Welcome to a new season of diary notes. Thought I’d start off with a little anecdote, showing, just like the famous old Windmill...we never close. We were on our first week out and In Andalucia. On the Thursday, the first round, we’d packed up reasonably early in the evening and disappeared for a bite to eat. We then got a call from the European Tour office that one of the players, Benn Barham, had broken a club. So we scrambled down our dinner, headed back to the course and set ourselves up again, repaired the club, and then while we were in there Santi Luna came in with a broken pitching wedge. He’d seen the lights on, because it was dusk by then, and he came knocking on the door. Then another player came in to pick up a couple of fairway woods. Then Ignacio Garrido came in and ordered a new set of irons and a couple of wedges. It was pitch dark by the time we left and we were glad we managed to finish dinner first! 

You’re always going to get instances like that at courses with lots of trees, the odd bent shaft. Players go for shots, knowing the workshop’s going to be there, so they maybe take on that risky one and if they do bend or break the shaft, we’ll be there to sort it out for them.

We haven’t got the early prototypes of next year’s models yet, so we’re tweaking the player’s bags with new specifications and set make ups. We haven’t seen the players since last November, so it’s been all hands to the pumps.
 
Working with the new Bettinardi Black Carbon putter has added plenty of hours – but with plenty of success. Maarten Lafeber, Ulrich Van den Burg and Birgir Hafthorsson have put them in play, along with two or three other guys not contracted to us. That’s been a nice little start for us in a category where we haven’t been that popular before.  The collaboration with Bob Bettinardi has taken a while for people to get their heads around – it’s a slow burner, but you can sense attitudes changing.

The players love the shape of the BC Series and the feel. The new milling technique removes about 70 per cent of the material from the face. So you have less material, in effect, making contact with the ball. You get a very soft feel and the guys like that. It’s not an insert, the head’s all one piece, but it has a very, very soft feel. With all the heads being milled it gives the putter very precise lines and they love the overall look of them. Some of these players have grown up on soft rubber inserts – the clicky feel of steel normally doesn’t work for them.  So it’s a big step forwards.
 
Driver promotion on tour is normally a tough business. Our competitors offer some big cheques to go with their drivers. That normally makes things a little tricky for us. But this year we’ve got quite a few in play – with Luke, Daniel Vancsik,(who’s one of the longest hitters on tour) and a couple of other guys. The MP-600’s performance is really surprising - we’ve found our guys a bit of extra distance. Luke’s now above average in the PGA driving distance average’s.  Impressive.

There are a few other guys now wishing they hadn’t signed a driver contract after they’ve tried the MP-600 and wished they could put it in their bags! Maybe next time they’ll think a bit harder before jumping in elsewhere and receiving a cheque, before testing out all the products.

There are plans on the table at the moment, looking at ways we can try and improve the MP600 even further. I can’t say too much at the moment, but I expect that later in the year, if everything comes together, we’ll have an updated version.
 
It was a bit of a strange winter break. It seemed to go on forever this year. The tour doesn’t reach Europe until around the end of March, so it means three or four months not seeing the guys. We have, though, managed to get a few of the players down to our fitting centre. Mark’s been working with a few of the guys, building them clubs through the winter. That’s worked pretty well. A lot of the guys were quite keen to come down and try out the products in their off-season.

We’ve picked up a few guys who’ve promoted themselves from the Challenge Tour but there haven’t been too many changes, we’ve still got 24 players. The guys from the Challenge Tour are quite young, so we’ll see how they progress. Peter Whiteford from Scotland is one of them. He had a pretty good year on the Challenge Tour and he shot a 64 at Cascais, which was the old course record. We have a young Spaniard, Alvaro Velasco, who’s had a couple of top tens, and Ulrich Van den Burg, who hits the ball a long way. Paolo Terreni, an Italian and Ben Teilleria from France are a couple more new attachments. We have a pretty decent stable.
 
Soren Kjeldsen’s continued with us this year and he’s started the year off well, getting an 11th place in the recent World Golf Championship at the Blue Monster, Doral. Things are looking pretty promising.

On top of that Jonathan Byrd in the US has signed a four year deal.  To secure him alongside Luke and Jeff Overton puts Mizuno in a much stronger position than we’ve been for a while.  Jonathan is really well regarded in the game.  Technically he is very sound and fitness-wise he’s on the top level.  Europeans might have been shocked to see him hammer Ernie Els in the matchplay, but we’ve been expecting that level from Jonathan for some time.  Even better for us - Jonathan is another one using the MP-600.

Andy Kikidas:  Tour Operations Manager

Pic:  Jonathan Byrd