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Keeping you in the swing
Club maker Andrew Hodson serves
his customers at the golf course
by Arthur Utley
for Virginia Business Options
March
2006
The tinker-with-golf-clubs gene revealed itself to
club maker Andrew Hodson before he became a teenager.
In those days — the mid-to-late 1970s — the
golf technology boom we know today was still a figment
of someone’s imagination. Choices were limited.
Clubs had steel shafts. Irons were thin blades and
unforgiving. Putters didn’t have perimeter weighting
and face balancing. Woods were really made out of wood.
Hodson, whose father, Peter, was an assistant and then
head golf professional at Willow Oaks Country Club
in Richmond, earned his allowance by putting new grips
on clubs. Young Andrew got 25 cents a grip.
By the time Hodson was 14,
he was adept at refinishing woods and making them
look new again. "I was around
golf from sunup to sundown, and I liked messing around
with the clubs. I had a knack for it," Hodson
says, remembering those days fondly.
After graduating from college,
Hodson turned his skill into an income-generating
venture. Today, he operates
Richmond-based Hodson Golf, which offers custom club
making and mobile fitting and repair services. Mobile
is the key word. Drawing from the example of equipment
vans and trailers that are on-site at major professional
golf tournaments, Hodson brings his services to the
golfers with his mobile equipment lab. "From day
one, that’s been the business model for me," says
Hodson, 38. On his business card next to “location,” it
says: "Wherever you need us!"
You can spot the van at most
of the state’s major
tournaments, such as the State Amateur and State Open,
or the Valentine Invitational at Hermitage Country
Club or the Willow Oaks Fall Invitational. Some of
the best players in the state use his quick, PGA Tour-level
skills on clubs for regripping and reshafting or changing
their lie or loft. "I think it gives the tournaments
a little extra zip to have him on-site. It’s
like at a Tour event," says Willow Oaks member
Steve Isaacs, who has leadership roles on the tournament
committees for the State Open and Willow Oaks Fall
Invitational.
You can spot Hodson’s
van near the driving range at public courses such
as Independence Golf Club
in Midlothian and The Crossings in Henrico County,
or
at private clubs such as Kinloch Golf Club in Goochland
County or Willow Oaks. Hodson also drives the van
to the international PGA merchandise show in Florida
every
February.
Despite his reputation, Hodson’s business is
a second source of income. By day, he works as a senior
real estate assessor for Henrico County. Hodson is
married and has two children under the age of 10. Unlike
the days of his youth, he doesn’t want to spend
all his daylight hours at the golf course — so
he sets his schedule with that in mind. Usually he’ll
be at a course one or two afternoons a week and once
a weekend.
When Hodson was a teenager,
working with clubs meant bending, grinding, re-gripping
and reshafting. He bought
clubs from club professionals, and the choices were
limited to a few major manufacturers. Graphite shafts
hadn’t appeared, and there wasn’t much
of a components (club making) market. By the early
to mid-1980s, Golfsmith and Ralph Maltby’s Golf
Works began carving a niche for custom club making,
thanks in part to consumers purchasing knockoffs and
clones of the top-level manufactured clubs for a quarter
to half the price.
Golfers, among the most impulsive
of consumers, know how expensive name-brand equipment
is, whether it is
bought from a club pro, the large discount chains,
a catalog or the Internet. Name-brand price markup
is huge. Custom clubs “are a pretty good incentive
to better your game and not spend a fortune,” Hodson
says. Forty percent of Hodson’s business involves custom clubs. The range of
components — heads for all clubs, shafts and grips — is vast, and
Hodson has a large inventory. His components are high end, and some are rated
higher in quality than many of the name brands. His forte is forged irons,
the type used by most good players. His charges vary depending on the shaft
and the
design of the head of the club. Typically, his irons average about $100 each
while drivers range from $400 to $500 each.
Another service Hodson provides
is club fitting. You’ll find the van parked
at or near the driving range at courses for a reason. “I’ve always
despised hitting balls into nets,” Hodson says. “You can watch ball
flight at a driving range.” A launch monitor, perhaps the most valuable
piece of technology for club makers, provides Hodson with the launch angle, launch
speed and ball spin a golfer generates with his or her swing. Those parameters
help determine what shaft fits the golfer best. Selecting a head that looks good
is important to golfers, but the proper shaft, especially if it’s graphite,
is the real key.
Ken Hart, the equipment manager
at the University of Richmond, found the shafts in
his clubs weren’t what he thought they were, and he purchased custom
irons from Hodson, who offers his services to golf team members at UR and at
Virginia Commonwealth University. “How many people have the ability to
tell you the specifics of the golf club you should be hitting?” asks Hart. “I
played five years with Wilson fat shafts that were supposed to be regular shafts,
and it turned out they were senior shafts. His trailer has absolutely everything
every man and every woman needs to make it right for them. Cost definitely
had something to do with [buying the irons].”
Hodson’s inventory is why the golf professionals at the clubs where he
sets up don’t view his work as competition. “He’s providing
support for what we can’t do. He can offer people quick, on-site repair,
and I can’t afford to keep that kind of inventory,” Willow Oaks head
pro Richard White says. “And he happens to be a very likeable guy. He takes
great pride in what he’s providing.”
Hodson could make club making
his primary job, but the turnover rate in the profession
is high. The ranks
of Class A club makers plying a visible trade in the
Richmond
area has dwindled to just Hodson in the past couple of years. “You have
to know your market, and you have to be good at it,” he says. “The
technology changes so much you can get swamped trying to keep up with the components.”
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