To measure the essence of a company’s excellence that has been consistent for 92 years, consider how philosophies then and now are eerily similar.

Of Phil Young, who founded the Acushnet Process Co. in 1910 and established its Golf division in 1932, it was once said of his engineering acumen: “If it doesn’t work, he will take it apart to find out why, and if it does work, he will take it apart to find out what makes it work.”

Of the Titleist Pro V1, which revolutionized the golf ball industry and is celebrating its 25^th anniversary, the brilliance is owed to an equally relentless pursuit that can be identified by a mantra that is embraced within the R&D department. “We might have something good, but how can we make it better?” said Courtney Engle, manager of mechanical engineering at Titleist.

Engineers born in different centuries, Young and Engle personify what Theodore Von Karman, a Hungarian-American aerospace engineer once said: “Scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been.”

The story of the iconic Pro V1 is a shining example.

Arguably the coolest thing to know about the upcoming release of the 2025 Pro V1 and Pro V1x is this: Engineers within the Titleist R&D department have been feverishly at work for more than two years building these golf balls - testing, fine-tuning, re-testing, tweaking, scrutinizing - and then re-testing them yet again.

It will be the 14^th iteration of the Pro V1, which debuted on the PGA TOUR in October 2000 and was made available to the public in late December, four months earlier than scheduled due to golfer demand. In March 2001 it became the best-selling ball in the marketplace, and it has retained that position every month since. The Pro V1x was introduced in 2003.

An engineering marvel? No question, yet the reason there is such anticipation for the 2025 ball is because Titleist, rooted as a process company, has consistently delivered in its iterations. Tour players know it, elite amateurs know it, recreational golfers know it.

Such trust is the byproduct of a diligent process that goes on time after time. The premise is real, that nothing gets out the door and into the hands of players until the performance improvements, quality and consistency have been validated.

Titleist designs, builds and robotically inspects the cavities in which the proprietary urethane blend becomes a dimpled cover; Titleist builds and owns the robots and launch monitors that help engineers scale down from a list of perhaps a thousand prototypes to the four or five balls that eventually get into the hands of elite golfers for final confirmation.

That this entire process – from creating to testing to building – happens across six company buildings within an 11-mile radius is a part of the Pro V1 story that cannot be underscored enough. Nothing about the ball is shipped across the world, everything about the ball is scrutinized within the framework of a company standard in its 10^th decade. Every Titleist golf ball is made to Titleist specifications by Titleist associates in Titleist owned and operated facilities.

is the Titleist business acumen that guides from start to finish and is re-set when changes are made. Said changes are often in response to comments from elite PGA TOUR professionals who offer feedback to Fordie Pitts III, Director of Tour Research & Development.

Having started with Titleist as a club fitter more than 30 years ago, Pitts and his four-person team is now the connection between the ball-maker and players at the top of the pyramid of influence. 

A fixture at nearly three dozen PGA TOUR events a year, Pitts is a craftsman whose keen set of eyes spot data that he uses with a long line of elite players to make sure they utilize the proper golf ball, be it the Pro V1, Pro V1x, Pro V1x Left Dash, Pro V1 Left Dot, or a couple other custom performance options for those golfers with the most extreme launch conditions. Equally keen are Pitts’ ears, because he brings these suggestions to the folks at R&D who treat feedback as a rich nutrient.

New innovation, high-gradient cores, softer covers, improved aerodynamics. They are the result of an endless search to provide what players ask for and to be better. Pitts secures a lot of this information at ball and club fitting sessions on PGA TOUR practice facilities and while walking practice rounds with tour players.

Ah, but in this age of technology can’t he do his job remotely, talking on-line with players, devouring data via Zoom sessions, digesting the information players send him either in texts or emails or videos? Not Pitts, who works his magic as if he were once again participating in the “100-Man March.”

The 100-Man March? What’s that? Glad you asked.

There is a fascinating confluence of past, present, and future engineering paths when you embrace the research and development of the Pro V1. But human nature being what it is, people often want to skip to the chase. The emphatic arrival of this revolutionary golf ball still resonates, as evidenced by the much-reported story surrounding the PGA TOUR dates of Oct. 11-15 in 2000.

At that five-round Invensys Classic in Las Vegas, it was the Pro V1 that made headlines as Billy Andrade, one of 47 players in the field to switch that week to Titleist’s first high performance, multi-component, solid construction golf ball, shot 67-67-63-67-68 to earn a one-stroke victory. It marked the largest pluralistic shift of equipment at one event in golf history.

To understand the significance of that victory, savor the sidelights to Andrade’s situation. At 36, he was mired in an awful slump, having missed the cut in 18 of his 28 tournaments and for the first time since 1988 the native Rhode Islander was signed up to return to the PGA TOUR Qualifying tournament.

Practice rounds with this new ball got Andrade thinking in a positive direction. “I’m 100 percent using it this week,” he said after a practice round. “That’s how good it is.”

With the victory, not only was Andrade’s season salvaged, but so, too, did it jump-start a second phase to his career.

It also set in motion an overwhelming reaction to the Pro V1. Now, in addition to owning the wound-ball “player count,” Titleist dominated the solid construction ball count, too. Thanks to its solid core, multi-layer construction and cast urethane cover, the Pro V1 delivered what players had always asked for, but presumed was impossible –

What followed was nothing short of a phenomenon. Players using the Pro V1 were not only winning tournaments across all global tours, they were setting records. In early 2001, scoring records were established by Brad Faxon (Sony Open), Mark Calcavecchia (Phoenix Open), Davis Love III (AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am), and the winner of the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic. Each of them playing a Pro V1.

The top eight players on the West Coast Swing money list in 2001 all played the Pro V1. It was a resounding confirmation for this revolutionary ball and the momentum has continued. Forty-seven men’s major championships since 2001 have been won by players entrusting a Pro V1 model golf ball, and since Andrade’s victory in Las Vegas,

What should never be understated is the role of the “100-Man March” that helped open the doors to that memorable Invensys Classic in Las Vegas.

In the summer of 2000, Titleist officials knew they had something special with the Pro V1, but it was vital that the world’s best validated all the data and testing under tour-level playing conditions. Then CEO Wally Uihlein along with Bill Morgan, then Titleist’s vice-president of Titleist Golf Ball R&D, and Mac Fritz, then the vice-president of player promotion, were joined by Mary Lou Bohn, now the President, Titleist Golf Balls, and Pitts to go face-to-face with players.

Day after day, week after week, these Titleist leaders walked the fairways during practice rounds with nearly 100 PGA TOUR (and LPGA Tour) players. Their request was simple – hit this new Pro V1, compare it to your current ball, and tell us what you think.

The response was overwhelming. Like Andrade, many switched as soon as they could. Like Andrade, they found uncanny positives.

A success story that has few rivals in the industry, but one that makes you ponder this: It’s probably a good thing that Phil Young missed a putt over 90 years ago, yes?

A member of the Class of 1909 at MIT, Phil Young had “an innate curiosity, a lot of drive,” his son, Dick Young, once wrote. One of Phil Young’s classic quotes about what inspired engineers like him was this: “There is always a reason for everything.”

So clearly, he was not a man willing to sit back and watch a very short putt veer quickly off line and miss the cup on the 18^th hole of a match at the Country Club of New Bedford in 1930. Young asked his playing partner, Dr. Bonner, to open up his office so he could x-ray that ball and a couple of dozen others.

Sure enough, his ball, and several of the others, had cores way off center. His was out of round and not symmetrical. “No wonder it hooks and slices,” Young said to Dr. Bonner, adding that if he could make a round ball with a stable core, “I could sell a few.”

He had great faith in the friends and co-workers who helped him build the Acushnet Process Company, where they de-resinated latex and supplied rubber to American industries. But to fulfill his mission to build a better golf ball, Young split his company into two divisions – Rubber and Golf. He knew he had to also invent equipment for the Golf division that would test the balls they were going to build.

What Phil Young invented in 1935 – a golf-ball driving machine that could be transported all over the country – has remained central to the generations of engineers and innovators inside Golf Ball Research & Development.

Consider that the first patent owned by Acushnet – in 1936 - isn’t for the construction of a golf ball, but for a dual pendulum machine that tested how golf balls performed. It was hitched to the back of a car and brought to golf courses throughout the country, helping cement Titleist’s reputation as the industry leader in building golf balls. Titleist golf balls were tested against the competition and proven reliable and consistent from ball to ball, sleeve to sleeve and dozen to dozen.

Consider further that “people forget that Titleist were the first ones to develop launch monitors, portable ones that we could take out into the field and test golfers outdoors,” said Pitts, who understandably will laugh while he tells you this story. 

That’s because the “portable” launch monitor wasn’t very portable. It weighed about 90 pounds and had to travel down below in the plane’s luggage area.

“It was a big thing. We put a case over it. It had strobes and cameras and a whole bunch of wires,” he laughed. “But it was an unbelievable machine and it really helped me to understand and learn the dynamics of ball and club.”

Consider also how Titleist has invested significantly in a testing facility called Manchester Lane in Acushnet, Mass., a 15-minute ride from company headquarters in Fairhaven. “We own the testing robots, we build our own launch monitors,” said Rich Daprato, Director of Testing, Engineering and Analytics, who directs what is now called the Titleist Performance Center.

And one more nugget to confirm just how cemented Titleist is as the industry leader – when TrackMan needed a golf ball that golfers could use indoors to measure their numbers, including spin, they went to Titleist to solve the riddle. Daprato said Titleist engineers figured out how to build a ball designed with proprietary Radar Capture Technology that could provide comprehensive launch condition data while being hit indoors.

The gist of all this is the continued commitment to excellence. Titleist engineers build golf balls that are intended to meet the requests of the game’s most elite players and golfers around the world. 

They just don’t have to ask the doctor to open his office.

What confronted Young and has been the challenge for all Titleist engineers since is this: “We’re not just being asked to build one golf ball; the challenge is to manufacture millions of them,” said Doug Jones, Principal Product Engineer, who joined Titleist R&D in the late 1990s when the original Pro V1 was being built.

To get to that one ball just right, “we maybe build a hundred prototypes a year,” said Jones. None of them get onto the range for the human testers – the elite PGA TOUR players – until they meet rigid standards set by the Titleist robots. And that is no small task.

The process would be painstaking and overwhelming to the average person; yet it is enthralling and exciting to the Golf Ball R&D engineers, though admittedly the challenge is to not get too emotionally attached to a particular prototype.

“I’ve had my heart broken a few times,” conceded Madson. “We’ve got to make them, then test them. We’re looking for consistency in every element of golf ball construction, from the aerodynamics down to the core. We always want the ball flying in the same window regardless of how it’s oriented and we want the ball to produce consistent launch, spin, and speed on every shot.”

As time has marched on, Titleist engineers have developed a true feel for what players at every level want, and players have come to develop an emphatic trust in the product, even if they sometimes aren’t necessarily called into the labs. 

No, the players didn’t ask for the engineers to devise a seamless technology. But they got it.

They don’t ask for shallower dimples or varied dimple patterns, but guess what? Madson and Jones and Engle are among the more than 75 associates that make up the world-class Titleist Golf Ball R&D department, and are all over that slice of the engineering puzzle. The aerodynamics of the Pro V1 and Pro V1x – and every other golf ball component - consumes these engineers who proudly call themselves “nerds.” In fact, Madson refers to Engle, who joined Titleist in 2020, as a “super nerd” that is worn like a badge of honor by her.

“We don’t repeat a (dimple) pattern,” she said, highlighting the importance of matching the right aerodynamics with the right construction, and when the discussion shifts to the optimized edge angle of a dimple configuration on a 1.68” golf ball that weighs 1.62 ounces her smile couldn’t have been wider or brighter.

“This job, it called me,” she said.

Pure conjecture this is, but Young, who once said that engineers need “an imagination to create things that nobody else had thought of,” would be rightfully pleased with the direction his company has taken and continues to forge with the Pro V1 and Pro V1x.

It has been embraced by writers for generations, this maxim that the mechanics to any story are a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Ah, but when discussing the saga of the Pro V1 there is a twist. Titleist engineers don’t subscribe to building endings; they only have a penchant for consistently improving and bringing a better Pro V1 to golfers everywhere.

That commitment has been met again in profound fashion. The 2025 Pro V1 has arrived, much to the delight of those PGA TOUR players who will be putting it in play this fall and to a wide world of golfers who’ll have it to tee up early next year.

The story continues in all its glory.