Clubmaker Jesse Ortiz has re-emerged with a hot new product, but he knows too well the price of success can be steep

On the upswing: Ortiz with his new creations, metal woods for the Bobby Jones brand. Photo: Thomas Broening

COMEBACK STORIES ARE ALWAYS INSPIRING, BUT WHEN the saga involves the rupture of a close father-son relationship, the bar is raised a bit higher — now it is more than a mere turnaround in a person’s material fortune. So it is with Jesse Ortiz, who with his father, Lou, built Orlimar into a onetime darling of the equipment industry and is lending his craftsmanship to a rising new brand of metal woods, Bobby Jones.

Lou Ortiz was born in Spain, in 1925. As a Basque and the son of a politically active father on the “wrong” side when General Francisco Franco came to power, Lou and his brother were spirited out of Spain in their early 20s. Lou wound up in San Francisco, where he married Delores Yrigoyen, American-born but also of Basque heritage. They had two children, Carmen and Jesse. Lou had learned the tool-and-die trade in Spain and worked for various industrial firms around San Francisco until he befriended Pedro Liendo, who made golf clubs for a local company, Fernquist and Johnson. Lou became interested in making clubs. It appealed to his mechanical instincts and training. He was especially drawn to the woods, which also pleased his aesthetic sense. In 1960 he went into business as a club manufacturer, starting in a leaky-roofed wooden building near downtown San Francisco that had been a stable. He named the company Orlimar — an acronym from Ortiz and his first two partners, Liendo and Emilio Martinez.

Orlimar was housed in this Oakland office from 1965-1984 but began in an old stable Courtesy of Jesse Ortiz

In only three or four years Orlimar’s persimmon woods began attracting attention. Whereas most clubmakers subdued or painted over the grain of their woods, Ortiz highlighted it with a technique he gleaned from local watercolor artists. The grain became a signal characteristic of his woods, not merely for the aesthetics but as an indication of the wood’s quality. Johnny Miller always wanted his with the closest-knit grain, which bespoke greater density and strength. In all, Ortiz’ woods had a clean, classic shape, gave excellent performance and became a boutique line known mainly by golf aficionados in northern California.

The buzz came entirely by word of mouth, and the mouths were very influential. Locals such as Miller, Tony Lema and Ken Venturi plugged the clubs and got them into the hands of tour pros playing every winter in the Lucky International Open at San Francisco’s Harding Park GC. Chi Chi Rodriguez, who won the Lucky in 1964, was a well-known pro who used — and touted — his fellow Latino’s woods.

Orlimar was a mom-and-pop shop. Lou made the clubs, Delores handled the books and phone, Jesse and Carmen helped out after school. “At 16 I was pouring inserts, grinding irons, doing the tough grunt work,” Jesse Ortiz recalls. The family wasn’t getting rich, but a living was being made. Then, modern technology reared its ugly head, so to speak, when Gary Adams founded the TaylorMade Company based on his development of pro-worthy metal “woods.” For most of the golf industry it seemed as though traditional woods instantly became dinosaurs, but Lou Ortiz, decrying craftsmanship had gone out of his business, continued to hew and sell his Diamond woods until 1996, when he finally gave in to market pressure.

By the time metals arrived in 1979, Jesse had earned a degree in business administration from the University of San Francisco and was effectively a partner in Orlimar. In 1995 two friends in the golf business around the Bay Area became investing partners in Orlimar and urged Jesse to produce a metal wood that “said” Orlimar, incorporating the classic shape of the Diamond wood and its high-mark playability. Orlimar had introduced a small-head metal in the late 1980s, but it didn’t catch on. But in 1995 Jesse learned of maraging, a method of treating steel that altered its original nature and made it so hard and strong that a clubface only 0.8 millimeters thick could withstand the heaviest pounding. The industry standard at the time was 4 millimeters.

Less weight up front allowed more to be concentrated elsewhere in the clubhead. Perimeter weighting was the rage at the time, but Lou and Jesse felt more weight on the bottom of the head would be more effective for hitting the ball off the ground. That was a central feature of Orlimar’s TriMetal 3-wood (maraged face, stainless-steel body, copper tungsten on the sole). It was enhanced by the same relatively shallow clubface on Orlimar’s Diamond wood and its first metal, which happened to be the same depth as the Adams’ TightLies fairway metal that had just made a big impact. Not long after its debut the TriMetal became Orlimar’s signature club. The first model, offered in 1998, did very well. But when Jesse took the advice of Tom Watson, who was playing the club before signing with Adams, to make the face a little deeper (about 1/8-inch), Orlimar’s TriMetal+ soared in sales like the shots it produced. In 1997 Orlimar did a little more than $1 million with its first metals (it had always produced a line of irons and putters but never did significant business.) In 1998 the company did $70 million. In 1999 the TriMetal+ raised gross sales to $100.1 million. Ironically, that spectacular growth — especially its speed — bore the seeds of the company’s decline, and the disconnection of father and son.

“We had capitalized the company at $2 million,” Jesse says, “but it wasn’t enough to sustain the growth, because every dollar we earned we put back in the company for materials, publicity and a bigger labor force. To keep up we borrowed from the banks based on our receivables, which were looking very good — on paper. However, in our industry, receivables are historically very poor. Golf professionals and retailers are slow payers.

“On top of that, a major retailer, Nevada Bob’s, went bankrupt, a sign that the golf bubble was beginning to deflate. We had to pay down $4 million in bad debt,” Jesse continues. “At the same time, we’re paying cash up front for an infomercial and expensive television air time, and [paying] our suppliers with letters of credit. We ran into a cash-flow problem.

“I took pride in and enjoyed being an artist and a craftsman,” says Jesse. “Getting involved in things like pricing and dealing with field reps is something else. I could do it, but when there is so much money in it, you really need sharp people around you.”

Orlimar was still a mom-and-pop shop, but doing Sears Roebuck business. And so, “we made our share of mistakes,” Ortiz admits. There was an unsuccessful stab at the ball business, and there were issues a small company can encounter after it takes a 10-percent market share and gets the big guys looking for ways to reduce the challenge. Callaway brought two suits against Orlimar, one claiming patent infringement on its irons, another for false advertising. TaylorMade brought a suit against Orlimar’s packaging of its golf ball. The suits took precious time and attention from Jesse’s pursuit of business, not to mention important money in legal fees.

Riding high: Jesse (left) with his father, Lou, during Orlimar’s heyday in the 1990′s. Courtesy of Jesse Ortiz

It became necessary that Orlimar go public, but market forces were now at work. When Adams Golf went public in July 1998, it opened at $16.00 a share and quickly plunged to $4.50 within three months. That, and the fact that a little company like Orlimar could take a sizable bite out of the business from giants such as Callaway and TaylorMade, led Wall Street to question just how solid or reliable the golf club manufacturing business was. Not very, it decided, and Ortiz could not get anyone to take his company public.

Desperate for operating capital, Jesse found a group of wealthy retired businessmen who loved golf, liked Jesse and Lou, and came in as partners with a $10 million overall investment. Perhaps more significantly, the new partners, all of whom had run major corporations, brought the corporate mindset to the table. They wanted a change in the Orlimar image from the homey, arts-and-crafts family feeling to a chrome-and-computer look. Also, pointing out that major American clubmakers were getting their metal heads made in California, they thought Orlimar should too. “We were getting good quality for a better price in China but had to use American suppliers,” Jesse says. “I don’t know if it was just patriotism or another image thing they were thinking of.”

One more image “thing” required Orlimar to move to Carlsbad, Calif., the capital of golf equipment manufacturing where most of the competition was headquartered. That was the final straw for Lou Ortiz, who had been increasingly unhappy with the way things were going.

Lou Ortiz was a big man — tall, strong of body as well as mind, a gruffly opinionated but lively spirit among his friends and business associates. His pride in Orlimar was earned: He had made something out of nothing. The trouble was, he retained his personal sense of proportion while the company mushroomed. In his day, five or six people worked at the benches, and, symbolically if not in fact, he touched every club that went out the door. All of a sudden, in 50,000 square feet of plant space, 5,000 clubs a day were being turned out by 160 people. “He was overwhelmed by the size of it all,” says his wife, Delores. “And to make it worse, if he saw someone doing something wrong, he had to go to a supervisor to get his word in.” With the move to Carlsbad, even that was not possible. His baby had been ripped from him.

Miller was one of the California tour pros who talked up Orlimar’s well-built wooden designs Golf Digest Resource Center

Lou blamed Jesse for most of what happened to the business. It was, in part, a classic case of an Old World patriarchal attitude versus a New World one — a son, articulate with no discernible accent, a college degree and the American drive to get bigger. It was compounded by the new majority owners wanting Jesse’s modern, young-man image to represent Orlimar. It was Jesse who courted tour pros, club pros, off-course retailers and suppliers — and who dominated the infomercial. It seemed he was the entire brain behind the business.

“That’s how my dad saw it,” says Jesse. “I’d tell him that I couldn’t have done anything without him, that he trained me to look for innovations in everything about clubmaking, everything. He’d just shrug me off, as if he didn’t believe me.” And then Lou simply stopped talking to his son. The move to Carlsbad was disastrous. Just getting there was expensive. The rent was considerably higher. Having to buy the heads in California raised the manufacturing costs. As a result, Orlimar couldn’t give its retailers the excellent margins that helped grow the company in the first place. The clubs were still as good as ever, but, as Jesse describes it, “We had built a Ferrari and didn’t have the price of a gallon of gas to get it out of the garage.”

Jesse, who himself commuted to Carlsbad, felt adrift. Even he wasn’t in charge anymore. He finally called it quits in 2003. Not long after, Orlimar was sold to King Par, a mass merchandiser near Flint, Mich. End of that story.

“I wasn’t totally broke when I left,” Jesse recalls, “but I didn’t take anything out of Orlimar.” He did manage to skirt the usual non-compete clause. Immediately free to do his thing, and with three children to raise — a 21-year-old in college, an 18-year-old getting ready for it and a 14-year-old — Jesse began developing a club to market under his name. Not long into that enterprise, in 2003, Walter Rosenthal showed up with an intriguing proposal — creating clubs for the Bobby Jones brand name.

Rosenthal, 64, grew up in Cincinnati but also had roots in southern California. He had an MBA from the University of California at San Diego, then made a successful career with Champion International and the DeCartier conglomerate specializing in “discerning the intrinsic value of business ventures.” When he came down with cancer, he retired, moved to Malibu, recovered and, having been a good athlete in his salad days, decided to get into a business having to do with sports. Rosenthal heard through the grapevine that Callaway no longer owned the rights to the Bobby Jones brand name. Rosenthal also learned that the great champion’s grandson, Bob IV, and the Hartmarx Company that produced Bobby Jones clothing, were interested in adding clubs to its line. Rosenthal began cultivating that idea. In his due diligence, whenever he asked around for someone to design the Jones clubs, Jesse Oritz’ name kept coming up.

The two met, hit it off from the get-go and became partners. Hartmarx/Jones wanted a club that reflected the same look and quality of its upscale, expensive clothing. With Ortiz, Rosenthal had his man. He also felt the club needed a designer’s name attached, as in Vokey wedges and Scotty Cameron putters. Jones IV had little interest in anyone sharing a billboard with his illustrious grandfather, but Hartmarx chairman Elbert Hand persuaded him it was a good marketing tool. When in early 2004 Jones IV saw the first club Jesse produced, a driver, he was won over.

Rosenthal (right) sold Ortiz on coming to work for Bobby Jones Courtesy of Jesse Ortiz

Rosenthal does not want to reveal precise figures, but in the year or so that the Bobby Jones Players Series by Jesse Ortiz drivers, fairway metals and hybrids have been on the market, more than $1 million worth of clubs — which recently made Golf Digest’s 2006 equipment Hot List — have been sold. Ken Venturi and his son, Matt, have invested in the enterprise, known as The Bobby Jones Golf Company LLC, which has a 50-year licensing agreement with the Jones’ heirs that includes global rights to the brand inclusive of all golf equipment. Rosenthal has recently licensed a group in the United Kingdom to create a Bobby Jones Europe enterprise. And he is planning to run 100 commercials on The Golf Channel in the next six months. Some players, mainly on the Champions Tour, including John Jacobs, Jay Sigel and Jim Albus, have been using the driver and 3-wood (although not under contract). Joe Durant played the 3-wood for a time on the PGA Tour, and Todd Fischer put one in his bag at one point in 2005.

Jesse Ortiz, of course, now has a secure future. Financially he may not get all the way to the place Orlimar reached in that fantastic 1998-99 spurt, but he will be busy doing what he is best at doing. Sadly, he will never know for sure how his father feels about his comeback. Lou Ortiz, 80, is suffering from Alzheimer’s, the first symptoms of which appeared seven years ago. There was a rapprochement developing between Lou and Jesse, they began to talk and Lou visited Jesse in Carlsbad a couple of times. But as the dementia got worse, it produced an awful irony. As Jesse notes, “What happens with this disease is, you forget things that happened yesterday but remember things from five and six years ago. For my dad, those were the bad times.”

Other private family problems also developed during those bad times, and as a result Jesse has not talked to his father for more than a year. Lou is very ill and under 24-hour special care in the home where he raised his family. Jesse would like to think his dad is happy for him. He hopes that somehow it has reached him that his boy is doing, as always, pretty much what the father originated many years ago in that porous one-time horse barn on Harrison Street in San Francisco.