A Look Back: Oct. 11 1964: Bob McCallister wins the Sunset Camelia Open. 1981: J.C. Snead defeats Mike Sullivan in a playoff to win the Southern Open. 1987: Doug Tewell wins the Pensacola Open by three strokes over Danny Edwards and Phil Blackmar. 1992: John Cook puts the finishing touches on a 26-under-par 334 total and wins the Las Vegas Invitational by two shots over David Frost. 1998: David Duval successfully defends his Michelob Championship at Kingsmill, winning by three shots over Phil Tataurangi.

Equipment
Dunlop introduces the new Advanced Titanium golf ball, a two-piece ball with a titanium core and Surlyn cover blend designed for more carry and roll. A new promotion will accompany the introduction of the Advanced Titanium, offering consumers a money-back guarantee if they don't think it's longer than other titanium balls. The new balls will retail for $18 per 15-ball pack.
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Courses
Traditional Golf Properties introduces a new membership program at The Tradition Golf Clubs at Royal New Kent and Stonehouse in Virginia. New members receive unlimited golf, preferred tee times, and special discounts on carts, merchandise and food while paying no dues until April 2002.
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Associations
The Golf Course Superintendents Association of America pledges $50,000 to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund and announces plans to participate in the golf industry's On Course America program developed by the National Golf Course Owners Association.
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Travel
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority promotes Las Vegas as an ideal vacation spot, with more than 50 golf courses, warm temperatures and good deals on room rates. In addition, two new courses have opened -- the Bali Hai Golf Club at the south end of the Strip and Bear's Best, a Jack Nicklaus design, in nearby Summerlin.
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Five Questions
Barney Adams
Founder & CEO, Adams Golf

Q: Tell us about the new Ultimate GT Irons. I tried the previous irons and had mixed results. How are these different?

A: Your experience is kind of where these new irons came from. One of the great advantages to me being a custom fitter is you get instantaneous feedback from your marketplace. When you're a custom fitter you'll get an order in and the order will be for, let's say, 3-4-5 iron in one model and 6-7-8 iron in another model. If that happens once, okay; but if that happens 10, 15, 20 times you start investigating and you find out that the golfers in a certain category like a combined set better than clubs from each individual set.

That's a great input for a new product design and development, which I said before, is one of the reasons why I like custom fitting. And that's what we kind of found out. The tour blade -- even though it's not really a blade as opposed to the back formation of the club, those words get kind of passed around pretty easily -- it looks good player-ish whatever the hell that means at address and that appeals to a certain percentage of the marketplace.

Then we have toe performance model with more offset and wider sole and that typically appeals to another factor of the marketplace (who wants to) get the ball airborne easily and quickly.

The ultimate irons take from both worlds. They take the best or what has been reported back to us by our custom fitted accounts the best attributes of the tour club and the best attributes of the performance club and allow us to produce a set of clubs that just offers more choice, more versatility to our customers.

Q: How the new GT shaft done both from a consumer standpoint and from your viewpoint?

A: There is no better iron shaft in the world, none whatsoever. That is based on combinations of feedback, testing that based on taking the shaft and getting other brands and sticking the shaft in other brands comparing it to their shafts. Every permutation and combination, I just think it is an absolutely terrific golf shaft.

I've talked to experts, off the record, even people who have involvement with other companies and they'll say the same thing, it's as good an iron shaft that has ever been made. Consumer reaction for people who bought the irons has been terrific. The consumer reaction overall has been fair, but anticipated because we've never done irons before in any kind of a scale and we are not exactly a household name when it comes to irons (so it will take time for) people to warm up to the product, but it continues to be strong.

When you're really introducing something new and different you got to have a tremendous amount of firepower just to ward off your competitors and we're not strong enough to do that. For example the way to overcome that would be go out and spend, oh, probably all and all $6-8 million and have a huge representation on tour. We can't afford that so we have to slug it out in the trenches.

Q: I have tried the shaft in the I-Wood and found it to be a great addition to my bag. Talk about the I-Wood and its success.

A: If you take something as radical as that shaft, which it really is, and consider the fact that this is its first year of life, this is its infancy, we're continuing to work to upgrade it and improve it and so on. I dearly hope we can make subtle changes in that shaft that will make it even easier to play.

Q: Where is Adams Golf in regards to financial stability, financial health?

A: I still maintain that outside of two or three big companies anybody in the golf industry would kill to trade places with us because we have no debt, but have over $10 million in cash and another few million in good receivables. We're very very strong financially.

One of the questions I get asked is when do you think the golf market is going to turn around. My answer is never. The golf market is what it is. To sit around and wait for some magic input that's going to change the golf market, I think is irresponsible. I think you have to look at the market the way it is, the way it was last year, the year before and just say, folks this is reality and we got to learn to live within this reality. Given that premise we in very, very good shape to go forward.

The goal I have and we all have as a company is to perform and I know this sounds a little bit rehearsed only because it is true: Make the best possible deal for our shareholders, best possible deal for our employees, best possible deal for everybody. If that means staying just as we are, that's what we do. If that means being a part of somebody else and we determine it is a good deal for everybody that's what we do.

It's not like we are tired and want to get out -- we want to do the best thing. And I will even go you half of step further. If I were especially a bigger golf club company and I got the folks up in Oregon ready to jump in the market place with both feet, I'm taking any kind of defensive measure I can take.

I am a little surprised that some of the bigger companies haven't -- forget us, take us off the page -- but haven't done more in the way of acquisitions just to make it harder for Nike to get in the ball game.

Q: Do you foresee anything new on the horizon for the show in Orlando in January?

A: Yes. Stay tuned.