Tom Wishon

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Tom Wishon is a leading golf club designer and researcher. He has designed golf clubs for famous golfers such as Ben Crenshaw, and Payne Stewart. He also designed a line of clubs for Harvey Penick.

He is author of two best-selling consumer-oriented books: "The Search for the Perfect Golf Club", which was recognized by the International Network of Golf as the best golf book of 2006, and "The Search for the Perfect Driver" which was recognized by the ING as the best golf book of 2007. In addition, he has written several books targeted for club makers and club fitters.

Tom Wishon is a former member of the PGA of America who chose to pursue a career in golf equipment design and clubfitting research. While he has been offered the chance to head up golf club design for some of the largest golf club companies in the world, he has chosen to remain within the lesser known segment of the golf equipment industry that focuses on fitting golfers one at a time and building their golf clubs from high quality clubhead, shaft and grip component designs.

Wishon is an avid crusader for the concept that all golfers should be custom fit for the golf clubs with which they play the game. The mainstream golf club companies have pursued a business model of creating golf club designs which are built to one set of standard, one size fits all, specifications, so they can more easily be sold in volume, off the rack, from traditional golf course pro shops and off course golf retail stores.

Wishon identifies that in every other sport in which the participant hits and ball with an implement, custom fitting options have been available. For example, in baseball and softball, the bat makers all create their bats to be sold off the rack in a variety of different lengths, different weights and different handle diameters. In tennis, racket makers do the same thing by offering their rackets in different grip sizes, and with no strings so each tennis player can choose the string type and string tension that best matches their strength and how they play.

But not golf. Golf clubs have always been sold off the rack in a series of average, standard, one size fits all specifications because it is more convenient to the business model of the golf club companies and their golf retail partners. Yet golfers are widely different from each other in their size, strength, athletic ability and swing characteristics. Wishon's pro-custom fitting crusade flies in the face of the mainstream golf equipment business model, so his teachings have been regularly squelched by the traditional golf media outlets who derive a large portion of their revenue from advertisements placed by the large companies that make the standard golf clubs.

Tom Wishon is recognized by many in the golf equipment industry as perhaps the single, most knowledgeable and most experienced expert on the design and performance of golf clubs. During his career he has designed more original golf clubhead models than any other person in the 500 year history of the game. Because of his passion to know everything about the performance of golf equipment, he has performed more technical research and published more technical information about golf clubs than any person in the history of the game. Through 9 books and countless articles published all over the world, Tom has shared every bit of his knowledge with golfers and custom clubmakers in an effort to expose the truths and facts of how golf clubs work for golfers who vary widely in the abilities they bring to the game.

More details of Tom Wishon's background can be found here. A list of Mr. Wishon's extensive design firsts can be found here.

[edit] References

• Wishon, Tom W., Grunder, Thomas. II. (2005). The Search for the Perfect Golf Club. Ann Arbor, MI.. Learned Information. ISBN 978-1-58726-185-5

• Wishon, Tom W., Grunder, Thomas. II. (2006). The Search for the Perfect Driver. Ann Arbor, MI.. Learned Information. ISBN 978-1-58726-311-8