The COMING golf ball wars - golf industry

Golf Digest, Feb, 1999 by Mark Seal

A graduate of the University of Mas-sachusetts, almost J.F.K.-esque in his monogrammed shirt, suit and tie, Uihlein takes his business very personally. Rocketing through 11 executive positions in two decades with the company, Uihlein refers to the Titleist customer as "you" and the Titleist brand as "me," as in, "If I lose you, then that's a wake- up call to come back to you and say, 'Hey, Mark, why did you leave me?'''

You immediately get the idea that competitors seeking to steal even the tiniest slice of Titleist's dominant 45-plus percent share of the U.S. market will have to first walk across Uihlein's dead body. Employing references ranging from motivational guru Tom Peters to the Amway direct-sales technique, Uihlein says the golf-ball business is ruled by the "Darwinian survival process."

"When you look at the competitive landscape-right now there are five companies that total 90-plus market share, among ourselves, Spalding, Wilson, Maxfli and Bridgestone [Precept]-it's not the strongest who is going to suffer," Uihlein says. "If the Darwinian survival process has any merit and validity to it, it's basically the weaker forces who will be first affected." Or as he says later, "The sheep will fall first, not the wolves."

Oh, but the interlopers are circling, hungry to steal even a sliver of market share, the term that will tally the score in the Ball Wars. One point of retail market share-representing the sale of 310,000 dozen of the 31 million dozen balls sold in the U.S. annually-can earn a com- pany an estimated $6.5 million a year. Titleist and its longtime, cross-state competitor, No. 2 Spalding, control an estimated 70 percent of the U.S. golf-ball market, with the other 30 percent di-vided primarily among Maxfli, Wilson, Bridgestone and Slazenger. Since the market has grown at a rate of only 2 to 5 percent a year-and industry analysts don't expect any radical increases-the pie is not expected to be expanded. So it's going to take a full-scale assault for any newcomer to snatch even a point of market share.

Uihlein says he's ready for any competitors. "Let's bring it on," he says. He speaks of competition in metaphors of war, employing terms like "hand-to-hand combat" to describe his sales force, and "rifle-shot focus" about the Titleist game plan for constant improvement. For Uihlein, Titleist is as indestructible as the balls it produces. The company was founded in 1932, when Acushnet Rubber Company's president, Phil Young, missed what he considered a well-stroked putt. Taking the ball for an X-ray at his dentist's office, Young discovered that the ball's core was indeed off-center. He and a friend from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spent the next three years creating the ball that would become the industry standard-the Titleist.

Forty-five years later-in 1977-Uihlein joined the company he had fallen in love with through a Titleist sales rep of almost mythical stature, Jim Kernohan. As a high school student working behind the counter of the Crystal Springs Country Club in his hometown of Haverhill, Mass., Uihlein caught Kernohan in a small statistical error and corrected him. "He looked around and said, 'Who said that?' '' Uihlein remembers. "Because challenging Titleist was borderline heresy."