A magazine story long ago called 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 the “mad scientist” of golf. I never thought the nickname was appropriate, “crazy” implying something evil or ghastly or even evil.
Helmstetter really wasn’t anything like that, more like a Willy Wonka of golf club curiosity and invention. He wasn’t crazy as much as he was creative and inspired to look at angles that others were just 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 see a lot of.
MORE: Dick Helmstetter’s Golf Digest “My Shot”
Helmstetter, senior executive vice president and chief innovation architect 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 very passionate about his work and making the game more enjoyable for golfers. Most importantly, he was a great man; he cared deeply about the next generation of club designers, mentored so many colleagues and treated them all with warmth and respect.”
Followed by company founder Ely Callaway for years, Helmstetter first made a name for himself as a designer and manufacturer of high-end billiard cues under the Adam brand he founded. He lived in Japan for nearly 20 years and became very attached to emerging sports technology platforms that would serve him well when he started in 1986 with a new golf equipment company based in Carlsbad, north of San Diego.
Helmstetter was instrumental in changing not only the size of the drivers, but also the materials (from steel to titanium and carbon composites), but also their new potentials for forgiveness, ball speed, launch and spin. His earliest ideas included the short-slope designs for weight redistribution that were essential to the early S2H2 woods and irons and subsequent bundles through the future wood and iron lines. He led the development of the Great Big Bertha, the company’s first titanium model and the most dominant thruster of its era. It sold 1.8 million units worldwide and ushered in the era not only of large drivers, but also of driver faces that deflected off impact, moving balls at a new speed that became known as the spring-like effect.
He was ahead of his time in leading the company’s pursuit of carbon composites in driver designs in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He was even working on radar-based, multi-camera launch monitoring systems for years. before Trackman or Foresight were an idea.
But Helmstetter’s greatest strength may have been in building an R&D stable of young minds that would go on to guide the design philosophy of Callaway and later other companies for decades. Among the many elite thinkers Helmstetter assembled included Alastair Cochran, the legendary researcher and author of the Perfect Swing Quest; Alan Hocknell, a PhD from England’s prestigious sports research institute, Loughborough University, who would go on to lead Callaway’s R&D efforts 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 eventually became the primary visionary for Odyssey’s barrel designs and is now senior director of rubber shooting R&D for Scotty Cameron; Mike Yagley, who led Callaway golf ball research and development 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 mechanical engineering PhD who left academia to work for a time at Callaway and has gone on to a distinguished research career most recently at Cal Poly, where he was associate chair of the engineering department mechanical. Mase has also been a longtime contributor to Golf Digest as a founding member of the Hot List Technical Advisory Panel.
“He knew he needed a team around him to help realize his vision,” Rollinson said in an email to Golf Digest. “He couldn’t do it on his own and I don’t think he would want to do it on his own. He loved to collaborate and his curiosity was infectious. … There was much discussion over dinner sampling his extensive wine collection and on the golf course where there was always a game and a bet involved. This made the process of creating new products look easy and a lot of fun. I think he knew that we needed this unpressurized space around you to display these important connections. It was a magical time.”
Making a big driver might sound like a simple and obvious idea, but executing it was a bit like a moon launch. Materials and processes had to be discovered and perfected, and were often sourced from an industry that was not initially equipped to understand the problem. Helmstetter was relentless in finding solutions and motivating others to move forward.
“One of the greatest traits that Dick had was being able to see things differently,” Rollinson said. “Where some people saw different ideas, he was able to see the connections between them.
“His products changed the industry by bringing a new level of science to the golf equipment design and innovation process. These science-led innovations made golf a little easier to play for the average golfer—and even some pros. It made the game more enjoyable and joy is a good thing and a great legacy. Most importantly, I think his legacy will also be the inspiration his creations have provided for all the golf designers and innovators that have come after him. Even if they didn’t know him personally, they knew his work and the impact he had on the industry. I truly feel that his influence 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 the ground up,” he said. “It grew into a modern R&D group as the industry moved from a craft to a science-based one. He used his contacts in Japan to create a solid, science-based foundation for Callaway.
Jerry Tarde, editor-in-chief of Golf Digest, recalled playing a pro-am round with Helmstetter, who was intrigued by the three-ball putter invented by Dave Pelz that Tarde was using. “Dick was clearly intrigued by the oddity of its construction,” Tarde said, “and the next thing I knew he had bought the rights to the design for Callaway and used it as the basis of the Odyssey two-ball putter that became a of the best selling footballers of all time in history.
“He mixed NASA-level principles with his experience making pool cues. That was his genius – applying innovative outside-the-box thinking to practical golf design.”
Helmstetter’s life fed his curiosity, especially his time in Japan, where he marveled at the martial arts masters who performed in the Budokan, but also learned from them. He once served as a translator for Japanese players at the Masters and was as knowledgeable about the best wines as he was about winning at billiards.
He pushed his growing research and development team to not just pursue new ideas, but to find ways to measure improvement that didn’t exist until they invented them. This included breaking down the duration of impact to less than a microsecond, all at the height of the spring rules controversy in 1998. Moreover, Helmstetter wasn’t just conducting scientific experiments, he was looking for a functional path to better golf. well, often in the design of the club but also in the way the game was taught. He once worked extensively on his game, matching video to pitch monitor numbers to understand why certain swings produced certain numbers, a concept that may seem obvious today, but something he was doing in the 1990s.
“The Japanese love the application of art that is otherwise banal or utilitarian,” Helmstetter told Guy Yocom of Golf Digest for a “My Shot” story in 2003. “They call it ‘mingei.’ simple, or even of a golf club – provided the club is handmade, by one person.
“The date tree had mingei. The grain, the color, the staining and shape of the club head, the depth of the beat, the fit of the plate and the fit of the insert, it was something to behold when done right. The metal woods I designed cannot have real mingei because they are not handmade and mass produced. However, this is what I strive for – mingei, a graceful, flowing, organic deity that makes my creations unique.”
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com