Few names in golf are as synonymous with craftsmanship, detail and short-game mastery as Bob Vokey. At 86, Vokey talks about perfecting the art of wedge making – one grind, groove and great player at a time.
The partnership between Titleist and Bob Vokey began with a raised hand, a positive attitude and some old-fashioned initiative. Decades before Vokey became famous within the sport as Titleist’s master craftsman of wedges, he was in a meeting led by the ball and equipment manufacturer’s long-time president and chief executive, Wally Uihlein, who asked a simple question, Who is going to be our head of wedges?
“I said, ‘Coach, I’ll take it,’” Vokey recalls, when chatting with Australian Golf Digest recently, of the fortuitous meeting in Titleist’s headquarters in Carlsbad, California. Vokey called Uihlein “Coach” affectionately. He wanted a specialist role on the team. Whatever Coach wanted, Vokey was going to deliver. “That was it. After the meeting, I turned to a colleague and said, ‘What the heck did I just say?’”
Vokey would eventually create some of the most popular wedges in golf’s equipment history, from the SM9, SM10 and SM8 to various WedgeWorks models and the Spin Milled series. Vokey’s evolution is a testament to the Canadian’s ability to remain ahead of the curve in a golf sector that has moved at a speed of light years.
Vokey has worked with many of the greatest short-game gurus golf has seen to perfect the wedges Titleist offers to pros and amateurs. But before he moved into wedges, few people remember that Vokey played a significant role in the development of Titleist’s drivers and woods. Which is why raising his hand to take on the wedges department was a surprise, even for the man himself.
In 1976, Vokey, who was raised in Montreal by a father who loved tinkering with golf equipment as much as playing the game, moved to the US and opened Bob’s Custom Golf Shop in San Diego. Four years later, he moved to a larger store in Vista, California.
“Lee Trevino would come all the time and work on golf,” Vokey recalls. “He’d grab the shaft of one of his clubs and he’d be hammering away on it, and I’d yell, ‘Lee! Your hands! If that slips and you miss, you’ll break your fingers! So much for golf!’ He’d say, ‘It’s OK. I’m happy.’ Customers would come in and they’d look in the back room and say to me, ‘Is that who I think it is?!’” Trevino, a six-time major winner and one of golf’s greatest champions, would then get a kick out of yelling hello back to the customers and asking if they needed any clubs fixed.
In 1991, Vokey was at TaylorMade but left to help start the Founders Club, a company specialising in metal woods, with Gary Adams, the founder of TaylorMade who was nicknamed the “father of the metal wood”. Five years later, Vokey joined Titleist. His first project? Helping nail down the final specifications for the wildly successful Titleist Titanium 975D driver.
In the present day, Vokey now works directly with Corey Gerrard, an Australian whose journey took him from a PGA of Australia traineeship at Murray Downs on the New South Wales/Victorian border to Carlsbad, where he holds the title of marketing director of Vokey Wedges. Gerrard says Vokey remains synonymous with Titleist’s legendary driver despite becoming the godfather of the company’s wedge range.
“We recently had a sales rep from South-East Asia come [and visit Titleist in California], and he brought with him a brand new 975D clubhead in mint condition,” Gerrard says. “I said, ‘Where on earth did you get that?!’ And he revealed he’d kept it at home all these years, without using it, and he cut off the shaft and brought it over for Vokey to sign.”
TIGER AND THE AUSSIES
Vokey wedges quickly became one of the company’s greatest offerings to the market given his dedication to working with elite players on what they wanted out of the short game. Steve Elkington was among the first Australians and great players Vokey consulted. It was a thrilling time to join Titleist given that in 1996, a young Californian named Tiger Woods turned professional and became an official Titleist ambassador.
“Tiger was a good one,” Vokey recalls. “He had his own way; little nuances that he liked in a golf club. Almost everything he used wasn’t that far from a tour pro’s standard [specifications], but he liked to see the depth a certain way, he liked a bit of heel relief, and I always put a little ribbon in the back of his 56/14 [56-degree wedge with 14 degrees of bounce].
“I’d put Tiger high on my list of players who knew exactly what they wanted and could really feel a golf club. I was at the Canadian Open one year and Tiger said to me, ‘Vokey, that last sand wedge you sent me, it doesn’t feel the same as the others.’”
Vokey then pulled the wedge apart, weighed the grip and found it was the same. He weighed the head; it too was no different. But when he weighed the shaft, the new shaft Vokey had inserted was a little heavier than Woods’ previous wedge, but not by enough to be noticeable to a normal human being. It confirmed to Vokey that rumours Woods could feel a difference of only several grams in a golf club were true.
While Vokey’s reach has spanned continents and tours, he holds a particularly soft spot for the Aussies. Perhaps it is the Commonwealth bond with Canada. He’s worked with Elkington, Adam Scott, Marc Leishman, Cameron Davis and Cameron Smith, to name only a handful.
Vokey has been enamoured with all the Australians who have come through Carlsbad or who have worked with him on what Vokey calls “the greatest R&D lab in the world” – the PGA Tour. Vokey first met Scott when he was a lanky, talented teenager in the late 1990s.
“Adam is one of my all-time favourites,” Vokey says. “I started working with him when he was 18 or 19, and not long after I met ‘Leish’. Leish is high on my list. He had such a great set of hands. Talk about good wedge men – Leish has a great wedge game. You just listen to him chip the ball; it’s got that sound – that Jose Maria Olazabal sound,” Vokey adds, referencing the Spanish winner of two Masters titles at Augusta.
But perhaps no Aussie has given Vokey more joy in terms of tournament results on the biggest stage than 2022 Open champion Smith. The Brisbane export’s career highlight reel features wedge shots prominently, such as the 50-metre up-and-down for bogey on the 72nd hole at TPC Sawgrass to win the 2022 Players Championship by one shot. There were countless wedge shots at St Andrews during his breakthrough major win, and plenty more.
“Oh, he’s had a few great wedge shots,” Vokey says modestly. “I’ll also say he has a great bunker game. I love his play from the sand. And from the fairway, his little 50-yarders – he can take ’em in low with spin or high and bouncing. It is amazing. The trajectory, distance control – he has it nailed down.”
Yet the player who Vokey has developed the greatest professional and personal admiration for may surprise most golf fans. Of all the major winners and world No.1s Vokey has worked with, none have featured in a picture on the wall of Vokey’s office. Only one golfer has that honour, and it belongs to Brett Rumford.
Rumford is renowned among tour pros – past, current and future – as having a prodigious set of hands and an incomprehensible knack for grind, bounce and short-game technique. Pros such as Smith and Rumford’s fellow West Australian Min Woo Lee are constantly uploading videos to social media of mind-blowing short-game challenges given to them by Rumford, from chipping one-handed to unfathomable flop shots.
“‘Rummy’ and I talk all the time,” Vokey says. “When you go in my office, there’s only one picture of a player on my wall, and it’s me and Rummy.”
Aside from being a stalwart of the European Tour from the early 2000s until 2018, why Rumford?
“He was so good [with his wedges]; he just knew his stuff,” Vokey says. “He is a very good person, too. He’d always call and ask how I was, and then say things like, ‘Hey Vokey, have you ever thought about doing this or that?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah, sure. I’ll make you a prototype. Let you hit it.’ I’ve learned a lot from that dialogue.”
Rumford learned even more. He first met Vokey at the Titleist testing facility in Oceanside, minutes from Carlsbad, the year he turned pro in 2000.
“I was excited and nervous at the same time,” Rumford tells Australian Golf Digest. “I was about to meet my hero, Bob Vokey. Wedging was always my thing and then Bob came along [and changed the game]. I was so excited to meet him. As I walked in the door, literally within three minutes, I was at a grinding station with him just grinding away on a wedge. I was absolutely blown away, and that’s where my introduction started.”
Rumford’s big European victories among the six he claimed included the Omega European Masters in Switzerland and the 2004 Irish Open at County Louth (Baltray). He says short game was his bedrock from 1999 until 2018 when injuries took their toll. Throughout those two decades on tour, Rumford says it was crucial to have a craftsman like Vokey, who could take his preferences and create a wedge tailored precisely to his needs. Rumford believes all tour pros have their own way of visualising the face being square and they build their short-game style from there.
“Bob and I talked often about what I liked visually,” Rumford says. “That was the great thing about the Vokey WedgeWorks and the custom wedge making; as a tour player, Bob could put any grind that you wanted visually on the golf club. I liked a wedge with a little bit more heel relief and a more pronounced, rolling leading edge, not a straight leading edge. When I open the sand wedge, I like that roll about it because I played a lot of shots with a really open face.
“Bob’s knowledge came through his ears, with the sound. He could close his eyes, and he would let you hit three or four shots and say, ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ He would take the wedge out of your hands after three shots, run off to the tour truck and he would work his magic. When he came back, he’d say, ‘Give that a go.’ Sure enough, your wedge would have a different sound, it’d have a better flight and you felt more confident.”
Rumford is so passionate about Vokey’s contribution to golf that he also penned a few words about his legacy and sent them to your correspondent after our interview: “Bob makes arguably the world’s best wedges, but you may naturally ask, Who is he, though? Well, Bob is the man who has selflessly dedicated his life to the pursuit of excellence; he has spent his entire life selflessly helping the lives and careers [of golfers] around him to be as successful as they can be. He’s a man of service, loyalty and integrity who is on another level of master craftsmanship. His genius and knowledge continue to inspire; and beyond the days, weeks and subsequent years that will pass, his everlasting footprint will no doubt guide the next generation. Bob is a beautiful man who has had an exceptional career, and I couldn’t honour and respect a man greater for the cause he has devoted his life to; making the world a better place in which he found it.”
CUTTING-EDGE WEDGES
While players are the stars, the wedges are heroes in their own right. So, is there a club Vokey feels changed the game?
“I have to say it would be my favourite, the M grind,” Vokey says of the wedge that’s designed for talented players who like to manipulate the face open and then closed to manufacture shots around the greens. “The M grind was the one that basically started it all. [I started making it because] Lanny Wadkins used to love to get the bottom of the blade up, hands up. It’s an old shot, and then Seve [Ballesteros] and Lee [Trevino] liked a little bit of a heel and trailing edge blade, and that’d end up looking like a crescent shape. That’s how it started. The V grind, the L, the T, other grinds came from the M, with just a little sole modification.”
Vokey’s expertise didn’t develop overnight. It came from decades of tinkering, trial and error, and, as he likes to say, having the right “brushes” to paint with. That philosophy is baked into his approach to wedge fitting, especially for recreational players.
“The biggest mistake I see when I do events [with amateurs] is golfers just not having the right tools, not having the right combination of lofts, grinds and bounces,” Vokey says. “Go to your local fitter and get fit for your wedges. A lot of amateurs go for the highest bounce they can find. You need the right bounce and grind and sole that matches your swing. It’s going to bring you in to hitting what I call the sweet spot, down between second and fifth groove. That’s when you get all the feel, proper feedback, trajectory, distance and spin. It’s so important to be fit.”
And why is it important to be fitted? Well, Vokey has a great story.
“Adam [Scott] was using the original Vokey Design 200 series (260.08) for several years, but in 2012, he was looking to improve his bunker play,” Vokey recalls. “He was looking for more forgiveness and – after some blind testing at the US Open at Olympic Club in 2012 where I told him not to look at the sole [because it could influence a player’s opinion of the club] – Adam was blown away by how much easier coming out of the sand could be with this grind. We started with a 60.10 K, and as conditions firmed up, Adam mentioned that a little less bounce could be the key. The 60.06 K was born.
“A few months later, right before the Masters in 2013, he called and said, ‘Hey, Vokey, I need more bounce.’ I sent him the 60.10 again – and he won at Augusta National.”
