An appreciation
Callaway visionary Dick Helmstetter combined science and innovation to lead club-making revolution
A long-ago magazine story once dubbed Richard C. “Dick” Helmstetter, the inventor of the iconic Big Bertha driver and dozens of other products during his three decades at Callaway Golf, as golf’s “mad scientist.” I never thought the moniker fit, “mad” implying something sinister or ghoulish or even villainous.
Helmstetter really wasn’t anything like that, more like a Willy Wonka of golf club curiosity and inventiveness. He wasn’t crazed as much as he was creative and inspired to look around corners others were merely approaching. And always, there was a twinkle in his eye, a knowing smile, that he was showing you something you hadn’t seen before but would soon be seeing a lot of.
Helmstetter, senior executive vice president and the principal architect of innovation for Callaway Golf in the 1980s, ’90s and early 2000s, died Thursday in California. He was 82.
“Richard Helmstetter was a legend and a true innovator in the golf industry,” said Chip Brewer, president and CEO at Topgolf Callaway Brands. “He was so passionate about his work, and for making the game more enjoyable for golfers. More importantly, he was a great man; he cared deeply about the next generation of club designers, mentored so many colleagues, and treated everyone warmly and with respect.”
Pursued by company founder Ely Callaway for years, Helmstetter first made a name for himself as the designer and manufacturer of high-end billiard cues under the Adam brand that he founded. He lived in Japan for nearly 20 years and became very plugged in to the burgeoning sports technology platforms that would serve him well when he started in 1986 with a fledgling golf equipment company based in Carlsbad, just north of San Diego.
Helmstetter was instrumental in changing not only the size of drivers but the materials (from steel to titanium and carbon composite) but also their new potentials for forgiveness, ball speed, launch and spin. His earliest ideas included the weight-redistributing short-hosel designs that were fundamental to first the S2H2 woods and irons and subsequent clubs across future wood and iron lines. He led the development of the Great Big Bertha, the company’s first titanium model and the most dominant driver of its era. It sold 1.8 million units worldwide and ushered in the era of not only super-oversized drivers but driver faces that deflected at impact, propelling balls with a new velocity that came to be known as spring-like effect.
He was ahead of his time in leading the company’s pursuit of carbon composite in driver designs in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He even was working on radar-based and multi-camera launch monitor systems years before Trackman or Foresight were even an idea.
But Helmstetter’s greatest strength may have been in building an R&D juggernaut of young minds that would go on to lead both Callaway’s design philosophy and later other companies for decades. Among the many elite thinkers that Helmstetter assembled included Alastair Cochran, the legendary researcher and author behind Search for the Perfect Swing; Alan Hocknell, the PhD plucked from England’s prestigious sports research institute Loughborough University who would go on to lead Callaway’s R&D effort for more than a decade and is now vice president of advanced research and innovation at Titleist; Austie Rollinson, the versatile designer who worked on everything as the third member of Helmstetter’s R&D team but ultimately became the principle vision for Odyssey’s putter designs and is now the senior director of putter R&D for Scotty Cameron; Mike Yagley, who headed Callaway’s golf ball R&D in the company’s early years in the ball business and is now vice president of innovation and AI at Cobra Puma Golf; and Tom Mase, another PhD in mechanical engineering who moved out of academia to work for a time at Callaway and has gone onto a distinguished research career most recently at Cal Poly, where he was associate chair in the mechanical engineering department. Mase also has been a long-standing contributor to Golf Digest as a founding member of the Hot List Technical Advisory Panel.
“He knew that he needed a team around him to help make his vision a reality,” Rollinson said in an email to Golf Digest. “He could not do it by himself, and I don’t think he would want to do it by himself. He loved to collaborate, and his curiosity was infectious. … There were many discussions over dinner sampling his extensive wine collection and on the golf course where there was always a game and bet involved. This made the process of creating new products seem effortless and a lot of fun. I think he knew that we needed this unpressured space around you to make these important connections appear. It was a magical time.”
Making an oversized driver might sound like a simple and obvious idea, but its execution was a bit like a moon launch. Materials and processes had to be discovered and perfected, and quite often cajoled out of an industry that wasn’t initially equipped to understand the problem. Helmstetter was relentless in finding solutions and motivating others to push forward.
“One of the most fantastic traits that Dick had was to be able to see things differently,” Rollinson said. “Where some people saw disparate ideas, he was able to see the connections between them.
“His products changed the industry by bringing a new level of science into the design and innovation process of golf equipment. These science-led innovations made golf just a bit easier to play for average players—and even some professionals. This made the game more enjoyable, and joy is a good thing and a great legacy. More importantly, I think his legacy will also be the inspiration his creations have meant to all the designers and golf innovators that have come after him. Even if they did not know him personally, they knew his work and the impact it had on the industry. I truly feel his impact is still being felt today, and I can personally attest to that.”
Mase said what Helmstetter really did was change the industry’s approach to golf club design. “Dick built an industry giant from scratch,” he said. “He grew a modern R&D group as the industry transitioned from a craft to science-based. He leveraged his Japan contacts to create a solid, science-based foundation for Callaway.”
Jerry Tarde, the editor-in-chief of Golf Digest, recalled playing a pro-am round with Helmstetter, who became intrigued by the Dave Pelz-invented three-ball putter that Tarde was using. "Dick was clearly intrigued by the oddity of its construction," Tarde said, "and the next thing I knew he’d bought the rights to the design for Callaway and used it as the basis of Odyssey’s two-ball putter that became one of the all-time best-selling putters in history.
"He mixed NASA-level principles with his experience making billiard cue sticks. That was his genius—applying out-of-the-box innovative thinking to practical golf design.”
Helmstetter’s life fueled his curiosity, particularly his time in Japan where he marveled at the martial arts masters performing at the Budokan, but learned from them, too. He once served as a translator for Japanese players at the Masters and was equally versed in the best wines as the ways to win at billiards.
He pushed his burgeoning R&D team to not merely pursue new ideas but find ways to measure improvement that didn’t exist until they invented them. That included dissecting the duration of impact to less than a microsecond, all at the height of the spring-like rules controversy in 1998. Moreover, Helmstetter wasn’t merely conducting science experiments, he was looking for a functional path to better golf, often in club design but also in how the game was learned. He once worked extensively on his own game, matching up video with launch monitor numbers to understand why certain swings produced certain numbers, a concept that might seem obvious today but something he was doing in the 1990s.
“The Japanese love the application of artistry that is otherwise banal or utilitarian,” Helmstetter told Golf Digest’s Guy Yocom for a “My Shot” story in 2003. “They call it ‘mingei.’ It might manifest itself in the form of a simple chair, or even a golf club—provided the club is handmade, by one person.
“Persimmon woods had mingei. The grain, color, staining and shape of the clubhead, the depth of the whipping, the fitting of the soleplate and the matching of the insert, was something to behold when done just right. The metal woods I’ve designed cannot have true mingei because they are not handmade and are mass-produced. Still, that’s what I strive to attain—mingei, a pleasing, flowing, organic divinity that makes my creations unique.”