, we are trying to develop as much ball speed as possible from as much of the face as possible, without going over the limits allowed by the USGA and The R&A. The computer came back with some face thickness pattern variations that we had never considered before – a series of thick areas and thin areas, with some of the thickest parts of the face right next to some of the thinnest parts in a sort of ripple-type fashion. It turned out that enhanced our ability to generate ball speed while staying within the rules.
What do you think golf clubs will look like in the future?
“The idea of taking you as an individual and optimising your performance is something AI can contribute to”
One of the ways of looking at that is to go back ten years and say ‘What would we have known then about the way that we are operating now?’ I think there is one example. In 2006, Phil Mickelson won The Masters using two drivers and that was a strategy we came up with about Phil as an individual and optimising his performance around that one golf course for the way he wanted to play it.
The reason I give that example is you could argue he was way ahead of his time in that he was using the design of the club to optimise his performance as an individual. So he wasn’t taking an off-the-shelf model, getting a quick fitting and then going to play. The general idea of taking you as an individual and optimising your performance is something that AI can contribute to and something that golfers everywhere will benefit from, especially as we see so many
people these days benefit from having some sort of fitting before they actually buy their clubs.
With artificial intelligence, there are whole lot of possibilities out there and we are looking at which ones are most effective for designing our best products.
What rules frustrate you when it comes to club design and what could you create if there were no restrictions?
If we were allowed to have unlimited COR, we could definitely add speed to all shots and that would make measurable changes in distance. Clubhead size is an interesting one, because the benefit of going larger tends to be that you get more moment of inertia and therefore off-centre impacts are more like your centre impact. But if it arrives at the ball more slowly then it might not be a good trade off for the same effort applied by the golfer in a swing.
If there were no rules on the golf ball as well as the driver, could we add ten yards? Yes. Could we add 20? Possibly. We think about scoring as much as hitting it far and those two things are sometimes in conflict with one another as design objectives. So we like to think of ourselves as designing equipment very holistically; we consider the golfer first and the troubles they are having on the course. And yes, some of those relate to distance, but a lot of them relate to straightness and consistency.
What have been some of Callaway’s most notable products over the years?
Clearly, the Great Big Bertha driver was a big step forward – it really put Callaway on the map. It was one of the drivers that was seemingly as prevalent on tour as it was with amateurs. There was something for almost everybody, and very few golf clubs have been able to say that since.
The Odyssey 2-Ball putter very much got close to that in terms of tour and amateur usage. It delivered advantages for all types of golfer and produced large numbers of sales everywhere.
The ERC driver would probably be my favourite, though. It was a big step forward in terms of distance and ball speed. I got to go to Australia as a young engineer to figure out how to make the face of this driver using a forging method we had never used before. So we felt like we were pretty cutting edge at the time, and that was such a great kick early in my career. It was exciting delivering something to the market that hadn’t been done before.