ORLANDO, FLORIDA | It’s virtually impossible to find a collective rallying point for competing companies in the golf industry. The marketing campaigns can sometimes be contentious, bordering on political. The fight for brand loyalists or an extra couple of yards in testing is a lengthy battle of constant maneuvering. It’s certainly not personal – employees of different manufacturers are often close friends – but in a business of relentless reinvention, every inch is valuable property.
Interestingly, it is that elbows-out type of fight that unites industry competitors: The war on counterfeit equipment.
“It’s rare that brands come together in any industry, but it’s different with counterfeit products,” said Lisa Rogan, the director of trademarks and brand protection at Acushnet Co., the parent of Titleist and FootJoy. “The watch industry has an anti-counterfeit effort, the pharmaceutical industry has one … but in the golf industry, it’s small enough to where we all know each other personally and we share a common goal. I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years, so there is a history we’ve built with other companies.”
The shared desire to rid, or at least greatly reduce, the business of counterfeit equipment is far from a new endeavor. Major companies have been combating fake gear on their own for most of the past half-century, and they finally came together in 2004 to form the U.S. Golf Manufacturers Anti-Counterfeiting Working Group as a way to pool resources and protect their respective products.
Their unofficial motto makes obvious their intentions: “Fake clubs are for fake golfers.” And there are a ton of these fake clubs being produced. If you were to lay all of last year’s counterfeit clubs end over end, they likely would stretch from Pebble Beach in California to Bethpage in New York. And that isn’t including clubhead covers, apparel, balls or other equipment.
Be that as it may, the fundamentals of the counterfeit golf business are murkier than a Pro V1 submerged in a muddy pond. How large is the issue? Significant enough for companies to spend several hours per day attempting to identify and shut down producers of counterfeit gear, but not large enough to put a major financial dent into spreadsheets. Has the overall issue become more or less of a problem over time? There isn’t a consensus, but it’s generally agreed that the threshold for producing legitimate counterfeit gear has become harder as the science major manufacturers employ has become more complex.
“The technology involved in making a driver or even an iron today is way higher than it was before,” said Alan Hocknell, the senior vice president of research and development at Callaway Golf. “So the barrier to entry for someone trying to be a counterfeiter is more challenging. Usually you get found out in the performance realm pretty quickly.”
Hocknell makes the point that there are two main areas of counterfeit gear: clubs that are total knockoffs, which almost anyone can spot as fake, and more authentic-looking counterfeit clubs that even knowledgeable players may need to study to determine which one is real.
In that way, it’s an intriguing two-way game. Clubs are becoming extremely difficult to mimic from a playability standpoint, but counterfeiters have become increasingly adept at making their clubs appear to be real. If consumers get the product in their hands they can realize it isn’t properly constructed, but a lot of times it is too late. Someone has already made the purchase through one of the many sketchy websites claiming to offer special discounts because of a “partnership” with the brand they are impersonating. The counterfeiter has already won.
The ideal situation is for it never to reach that point.
“We would like to think we’ve made a difference, but candidly, we are playing counterfeit whack-a-mole,” said Jason Rocker, a spokesperson for the golf working group. “It’s not like the criminals are giving us an annual report, so deciphering the scope is a difficult task. It’s guerilla warfare.
“The one thing we know is that education is critical. If we can educate consumers, then they won’t be willing to buy counterfeit clubs and there won’t be a market for it.”
Fake golf balls are immediately recognized when cut in half because you can tell if the core is uniform and multi-layered. Counterfeiters will use surlyn rather than urethane for the cover because it is less expensive.
This writer has spent more than two decades playing golf and did a double take or two when a fake club and real club were shown together side by side. To be certain, any counterfeit golf club can be spotted when actually hit – Hocknell notes that the difference in sound is a dead giveaway – but it often isn’t noticeable at all without the luxury of testing a club on the range.
Scotty Cameron putters are prime targets because of their price tags and how it is often easier to make a fake putter than a fake driver. The prime alert to a Scotty Cameron fake is the shoddy paint job and poor inscription on the bottom of the putter.
In other cases, it requires a more trained eye. Fake golf balls are immediately recognized when cut in half because you can tell if the core is uniform and multi-layered. Counterfeiters will use surlyn rather than urethane for the cover because it is less expensive. It’s a similar situation with irons. If you are to cut an iron in half, the real ones would be partially hollowed out with precision while the fakes are not hollowed out at all.
The sound test of bouncing a golf ball on a hard surface often reveals its true character but when it comes to actual golf clubs, there’s a unique way to determine if a club is real. Believe it or not, it actually comes down to your nose.
“If you smell a counterfeit grip, it has a strong rubber smell,” Rogan said. “You just wouldn’t get that in an authentic product. It may have a Golf Pride grip with what appears to be the normal markings, but it’s a terrible smell.”
In the driver arena, the sight test is often enough to discern if a club is fake. When you put two Callaway Big Bertha Alpha drivers side by side, there are slight differences in the heads. The center weight is not in the same place, the paint-fill on the label is different and the screws used to connect the shaft with the clubhead are not the same.
To the average consumer, however, picking out these minute differences only proves how successfully sly a counterfeit product can be. The red flags consumers can look for are obvious to some but perhaps not to the average buyer. Counterfeit products are made mainly in China and southeast Asia, so any indication that your potential purchase is coming from that part of the world should signal an alarm. Even if it isn’t related to China, a significantly lower price can be a giveaway for fake products. And those can come from the U.S., usually Southern California, and places like South Africa or the United Kingdom.
To put it simply, if the retailer is not verified, the risk is the same as running across a driving range full of practicing golfers.
But that isn’t always enough of a hurdle to stop consumers who believe they have found the deal of a lifetime. Photos of products online can be doctored. Even without Photoshop, the counterfeiters are likely to win any exchange with an eager online buyer. One complicating factor is that the products are sold through eBay or Craigslist, channels that represent the wild west of under-the-table deals on the internet. If it’s an environment where any price goes, the situation becomes even more dangerous.
As club technology has reached such realms like using artificial intelligence to help produce drivers, counterfeiters have changed their strategies to stay ahead of the consumer and the equipment companies hoping to shut them down. Rogan says that many counterfeiters will wait until the last moments to place a brand label on the clubs because it can’t be seized before then. They also carry little inventory as insurance against getting caught, which actually happens on a regular basis.
“The Chinese authorities are probably the most aggressive law enforcement agencies and they do a lot of raids,” Rogan said. “So they’re doing the work, it’s just that the problem is too big. Now the counterfeiters are moving to Vietnam and we can see the problem shifting south. Our sole focus used to be China, but now we need a strategy for these other countries.”
The speed with which they build the equipment is second only to the speed with which they leave the premises to find a new location to build. And if consumers aren’t buying a certain product, counterfeiters have no issue moving on to make fake jewelry, shoes or something else outside the golf world.
For every company in the golf industry, the endgame is to educate the consumer to eliminate the market for fake equipment.
It’s not a fire that will be put out cleanly or permanently, but every moment of progress is meaningful.