Callaway Teams With IBM to Match Golfer’s
Swing With Right Club
It seems name association goes a long way in professional sports.
For pro teams in San Diego, certain players become fan magnets. Quarterback Doug Flutie has created much fanfare for the Chargers. For the Spirit, San Diego’s professional women’s soccer team, the draw has been U.S. women’s national team players Julie Foudy and Shannon MacMillan.
The Padres’ crowd-pleaser has remained constant for the last 20 years , Tony Gwynn.
One day after the Padres right fielder announced his retirement, fans flocked to the team’s ticket windows at Qualcomm Stadium to secure their spot in history.
The team announced it sold more than 13,500 tickets to the Sept. 23 home season finale and nearly 16,000 tickets for the final weekend series in one day.
The Chargers have seen an across-the-board increase in ticket sales since signing Flutie in March.
Two weeks after signing the former Buffalo Bills quarterback, the team sold more than 1,500 new season tickets. So far, the Chargers have sold 3,000 additional season tickets for the 2001 season, 800 more than this time last year.
Jerry McBurney, the team’s director of ticket sales, said that hasn’t happened since the team went to the Super Bowl in 1995. McBurney said they have also sold more mini-pack and group tickets.
The club sold nearly 17,000 single-game tickets on June 23, when tickets went on sale , that’s 5,000 more than the team sold on the first day of sales last year.
Since the inaugural Women’s United Soccer Association season started in April, the stands at Torero Stadium at the University of San Diego have been packed.
The majority of the hand-made signs and the loudest screams reflect on Foudy and MacMillan.
Team officials said 2,009 season tickets have been sold, the majority of which were sold before the season started. Average attendance for a Spirit game is 5,521 per match.
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Matchmakers:
Callaway Golf Cos. already has technology in place to help match the right golfer with the right club.
There’s a state-of-the-art fitting room at the company’s Carlsbad headquarters to test a golfer’s swing, speed of the ball and club head.
Now the company has taken that technology from the fitting room and put it on the golf course. Callaway and IBM have teamed to design a mobile fitting machine the size of a lawn mower. The unit can be pushed by hand or pulled behind a golf cart.
It is powered by IBM’s ThinkPad T21 Series notebook computers and features 50 clubs and a radar gun, which calculates what specifications would best fit a golfer.
“We’ve built this fitting system to be the best of both worlds , trusted advice from an experienced golf professional and technological data that will help us make the best set of clubs for a particular golfer,” said Richard C. Helmstetter, Callaway’s chief of new products.
“The computer system we have incorporated into (the program) is an entirely new system that encompasses what we have learned about golf club technology with what we know about the benefits of properly fitted golf clubs.”
The system includes ASTAR software that allows a video camera to be plugged into the system to tape the golfers’ swing. Callaway has produced 300 of the devices so far. It will cost golfers from $5,000 to $6,000 to use the system.
The Real Deal:
Upper Deck Authenticated, a division of The Upper Deck Cos., of Carlsbad, recently signed a marketing agreement with Connecticut-based The Danbury Mint to produce a figurine of basketball star Michael Jordan.
The figurine, which will cost $210, will feature four poses of Jordan, each from a specific year of play. The porcelain figurines, which range from 6 to 9 inches, hit the market in April on Danbury Mint’s mailing list. It will be available to the general public through Danbury’s Web site in upcoming weeks at (www.danburymintsports.com).
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Good Cause:
EDCO Disposal Corp. of Lemon Grove and Grossmont Healthcare District are co-sponsoring the Home of Guiding Hands 19th annual Celebrity Golf Classic on Sept. 20 at the Eastlake Country Club. Proceeds will benefit Home of Guiding Hands’ programs and services to assist those with developmental disabilities.
Last year, the golf tournament, also sponsored by EDCO, netted $45,000. For more information, call (619) 448-3700, ext. 355.
The deadline for the next Sports Biz column is Thursday, July 19. Send related items to dward@sdbj.com.
