Pongman Dalton Daves following his nerdy passion

Dalton R. Daves is the Pongman.

A minority of you may know what that means. You probably belong to a cohort we can affectionately describe as “degenerate golfers” — DGs. You will have to bear with me for a moment while I bring the non-DG community up to speed.

The Pongman came into existence in 1990, after the United States Golf Association sued Karsten Manufacturing, the parent company of Ping Inc., a company that focuses on making golf equipment. Ping was founded by Norwegian-born mechanical engineer Karsten Solheim, who took up golf at the age of 42 at the urging of his co-workers at General Electric, where they worked on jet fighters and missile guidance systems. One of the stories you hear is that these co-workers wanted Solheim to fill out their weekly foursome.

Unlike normal people, Solheim took to the game fairly quickly, though he struggled with his putting. Being an engineer, he thought about ways of using science to design a better putter. He started experimenting with sugar cubes and Popsicle sticks and a block of aluminum that was sitting around the GE offices, and eventually came up with a putter design that distributed more weight around the perimeter of the clubhead (so-called “heel-toe weighting”), which made it more stable and easier for most golfers to make square contact with the golf ball.

Solheim’s putters helped players hit the ball straighter and make contact with the ball closer to the club’s center of gravity. They resisted twisting. They were, in quantifiable ways, better.

Or at least they made the game easier for people who didn’t spend hours a day pounding balls on a driving range. Solheim’s focus was on making a very difficult game more fun for more people, not for providing incremental edges to the best players in the world.

GE transferred Solheim to Palo Alto, Calif., in the late 1950s, where he was part of the team that produced the first bank computer system. By 1959 he had constructed, in the garage and kitchen

of his house in Redwood City, Calif., a series of prototypes for a center-shafted putter that eventually went into production as the Redwood City Model 1A.

“I heard this noise; it startled me so much I dropped the putter on the floor,” Solheim would later say. “And then I knew that’s what I would call my new putter: Ping.”

Still working for GE, Solheim spent weekends visiting golf courses and gifting club professionals with putters in exchange for their feedback. He attended professional tour events, and tried to talk the touring pros into trying his funny-looking, funny-sounding putters, which he offered to them for $5, figuring that if they’d paid for the putters they’d value them more.

Not many were interested at first, and most of them putted fine with the putters they already had. Solheim’s innovations were of great benefit to average and below-average players, but the best players in the world could already hit putts straight and square.

In 1959, a club pro suggested that Solheim manufacture the Ping putters and sell them through golf pro shops. That same pro also cautioned him not to quit his good job with GE. So Solheim took out an $1,100 bank loan — according to legend, the only financing he would ever need — to begin the production of his putters, first in Redwood City and then, after GE transferred him again, in Phoenix.

Solheim would hand-grind the putter heads in his garage at night, then heat them on the stove to fit them to the shafts. His sons would slip on pistol-style grips. The Redwood City 1A carried a price tag of $17.50, which was considered expensive and is equivalent to about $179 today. If you want to buy a new Ping putter today you can expect to pay $300 or more.

If you want to buy an old Ping putter today, you might be looking at four or even five figures. That’s where the Pongman comes in.

FINDING AN ANSER

Solheim knew he had a good product; eventually his faith was validated by touring professionals.

In 1962, John Barnum won the Cajun Classic in Lafayette, La., using a Ping putter. Barnum was 51 years old — which, up until that time, made him the only golfer to win a professional tournament after the age of 50 — and it was the only official PGA tour event he would ever win.

By 1966, Ping was established enough that when GE wanted to transfer Solheim yet again — this time to Oklahoma City — he turned in his resignation. He was 55. Within two years, Ping would grow from a $50,000-a-year sideline run out of Solheim’s garage to an $800,000-a-year business. He bought land and a building on the outskirts of Phoenix; the campus employs some 800 people today.

In 1969, George Archer won the Masters using a Ping Anser putter. Since then more professional tournaments have been won with a Ping Anser than any other model.

If you are a DG you probably know that the custom Scotty Cameron Newport 2 GSS (German Stainless Steel) prototype that Tiger Woods has used throughout most of his career (he has won 14 of his 15 major championships with it) is basically a copy of a Ping Anser, as was the Scotty Cameron Newport TeI3 with the Teryillium face insert that he used to win his first major, the 1997 Masters. (And so was the infamous Cameron “Scottydale” putter the young Woods used during his first two wins on the PGA tour — some suspect the neck of the putter was longer than the rules of golf allow.) And Woods used an actual Ping Anser — his friend Mark O’Meara’s backup putter — in the 1998 PGA Championship.

Woods finished second in that tournament. To O’Meara. Who said that that’s why the Anser was his backup.

IRONING IT OUT

Pongman — Dalton Daves — told me that story.

He is, among other things, a raconteur. I have to be careful what stories I repeat here; there are a lot of them involving names that all DGs would know that Dalton asked me not to repeat. I think I am OK with the O’Meara story; he told me that after I took him a club to appraise, a stainless steel Ping Anser from the ’90s, the same make and model as the ones Woods and O’Meara used in that PGA Championship. It’s not a particularly valuable putter, he told me, but it’s a very good one and part of history.

Dalton became Pongman in 1990, after Solheim and Ping got crossways with the United States Golf Association.

What happened was that Solheim wasn’t just interested in making putters, he was making other clubs as early as 1961, when he produced about 100 sets of Ping Ballnamic 69 irons. These irons features a bend in the shaft to help keep the golfer’s hands in front of the ball. This bend was outlawed by the USGA in 1968, so a lot of Solheim’s products — including putters — were rendered unsellable. If he hadn’t come up with the Anser, Ping probably wouldn’t have survived the ’60s.

But it wasn’t this run-in with the mandarins of golf that created the opportunity that led to Dalton Daves becoming the Pongman. Ping made irons (and woods, and later golf balls and golf accessories) throughout the ’70s and the ’80s, and they appealed to a certain practical-minded demographic.

The perimeter weighting Solheim used in his putters also made irons easier to hit. And Ping had an aesthetic — they were functional tools; the sort of clubs engineers would play. They weren’t as pretty as the Wilson Staff or Ben Hogan forged blades, but they were a lot easier to play with. Ping clubs — irons especially — developed a cult following.

Then in 1984, Ping came out with a club called the Ping Eye 2.

There are people who still play these irons today. They are beloved by many. Some claim they can instantly turn a high-handicap golfer into a mid-handicap golfer and a mid-handicap golfer into a low-handicap golfer. People seek them out. If you want to find a set of them, your best bet is to ask the Pongman. (The website is pongman.com.)

There was something different about the Ping Eye 2. In 1981, the USGA, the governing body of the sport, allowed manufacturers to put square ( as opposed to V- shaped) grooves in their clubs. This was done not to improve performance or to increase the amount of spin a club could impart to a ball (not to get too far in the weeds here, but generally the more spin, the more control a golfer has on a shot) but to make it easier to tool up to manufacture iron clubheads.

Solheim took advantage of this, retooling Ping’s machines to produce square- groove irons. Other manufacturers didn’t see the need. Players began to notice. Ping’s market share increased.

While the Ping Eye 2s were popular irons, they had one problem. Their square grooves literally ate up the soft balata covers of premium golf balls. So Solheim rounded the corners of each groove, making them a little bit less aggressive and taking away some of their bite.

The problem was when he did this, he effectively made the grooves on the face a little bit wider. Which technically violated a USGA rule about how wide a groove could be if you measured a certain way. If you measured from the vertical walls of the groove it was in compliance. Ping didn’t even bother to submit their clubs to the USGA for approval; they figured the change was trivial. The grooves hadn’t changed; the edges had just been softened.

If the problem was that the legal square grooves spun the ball too much, well, Solheim had taken some of the spin off his irons. But the USGA measured the grooves and found that they were both too wide and too close together. By less than the width of a human hair.

But rules is rules, especially in golf.

PROS AND CONS

The PGA Tour — the touring pros — released a study contending that the square grooves spun too much, especially from the rough. They banned square grooves in tour events.

Some people believe that the PGA Tour — basically the tour players — did this because most of them were handsomely paid by companies other than Ping to play clubs that did not have square grooves. At the time, Ping’s business model did not involve paying tour players to use their clubs on tour — they were concentrating mainly on selling game-improvement clubs to recreational players.

Together, these two decisions put the very existence of Solheim’s company in jeopardy. So they sued both the USGA and the PGA Tour, for, respectively, $100 million and $200 million.

The suit against the USGA was settled out of court within a matter of months. The terms were that the USGA would clarify its rule for the measurement of grooves, Ping would retool its clubs to meet the clarified specifications, and — most importantly — all of the existing Ping clubs would be grandfathered in as legal. This means that all the clubs made prior to the agreement could be used in USGA events.

And they would never be produced again.

You can see why Ping wanted this grandfather clause — they were an innovative company pushing the envelope; they wanted their customers to know that they would fight to keep their products from being banned by the sport’s ruling authorities.

The PGA Tour settled the suit in 1993. Essentially Ping won (though that’s not the way it was reported at the time). The Tour and Ping both agreed that the USGA got to decide what clubs were conforming and what were not (a condition that Ping had agreed to three years earlier). And the PGA Tour dropped its rule against square grooves.

So, DGs, square grooves are actually legal and have been since 1981.

But Ping agreed to no longer make the Ping Eye 2. Instead, they started making the Ping Eye 2 Plus, with a different groove. But there was still a market for the old Ping Eye 2s, especially the wedges (Phil Mickleson used a 20-year-old Ping Eye 2 wedge in a tour event in 2010, and a few of his competitors thought he violated the spirit of the rules).

And the clubs had sold so well that there were still quite a few sets around.

“It was such a forgiving club and people were shocked by the [USGA] ruling,” Daves writes on his website. “I saw a niche in the golf industry.”

He started buying up every set of Eye 2s he could find on the open market. His main emphasis was selling single clubs to golfers who had lost a particular club, especially a wedge. (DGs know that wedges are the most often lost club, because you’ll leave them lying around by the green after chipping. Even before eBay was a thing, people lost a lot of wedges.) It was a business model.

Ping didn’t want Dalton to call himself “the Ping guy” or “the Ping man,” but they did understand he was providing a valuable service to their customers by replacing lost or broken clubs. They couldn’t make a new Ping Eye 2 7-iron for a client, but they could refer them to the Pongman, who could track down a replacement.

More than 30 years on, Dalton is still hunting down clubs for Ping customers.

MAKING A LIVING

It’s not all he does. Aside from being a world expert on Ping putters and irons, he has another website — whattheprosplay.com — where he resells a lot of Scotty Cameron gear. (DGs out there know what I mean; the rest of you should understand this is where you go to get very highend golf accessories like embroidered putter covers and items that have been handed down from the PGA Tour. Full disclosure, he’s got some of my old gear on that site. I consider Dalton and his brother, Darryl Daves, friends; Darryl has been my club repair guy for 25 years.)

Dalton is also a distributor of Scotty Cameron putters, most of which are Circle T putters designed for tour use, made of more expensive materials and hand-milled and can easily run $5,000. He ships worldwide from his nondescript windowless studio hard by the railroad tracks in North Little Rock.

He’s got a book coming out soon, a new edition of “The Ping Identification and Collectors Guide,” which was originally the reason I wanted to write this story. It will come with a supplemental thumb drive. He’s also the author of the 1996 book “Putters of Distinction: A Guide to Classic Putters,” which is also in need of a new edition.

Daves allows that he has been lucky — he followed a nerdy passion and made a living from it. A pretty nice living actually, one that involves travel and a little glamour and the chance to play courses like Pebble Beach. A living all you DGs out there might envy. Email:

Dalton R. Daves is the founder of North Little Rock-based Pongman, a company by which he replaces lost or broken Ping Eye 2 golf clubs.

A page from Dalton Daves’ book, “The Ping Identification and Collector’s Guide,” identifies Ping’s Anser putters. In 1969, George Archer won the Masters using a Ping Anser putter. Since then more professional tournaments have been won with a Ping Anser than any other model.

Ping founder Karsten Solheim would hand-grind the putter heads for the Ping Redwood City 1A in his garage at night, then heat them on the stove to fit them to the shafts. The Redwood City 1A carried the then-expensive price tag of $17.50, equivalent to about $179 today.