BETHESDA, Md. – To scan the field of players from top to bottom at a golf competition – especially one that casts its net nationally and internationally – is to provide great fodder should you always be intrigued by wonderful golf stories.
Count me totally in, of course, so at the intersection of Birk Nelson and his caddie, Jim Hackenberg, down at the 85th Senior PGA Championship at vaunted Congressional Country Club last week, what set off a bell was mention of the Orange Whip.
No, not the round of drinks John Candy ordered in “Blues Brothers” – released 45 years ago, by the way. The Orange Whip that Nelson mentioned after shooting an opening 75 is a swing aid that promotes rhythm and tempo and was introduced to the public for the first time at the 2008 PGA Show (the longest running and largest global gathering for the business of golf).
That Hackenberg’s invention met with rave reviews 17 years ago has been validated by the fact that “more than 800,000 units have been sold,” said Hackenberg.
Here is where intrigue set in. Questions were asked and Hackenberg came forth with one of those stories that tickles my fancy. He loves golf, as both a competitive player and a student of the swing. So, too, does he cherish the game’s community, the people he’s met and the places to which he has traveled. When asked, “How does a kid from North Dakota find his way to Edgartown Golf Club on Martha’s Vineyard, invent a hugely popular swing aid, and get himself on the bag of a player in the Senior PGA Championship?” Hackenberg smiled, then chuckled.
“Golf.”
Ah, yes. Golf tugs at us in different directions and so when Hackenberg graduated from high school in 1986 he moved to a state with more golf options – Arizona. “I just got a job working at a (mediocre) golf course, range and carts and stuff. Just to work and play golf.”
When he discovered he could afford the in-state tuition for Arizona State, Hackenberg jumped at the opportunity. Even better, he saw that a 60-player tournament was held and the winner would be on the college team. Should he do it? The answer was a no-brainer, “Why not?”
When he won and officially made the Arizona State golf team in the fall of 1988, Hackenberg was officially a teammate of a young kid from San Diego named Phil Mickelson. He thought he’d have a good chance to make the travel squad, only Hackenberg said the coach, Steve Loy, told him, “Jimmy, you qualified, and that’s great, but we need to keep our scholarship guys playing.”
He shrugged, but added, “I sort of eased out.” Then came a smile. That’s because “Loy’s assistant, Todd Rolfes, went to coach Oregon State, so I followed him up there and played for him.”
For five years after Oregon State, Hackenberg kicked around the minitours but when the results weren’t there “I got tired of the life.”
But wasn’t tired of golf. In fact, he was more passionate about it than ever before so he got into teaching the swing. He had a steady line of students, too, but were you to give Hackenberg a mulligan, he’d have studied the mechanics more prudently because he knows now that he was far too technical.
“I complicated things. I was probably hurting more people than I was helping,” he concedes.
When another avenue opened up to keep Hackenberg in the game, he jumped onto the bag of a young player, Patrick Moore, who shared North Dakota roots. (Hackenberg attended Central High School in Grand Forks; Moore went to Bishop Ryan High School in Minot). The potential appeared to be enormous, because Moore in 2002 won three times on what was then called the Buy.com Tour and secured the “Battlefield Promotion” to the PGA Tour.
“A very unique opportunity,” said Hackenberg. “We had played junior golf in high school against each other. But (Moore) was a phenom and I was a wannabe. When he called me he said, ‘I want somebody I’m comfortable with,’ someone like me.”
That story never got to play out the way it should have. Moore’s one year on the PGA Tour didn’t go well (he made just 2 cuts in 14 starts) because he was limited with neck issues. Sadly, the injuries spiraled the wrong way – he was diagnosed with a bulging disc – and he was out of competitive golf in a few years.
It pains Hackenberg to this day that doctors were never able to help Moore through his injuries and that he wasn’t afforded the pro career he should have.
The time with Moore did pay dividends for Hackenberg, however.
“(Patrick) would hit balls every day for two to four hours,” said Hackenberg, and that enabled the caddie to study classic swingers in those years – Ernie Els, Fred Couples, Geoff Ogilvy, Retief Goosen.
“They had such rhythm, such tempo. And a guy like Boo Weekley, who isn’t thinking about his swing. I would go home to my hotel and study what I saw. I said to myself, ‘Maybe I’m making the swing too complicated.’ ”
Before swinging the Orange Whip for his rhythm and tempo, Birk Nelson uses it to stretch out. Jim Hackenberg stands on the range with him at the 85th Senior PGA Championship.
By now, Hackenberg had chosen to get in the club pro world and for a few summers he was a small little private club on Martha’s Vineyard. Edgartown CC. A piece of heaven, he called it, and it was there that he’d retire at night to a small shed on the property and advance an idea he had.
When he taught the swing, never did Hackenburg emphasize rhythm and tempo but now he believed wholeheartedly in it. But instead of teaching it, he wanted to develop a swing aid that would help amateurs obtain it. His theory was this: “The guys who make it look easy – let’s say Geoff Ogilvy – are swinging a weighted ball on the end of a chain, he’s loading up that weight and then unloading it all on the target with body and footwork all combined.”
The idea percolated for three or four years and then came a series of experiments on how to build his training aid.
A chain and ball. “Didn’t work,” sighed Hackenberg.
A wooden handle with a steel, spiky ball. “Didn’t work.”
Still, he was relentless after work at Edgartown CC. “I’d go in there at night, I turned the radio on, I’d drink a few beers and I’d tinker.”
Fishing rods provided the necessary flex, but he didn’t want a club face at the other end. “I’m going to put a ball on the end of this,” he said, “and it started to work.”
Then came the fine-tuning. He wanted counter-balance weight in the grip so he used washers, then he tried doorknobs. For the ball, he tried pool balls. “Had 700 of them with holes drilled in them.” But that didn’t work. Nor did steel balls. Ah, but “the lacrosse ball did.”
Along the way he tried rubber tubing inside the shafts. Two-sided tape and a solvent was involved. There were steel units shaped like a wine corks epoxied to the handle end of the fiberglass shaft.
“It took me a while to figure it out and then to do it, but I had all the time in the world, because my whole life was now trying to make the Orange Whip.”
Thinking he was close, he made about 30 or 40 of them, sold them to members at Edgartown CC and got positive comments. “This was 2006, 2007 and I said to myself, ‘Hey, people like these and tell me they’re buying them, so . . . ’ ” the light went off. If he really got the product to where he wanted it, he would go into business.
Making them by hand (and to this day, all Orange Whips are made by hand) afforded Hackenberg the ability to test some more, to get feedback from students, to tweak, to get even more feedback, until he decided on what is now a 10 ½-ounce grip at one end and a 10 ½-ounce ball at the other.
Students had given positive reviews throughout the process. So, too, had influential members at the two clubs he worked at (The Plantation Club in Indio, Calif., winters; and Edgartown GC summers), four of whom became “angel investors” for $10,000 each. Hackenberg with his own $10,000 thus had a decent foundation to take the next step.
He moved to Easley, S.C., just outside of Greenville, and started making his Orange Whips. The parts are all made in the U.S. The grips in Arizona. The fiberglass shafts in St. Louis. The orange ball and counterweights in Delaware. (He still lives in Easley and is fulltime devoted to the Orange Whip, though he tries to caddie a few tournaments and play competitively when he can. The Mass Open has often been on his calendar.)
“I had a process as to how to do it,” said Hackenberg, “but it’s changed a lot since then, as you would guess.”
A gun rack in his garage doesn’t hold guns. It holds all the prototypes of the Orange Whip and along the line Hackenberg is reminded of the folks who had laughed and how on the eve of the 2008 PGA show he asked himself, “I might have screwed up there.”
A week after that show, many positive reviews buoyed his spirits. “Better players got it. Instructors did, too. All of a sudden I was telling myself, this is going to happen. And it has.”
By 800,000 – and still counting. A most beautiful golf odyssey.
