For those of you who dream of smash factors, spin rates and dispersion cones, um, sorry there’s no cure for what you have, however, we’ve got something infinitely better – stylish whimsical headcovers.
For years, I’ve longed for eye-catching headcovers that were neither enormous, heavy nor festooned with corporate logos. I wanted clever, minimalist, maybe even wool.
Imagine my surprise to find out that Nashville-based Sunfish has been making just such club garments since 2011, when co-founders Alonzo Guess and David Riggs quit their recession-stalled businesses to begin selling, from their garage, stuff like scorecard holders, valuables pouches, ball markers, duffel bags and virtually any kind of headcover, be it real leather, synthetic or, yes, 100 percent New Zealand wool.
These aren’t your dad’s 1960s woolly pompoms. Sunfish designers assembled a menagerie of some 23 playful animals — from bears and tigers to koalas, sloths and penguins – in sizes that snugly fit your driver and fairway woods.
“Around 2010,” says Guess, who now employs some 40 workers, “we were inspired by all those beanie hats that looked like a mouse or cat or lion. They’ve really taken off and I would estimate we’ve sold about 250,000 knitted headcovers since then.”
They’re made of tightly-woven, all natural, biodegradable, New Zealand sheep fleece, and Guess says they often last seven or eight years, with hand washing in products like Woolite and air drying. You can find them at golf shops, online at sunfishsales.com and at some 500 of the nation’s tonier clubs, such as Pinehurst, Winged Foot and Cypress Point.
“Oddly, it’s not the golf shops that keep us going,” says Guess, “it’s all the club tournaments, the tee prizes for member-guest events and such.”
And if for some reason you don’t want a woolen New Zealand mallard or giraffe gracing your toaster-sized driver, you can still order leather or synthetic headcovers and, if needed, have them printed with a high-resolution process called Photoflux that applies images with a detail that can’t be achieved with basic embroidery.
Getting 20 extra yards with that driver is still up to you.