Grip It

Grip It: How Golf Pride Reinvented a 77-Year-Old Golf Institution


While the Sandhills area was squarely in the golf world spotlight in the early 2010s with the cutting-edge restoration of Pinehurst No. 2 and the USGA’s ambitious idea to stage its U.S. Open and Women’s Open on back-to-back weeks on the same golf course, there was one major player in the golf industry biding its time in relative anonymity just three miles from the No. 2 course.

Located just a three-wood shot from a car dealership, an Asian restaurant and a convenience store on Murray Hill Road in Southern Pines, Golf Pride ran its golf grip manufacturing business from a nondescript commercial building that didn’t have so much as the Golf Pride name on office signage (management instead opting for the corporate parent Eaton Corporation) and kept the front door locked during business hours.

It was all so unimpressive that a potential candidate for its presidency in 2012 almost turned the job down. Golf Pride had the history — it was founded in 1949 and was the No. 1 manufacturer of grips in the world. But it had no panache and no vision.

Good thing Jamie Ledford liked a challenge and had his eyes on the future.

“My assignment was to come here and give Golf Pride a new lease on life,” he says. “We needed to chart a new future for Golf Pride because we were living in the past.”

Golf Pride was founded in 1949 by a Cleveland golfer named Thomas Fawick, who believed that molded rubber would offer better traction and durability than traditional leather. He went to Akron — the rubber capital of the world — and found business partners and launched the company. Fawick soon introduced the slip-on grip, revolutionizing the industry and creating the modern regripping market. The company was acquired by Eaton in 1968 and moved to North Carolina a year later, with operational headquarters in Southern Pines and a manufacturing plant in Laurinburg. The latter shut down in the early 2000s and now some 50 million grips a year are produced out of company facilities in Thailand and Taiwan.

When Ledford arrived in 2012, the lifelong golfer from the Pacific Northwest had a decade of experience as director of consumer products for Starbucks Coffee Company and in business development with Callaway Golf. Among his priorities on taking the Golf Pride presidency was to find a new home for the business. Word got around town and one day he got a phone call from an executive at Pinehurst Resort suggesting that some unused land along the entry road to Pinehurst No. 8 north of the Village of Pinehurst might be an idea for Golf Pride.

That led to Golf Pride announcing in November 2017 that it would build its Global Innovation Center next to Pinehurst No. 8, partnering with the resort and its branding power and parlaying the steady stream of golfers visiting Pinehurst from around the world. The 36,000-square-foot building opened on a 10-acre site in 2019 and combines traditional Pinehurst brick and wood architecture with a modern open-office interior with lots of natural light and graphics displays that tell the company’s history.

There are offices in one wing and a manufacturing operation in another wing where ideas for new grips can be turned into workable prototypes within days. Most significantly to the public, there is a “retail lab” where golfers can bring their clubs and get fitted for new grips and watch as they’re installed. The company sought to make the process as easy and expedient as going to the barbershop and getting a haircut.

“We’re here to innovate and create new grips,” Ledford says. “We built this facility as a bit of a statement of purpose for Golf Pride in the future. We’re 77 years old this year. But it’s really easy for a brand that’s 77 years old, that’s been number one for a long time, to just kind of focus on the past and lose its way. And this place is really built on what our future is. I’ve been pleased how it has rejuvenated Golf Pride and given us a whole new boost of energy.”

Ledford’s perspective in helping take Starbucks to Asia is invaluable in leading Golf Pride. People didn’t know they loved coffee so much until Starbucks came along and commenced its meteoric growth in the 1990s. Golfers haven’t recognized how important grips are until Ledford and his team expanded with cutting-edge ideas and began proselytizing on the marriage of hands and clubs.

“Starbucks reinvented how people think about the coffee shop,” Ledford says. “It was fun. There was music. It became a cool experience. And I felt like we really needed to reinvent how people think about grips. The world outside says, ‘Grips are handles for clubs.’ But if you work at Golf Pride, what you believe is that grips are equipment for your hands first and foremost.”

Roughly 80 percent of the company’s business comes from individual golfers, with the remainder coming from original equipment manufacturers that install Golf Pride grips on the clubs they make and sell. Eighty percent of PGA Tour players use Golf Pride grips.

The early Golf Pride operation was best known for its 1956 launch of the Victory Grip, a rubber-and-cork design featuring an innovative hand-alignment arrow. That evolved into the Tour Velvet Grip in the 1990s and featured a non-slip, computer-designed surface pattern that quickly became a Tour staple. The Tour Velvet Cord was next and wove cotton fibers into the rubber to wick away moisture and sweat.

Today the company has any number of initiatives on display in its Pinehurst home.

Align Technology uses ridges on the underside of the grip to help lock your hand placement for consistency.

The MCC Grip is a hybrid that fuses moisture-wicking brushed cotton cord in the upper hand area for all-weather traction with high-performance rubber in the lower area for feel and responsiveness.

Putter grips are a major focus. One grip is dubbed the Zero Taper and offers a parallel-style shape with the same feel for both hands. There is also a Reverse Taper that is thicker on the bottom, the concept being that the thicker lower area prevents the bottom hand from squeezing too tightly and leading to a wrist breakdown at impact.

It all adds up to a culture at Golf Pride that salutes its past while racing forward with energy and innovation. Ledford has been gratified by visitors to the Global Innovation Center who say the company feels like a start-up — not a 77-year-old.

“We just wanted it to be the single best place in the world to get your clubs regripped,” he says. “Grips matter. The industry is built around clubheads and shafts and balls. But the grip is our only physical connection to all this other gear. It’s the most overlooked and unappreciated equipment category in golf. We have a little bit of a chip on our shoulder.

“Golfers are making choices about what grips they want much like running shoes for your feet, picking the correct grip for your hands.”

Lee Pace is a freelance golf writer who has written about Sandhills area golf for four decades and is the author of club histories about Pinehurst Resort & Country Club, Mid Pines, Pine Needles and Forest Creek.

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