Woods Sends Balls Flying at California Regional Airport

Dec. 1, 2006
In a promotional tour for Nike drivers, Woods launches golf balls from the runway at Hawthorne Municipal Airport.

You want to know the true measure of star power?

Hawthorne Municipal Airport, a small public airport in the South Bay also known as Jack Northrup Field, was closed to outgoing and incoming air traffic Tuesday morning so Tiger Woods could practice hitting golf balls down the runway.

OK, that's a little misleading. Bob Wood, president of Nike Golf, told me the FAA was adamantly opposed to shutting down the airstrip for a promotional appearance by the world's top-ranked golfer.

No problem. With helpful intervention by the Hawthorne mayor, the airport was temporarily closed for ``routine scheduled maintenance,'' enabling Tiger to launch another clever Nike marketing campaign by launching a few golf balls down the tarmac with his new prototype drivers.

Wood, the Nike exec, smirked as he retold the story, standing on the pock-marked concrete where moments earlier Tiger had rocketed a few drives down the middle of the 100-foot-wide, 4,956-foot-long runway.

We were told the balls eventually stopped rolling -- about a half-mile away.

That's because Tiger didn't have time to warm up, didn't swing hard and had to hit off a tiny AstroTurf mat, with one golf spike on the mat and one on the concrete. Otherwise, the air-traffic controllers in the tower likely would have spotted UFOs on their radar.

``I think it would be safe to say they traveled about 800 yards, but we didn't measure them,'' Wood said, explaining he didn't want Tiger risking injury by over-swinging without having warmed up. ``We need him healthy.''

Tiger later said he thought the balls went about 500 yards, which is closer to what ESPN footage seemed to suggest, but it was irrelevant because this wasn't a Guinness Book of World Records attempt.

This was the first stop on a two-day, coast-to-coast Nike Golf ``whistle stop tour,'' with the corporate Swoosh jet taking the marketing entourage from Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., to Los Angeles, to Phoenix, and finally to New York City.

The marketing mission, of course, was to introduce two new Nike clubs: the ``SasQuatch Sumo'' driver and the ``SasQuatch Sumo2'' driver. That's Sumo2 as in ``Sumo squared,'' because the radically shaped driver features a square clubhead.

Why a square clubhead?

``Because it's hip to be square.'' Well, at least that's what the lyrics of a well-known song by Huey Lewis and the News kept blaring as the invited media entered an airplane hangar at the end of the runway and sat down on square ottomans to listen to the promotional propaganda.

We learned what makes the Sumo drivers unique is their high MOI -- short for Moment Of Inertia. Did you know ``inertia lives in the outer limits of physics?'' That's what we were told during a video presentation. We were also told that MOI reflects resistance to turning at impact and is a measure of club stability.

We also were told the Sumo2, which will not be available to the public until late January, has an MOI of 5,300 grams per square centimeter, the highest of any driver on the market and that the SQ Sumo has an MOI of 4,950, second-highest. Whatever that means.

Supposedly, the higher the MOI, the more forgiveness a club has on mis-hits. It certainly worked for K.J. Choi, a Nike client who won the Chrysler Classic in October using a Sumo2 prototype -- his first PGA Tour victory in nearly two years.

When Tiger was called up to the front of the hangar to talk about the new clubs, he acknowledged he laughed the first time he saw the square driver. ``It is funny-looking,'' he said. He also smiled as he recalled how technology has changed the game since he turned pro in 1996.

``When I beat Davis Love III in a playoff in Las Vegas, to win my first tournament in 1996, he was using a persimmon driver,'' Tiger said, shaking his head incredulously.

And now there are square drivers with deeper centers of gravity and higher MOIs. Obviously, Tiger is intrigued. He said he has been testing the prototypes extensively and that he hits the Sumo2 farther than his current Sasquatch driver. He likes the Sumo2 feel, but says the ball flight is too high for him.

``I haven't quite found the launch conditions that will be better for me,'' he said. ``I haven't quite found the ball flight I want yet. And I'm not going to put something in the bag until it's better than what I have.''

You can be certain it'll be in Tiger's bag soon, because Nike is manufacturing a new line of expensive drivers they need him to endorse.

After the presentation, everyone went out to the runway to watch Tiger swing the new clubs. First he hit four balls with an 8.5-degree SQ Sumo.

``Does every ball go that far with that kind of roll?'' he asked, smirking when the ball disappeared from sight.

Then he hit five balls with an 8.5-degree Sumo2.

``I think the runway opens up to the right,'' he wisecracked before going deep, down the middle. Again, the balls rocketed out of sight.

``Another runway hit,'' he joked, inventing a new golf stat.

Then he, too, disappeared, leaving the runway open for the media to try the clubs.

After watching a Fox Sports Net anchor slice one 50 yards into moving traffic on 120th Street and then watching a reporter snap-hook a few toward the private planes sitting near the appropriately named ``Million Air'' terminal, I decided not to risk any lawsuits.

Soon thereafter, all of the media were shooed back to the terminal so the airport could be reopened and the Swoosh jet could take off for Phoenix.

Hawthorne used to be known as the city where Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys grew up and where Marilyn Monroe and Jim Thorpe spent a few years of their childhoods. More recently, ``CSI: Miami'' has filmed a number of scenes in Hawthorne, with the FAA First Federal Credit Union serving as police headquarters.

But now Hawthorne will be remembered for the airport Tiger Woods shut down.

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