Type | Division |
---|---|
Industry | Sports equipment |
Founded | 1914 |
Headquarters | , US |
Products | Golf balls, clubs, gloves, bags, polo shirts |
Parent | Wilson Sporting Goods |
Website | wilson.com/golf |
Wilson Staff is Wilson's premium golf brand aimed at tour professionals and serious players. Wilson designs and manufactures a full range of golf equipment, accessories, and apparel using the Wilson Staff, Wilson, ProStaff, Profile, Ultra and Hope brands. Wilson's other lines are generally considered to be "big box," "value," or "economy" brands, while the Wilson Staff line provides higher quality equipment used on all major professional golf tours.
Products marketed under the Wilson Staff brand include golf equipment (balls, clubs, gloves, and bags), and clothing (polo shirts).
Many of the world's top professional golfers have used Wilson equipment, including Gene Sarazen (who had a 75-year relationship with the company, the longest-running contract in sports history). Other golfers who have used Wilson Staff equipment include Sam Snead, Walter Hagen, Arnold Palmer, Patty Berg, Nick Faldo, Payne Stewart, John Daly, Ben Crenshaw, and Vijay Singh. Palmer and Crenshaw both used Wilson 8802 putters, with Crenshaw's receiving the moniker Little Ben due to his proficiency with it. Current Wilson Staff players include Open and USPGA champion Pádraig Harrington and Brendan Steele.
In 1932 Wilson Advisory staff member Gene Sarazen was inspired by the aerodynamics of an airplane's wing to create a club head that would glide smoothly through sand. Sarazen welded a piece of steel to the sole of the club and ground it producing 'bounce'. This marked the introduction of the sand wedge and in 1933 alone, Wilson sold 50,000 of these clubs, marketed as the R-90, which went on to be the most popular sand wedge in golf. [1]
In 1933 Wilson Advisory Staff member Willie Ogg created a design for distributing weight away from the heel of the club head, moving it towards the "sweet spot" of the blade. This design feature was used in the Wilson Ogg-mented irons, the forerunner of perimeter weighted or cavity back irons. [2]
In 1948, then Wilson Sporting Goods President Lawrence Icely provided the financial backing for Patty Berg and Babe Didrikson Zaharias to form the Women’s PGA, predecessor of today's LPGA. [3]
In 1954 Wilson began producing the Wilson Staff ball which was seen as revolutionary due to its ability to launch up to 40 percent faster than the golf club's head speed. [4] In 2005 Wilson Staff claims to be the first golf company to utilize nanotechnology in golf equipment. [5]
Wilson Staff claims that its line of irons has "more majors won than any other brand." [6] Players using Wilson Staff clubs have won a total of 62 majors.
In the past, Wilson has had many of the world best golfers under contract, including six-time major winner Nick Faldo and three-time major winner Pádraig Harrington. Wilson Staff currently has endorsement deals with many professional golfers who compete on all the major tours. [7]
Wilson Staff also has sponsorship deals with Brendan Steele, Kevin Tway, Kevin Streelman, Kevin Kisner and Trey Mullinax.
Gene Sarazen was an American professional golfer, one of the world's top players in the 1920s and 1930s, and the winner of seven major championships. He is one of five players to win each of the four majors at least once, now known as the Career Grand Slam: U.S. Open , PGA Championship , The Open Championship (1932), and Masters Tournament (1935).
A sand wedge, or sand iron, is a type of golf club, an open-faced wedge primarily designed for getting out of sand bunkers. It has the widest sole of any wedge, which provides the greatest amount of bounce, allowing the club head to glide through sand and avoid digging in. After Gene Sarazen had success in 1932 with a new club that he had invented for sand play, its popularity quickly grew. The club can be advantageous in other soft lies—such as thick rough, soggy ground, or mud—and is also used from firmer grass lies for lobs or chips.
John Joseph Farrell was an American professional golfer, best known for winning the U.S. Open in 1928. Over the course of his career, he won 22 PGA Tour events. He was elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2023 and will be inducted in 2024.
Sergio García Fernández is a Spanish professional golfer. He has played on the European Tour, PGA Tour and currently plays in the LIV Golf Invitational Series. García has won 36 international tournaments as a professional, most notably the 2008 Players Championship and the 2017 Masters Tournament. García was also the Chairman of Spanish football team CF Borriol.
Pádraig Peter Harrington is an Irish professional golfer who plays on the European Tour, PGA Tour and the PGA Tour Champions. He has won three major championships: The Open Championship in 2007 and 2008 and the PGA Championship, also in 2008. He spent over 300 weeks in the top-10 of the world rankings, and reached a career-high ranking of third in July 2008. Harrington was a member of six consecutive Ryder Cup teams between 1999 and 2010. In 2024, he will be an inductee of the World Golf Hall of Fame.
The World Golf Hall of Fame is located at World Golf Village near St. Augustine, Florida, in the United States, and it is unusual among sports halls of fame in that a single site honors both men and women. It is supported by a consortium of 26 golf organizations from all over the world.
The men's major golf championships, commonly known as the major championships, and often referred to simply as the majors, are the most prestigious tournaments in golf. Historically, the national open and amateur championships of Great Britain and the United States were regarded as the majors. With the rise of professional golf in the middle of the twentieth century, the majors came to refer to the most prestigious professional tournaments.
The Wilson Sporting Goods Company is an American sports equipment manufacturer based in Chicago, Illinois. The company has been a subsidiary of Finnish multinational company Amer Sports since 1989. Wilson makes equipment for many sports, among them baseball, badminton, American football, basketball, fastpitch softball, golf, racquetball, soccer, squash, tennis, pickleball and volleyball.
In the sport of golf, a wedge is a subset of the iron family of golf clubs designed for special use situations. As a class, wedges have the highest lofts, the shortest shafts, and the heaviest clubheads of the irons. These features generally aid the player in making accurate short-distance "lob" shots, to get the ball onto the green or out of a hazard or other tricky spot. In addition, wedges are designed with modified soles that aid the player in moving the clubhead through soft lies, such as sand, mud, and thick grass, to extract a ball that is embedded or even buried. Wedges come in a variety of configurations, and are generally grouped into four categories: pitching wedges, sand wedges, gap/approach wedges and lob wedges.
In golf, a gap wedge, also known as an approach wedge, is a wedge used to hit a shot with higher and shorter trajectory than a pitching wedge and lower and longer trajectory than a sand wedge. The name derives from the club's design to fill the "gap" between sand and pitching wedges.
The following is a partial timeline of the history of golf.
Golf equipment encompasses the various items that are used to play the sport of golf. Types of equipment include the golf ball, golf clubs, and devices that aid in the sport.
An iron is a type of club used in the sport of golf to propel the ball towards the hole. Irons typically have shorter shafts and smaller clubheads than woods, the head is made of solid iron or steel, and the head's primary feature is a large, flat, angled face, usually scored with grooves. Irons are used in a wide variety of situations, typically from the teeing ground on shorter holes, from the fairway or rough as the player approaches the green, and to extract the ball from hazards, such as bunkers or even shallow water hazards.
The 2002 Masters Tournament was the 66th Masters Tournament, held April 11–14 at Augusta National Golf Club. Tiger Woods won his third Masters, and second consecutive, with a score of 276 (−12), three strokes ahead of runner-up Retief Goosen. The course was lengthened by 285 yards (261 m) over the previous year. It was only the third successful defense of a Masters title, previously accomplished in 1966 by Jack Nicklaus and 1990 by Nick Faldo.
The 1979 Masters Tournament was the 43rd Masters Tournament, held April 12–15 at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia.
The 1989 Masters Tournament was the 53rd Masters Tournament, held April 6–9 at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia.
The 1990 Masters Tournament was the 54th Masters Tournament, held April 5–8 at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia.
The 2008 Open Championship was a men's major golf championship and the 137th Open Championship, played from 17 to 20 July at Royal Birkdale Golf Club in Southport, England. Pádraig Harrington successfully defended his Open Championship title, his second; he shot four under par over the final nine holes and was four strokes ahead of runner-up Ian Poulter. Harrington was the last golfer to win the same major back-to-back for a decade until Brooks Koepka won consecutive U.S. Opens in 2017 and 2018.
David T. Pelz is an American golf coach, known for his expertise and published writing on the art of the short game, particularly putting.
William Robertson Ogg, Jr. was a Scottish-American professional golfer, club maker, and golf course architect. He won the 1921 Shawnee Open, 1923 Maine Open, 1924 New England PGA Championship, and the 1924 Massachusetts Open. He finished tied for 9th place in the 1923 PGA Championship, a career-best result in major championships.