Here’s an interesting way to get into the golf business.

A company called Sonic Golf offers a golf club cleaning franchise. For your franchise fee of 15,000 pounds sterling (about $28,000), you get a set of sonic golf cleaning machines, which you place and staff at local golf clubs.

The machines use sonic vibrations in a liquid solution to clean a full set of clubs in just two minutes. The machines will clean the heads as well as the grips. I’m sure that my wife has a similar device for cleaning jewelry.

Unfortunately, the opportunity appears to be available only in the UK. I’d think that it would be a huge hit in places like Myrtle Beach that have a huge concentration of courses in a small area.

TEAM EFFORT College 3 PK Headcover

The BIG GAME is Saturday, and what cold be more appropriate than these headcovers.

TAYLORMADE r7 Draw Iron Set 3-PW with Steel Shafts

The R7 Draw irons are the latest aid for high handicappers from the mad scientists at TaylorMade.

These clubs are built—as their name suggests—with a built in draw bias. Wdight has been removed from the cavity area in the toe and moved closer to the heel, allowing the player to close the clubface more quickly, reducing the slice and encouraging a draw. Slicing is further reduced by the offset design.

Like other R7 design clubs, the R7 Draw Irons feature TaylorMade’s Inverted Cone Techonology—the same technology that makes their drivers and woods so forgiving and so long. The inverted cone expands the Coeffient of Restitution (COR) zone for consistently longer shots—even on mishits.

The R7 Draw Irons have been made even more forgiving with their wide, cambered sole, which is designed to glide over turf and reduce the chance of fat shots.

Vibration from off center hits is reduced by the unique Dampening Web (that’s the little “X” structure on the back of the club).

What you have in the R7 Draw is the next generational step beyond the R7 XD, a set of clubs I prefer and highly recommend.

Callaway has been sort of a pioneer among the big manufacturers with its online retailing. It is the only one, to my knowledge, with an in-house “Pre-Owned” program, and now it’s about to unleash its own “new” clubs webstore at shop.callawaygolf.com.

Of course, opening its own retail store would unnecessarily anger the retailers that Callaway depends on to move its product, so the new site has a twist. You can actually order the clubs at the Calaway store, but fulfillment of the order comes from brick-and-mortar retailers.

Here’s how it works: When a consumer orders a product direct from Callaway, the software searches local participating retailers for one that has the desired product in stock. It presents the order to the retailer, and the retailer handles the shipping from her stock.’

Its not a bad idea, and it’s one in which everyone wins. If it works, it also could be a model for other large manufacturers in other industries and serve as the solution to the common complaint that the internet is putting the small retailer out of business.

Nearly 300 retailers apparently signed up for the plan, including giants GolfSmith and golf Galaxy, as well as smaller mom-and-pop stores.

The Pacific Coast Busienss Times has an interesting article on a position that I never knew existed: official painter for the PGA Tour and Nascar.

CLUB GLOVE Personalized Collegiate Last Bag

Display your college loyalties with this Club Glove Collegiate bag.

Go Blue!

The latest issue of PGA Partners has a column by Tom Lehman in which he reminisces about the late, great Byron Nelson. Lehman confirms what most golf fans already knew about Lord Byron: that as great a player as he was, he was a greater human being.

And then Lehman drops a historical bombshell (ok, perhaps it was only a grenade). Once, in a conversation with Lehman, Nelson let it slip that he had actually won 12 in a row in the summer of 1945, not 11. The twelfth, however, was not counted at the time because it was for a purse of less than the $500 minimum.

Nelson, always a modest man, apparently never mentioned it to anyone else.

The fact that in all of the dozens of articles I read on Nelson after his passing, this was not mentioned even once makes me wonder about golf’s historical record keeping. Such a thing would not have gone unnoticed by baseball historians, who pore over old newspapers divining information about even the most obscure of games and players.

Golf apparently doesn’t inspire such meticulous review. The PGA, or the Tour, with all of their millions, should commission a team of researchers to do just what baseball historians have been doing: trying to uncover every stat about every professional and major match ever played. (And if they already have such people then they aren’t doing such a good job if the story on the twelfth win didn’t come up when Nelson died).

And here’s another item for thought: $500 in 1945 translates to about $5600 in today’s currency. And folks, that was the purse, not the first place take.