Adam Barr: President, Miura Golf

Adam Barr is one smart cookie.  He’s a University of Pennsylvania graduate; received his law degree from Duquesne University School of Law; was a business reporter and editor for Golfweek and Golf Channel; and hosted the latter’s “What’s In The Bag?” which enjoyed a six-year run. While in Japan doing a story for “WITB?” Adam discovered Miura Golf, where irons are hand-forged in the tradition of precision-crafted Samurai swords. A friendship began between Adam and the Miura family, culminating in the November, 2010 appointment of Barr-san as President of Miura Golf.

Golf Conversations: Ok, Super Bowl’s coming up next week.  I know you’re a Steelers guy, I’m a Green Bay Packer fan; Instant Replay was my favorite book when I was a kid.  Who’s going to win?

Adam Barr: I’m gonna give you the game plan right now.

GC: Go ahead.

AB: Aaron Rodgers to Donald Driver all day long.  Our secondary is … each of those guys is two different guys and I need to see which ones show up on February 6^th.

(laughter)

If the bad shows up: Aaron Rodgers to Donald Driver all day long.  About 11 yards, each pass play.  It’ll be a nice day for you.

(laughter)

GC: I can’t remember where I heard this Arnold Palmer story which I’m sure you’ve heard. Ben Roethlisberger crashed some private golf club in Pennsylvania. Maybe it was Laurel Valley. He acted like a real jerk, was rude to the staff. Mr. Palmer was there when it happened and read him the riot act.

AB: Oh, yeah.  Gosh, unfortunately, that story is…

GC: It’s true?

AB: I’ve heard it from too many sources for it not to be true.  Young man had a lot to learn; I hope he’s learned by now.  Everything from motorcycles to being respectful to women.

GC: Ok, now about Miura Golf … when I saw the Miura web site, I was really fascinated with the story behind it.  My first reaction? I thought of the movie “Kill Bill” and the Hattori Hanzo sword.

(laughter)

Tell me how you met Mr. Miura.

[NOTE: The beauty and precision of the Hattori Hanzo sword is on display in a clip at the end of this interview.  CAUTION: It contains adult content not suitable for junior golfers or plumb bobbers.]

AB: It was on one of my Golf Channel trips.  In 2003, a Golf Channel crew for What’s In The Bag? went to China and Japan to get as much useful footage out of one Asia trip as possible.  It was a 19-day trip.  One of the important stops was Miura because of what they did with forging.  They were kind of iconoclastic without being arrogant about it: “We forge our golf clubs this way.  We spin our hosels on for a reason.”

Mr. Miura and his sons – who he taught – finish the clubs themselves and do the fine grinding.  It was a hand-crafted, family story that was irresistible.  And I hit it off with the family: Mr. Miura and his two sons, Shinei and Yoshitaka, even Mrs. Miura.

The last day of shooting when we left … we’re on the train station platform after they dropped us off.  Just before the train comes, Mrs. Miura comes running up the platform.  She had little gifts for all of us and didn’t want us to leave without giving us these gifts.  She was so kind to us.

The whole family was like that.  Very welcoming to people they had never met from 9,000 miles away.  And that stuck with me.  Also, the depth of attention and quality in the product was something that … I’m not going to say you don’t see that anywhere else in the industry … but their insistence on high quality, low production capacity, unique attention to the product, plus the hand-crafted element, it was absolutely irresistible.

GC: Did you have any proficiency in Japanese?

AB: No.  Especially not in 2003.  Since coming on with the company as part of the team, I started studying it through Rosetta Stone.  For a non-immersion program – I still live in the U.S. – it’s pretty darned effective.  But it’s going to take a long time; it’s much more complicated than the Romance languages I was brought up on.

It makes its own sort of sense once you start thinking in it like any other language.  On his last trip to the U.S., Miura-san asked me, “How’s it going with the Japanese?”  I could see him holding back a smirk and I sheepishly said, “???????” which means, “The fish is swimming” and he laughed and laughed and laughed!

(laughter)

So I said to the interpreter: “As you can see, this is not going to help us too much with golf business talk.”  But interestingly, in industrial-speak, a lot of Japanese terms are borrowed from English.

So if I want to talk to Miura-san about a particular shaft, I’ll say, “Stiffy-frex shaft-o” and that’s in a tone he picks up on and he’ll understand what I’m talking about. So we’re beginning to communicate better.  And since he and I are going to be traveling around a lot together, around the world as part of our campaign to get more people to know about him, I want to be able to communicate at least basically.  We’ll always have an interpreter but I like languages, I like him, I want to learn Japanese.

GC: Do his sons speak English?

AB: Not very much.

GC: Adam, you’re now President of Miura Golf.  How did that come about?

AB: Doug Buchanan is a corporate lawyer in Vancouver who is an expert in what they call “3P”: Public-Private Partnerships.  This is how most major public works projects around the world get done.  Private companies and a municipality will get together and say, “We need a subway, let’s start pooling our resources.”

In addition to doing this, he was a University of British Columbia hockey star, an Olympic hockey star.  And he played professionally in Japan.  Hockey became big in Japan after the Sapporo Olympics.

He met the Miuras and wanted to champion their business in the West.  So in addition to being one of the top dozen-or-so corporate lawyers in Canada, Doug is the CEO of Miura. He handles it with great skill.

He called me in the middle of 2010 when I was running my own website business – chasing down invoices and traveling to tour events and enjoying the heck out of it.  He said, “I know you’re enjoying what you’re doing, but we need help moving to the next level; can you give us a list of people you would recommend and make sure your name is on it.”

I said, “Yeah, I have a list right here.”  And I wrote down my name.

(laughter)

My respect for Miura being what it was, I just knew right away that this was not the sort of chance that comes along very often.  So I visited with Doug and his team in Toronto.  I was going there to cover the Canadian Open.  He said, “Come by when you fly in, be there at five o’clock, we’ll order in dinner, we’ll talk for a couple of hours.”

Started talking at five, ordered in Chinese food, talked about golf clubs, marketing, the industry, what we liked, what we didn’t like.  I turned around and it was 12:30.  So I thought, “Well maybe I found the right group of guys.”

GC: Time flew when you were having fun.

AB: And that was the beginning of an association.  We kind of talked it over all summer while I continued to pursue my website business.  Then in the Fall, we finally decided, “Ok, it’s time; come to Vancouver, sign the contract.”  And Mr. Miura and I went on a tour of golf shops in Vancouver and San Francisco to see how it would go … and it went very well.

That’s pretty much how it came about.  It came to me.  And that’s my great, good fortune.

GC: Not that it ever happened to me, but isn’t that how many job offers materialize?

AB: Yes.

GC: When you’re not looking for something, the door knocks …

AB: You have to have the courage to take it.

GC: Yes, you do.  And you did.  But this is a different thing for you, isn’t it, Mr. President?  And by the way, I want to see your birth certificate.

(laughter)

AB: It’s very different.  Actually, that deserves a little amplification.  I think “President” means something different in every company in which it’s used.  In bigger companies, the president is the one responsible for making sure every single day-to-day operation runs smoothly, from an executive point-of-view.

At Miura, certainly I’ll have some responsibilities like that, but not nearly the way you would find at a very large company.  I was brought on mainly because of my story-telling ability as developed through my journalism career.  So I can get the word out about Miura.  We’re confident that when more people know about Miura-san and his sons and what they can do, they’ll want to try the clubs.  And they’ll want to buy them and play them and become better golfers and enjoy their games more.

So it’s an enormous communications job and I was happy to take it.  I’m honored to have the title of “President,” but I have no illusions about it being an elevated, big, top-of-the-flow chart thing.  We’re kind of an “everybody puts their shoulder to the wheel” company.  35 or so people in Japan, 2 in Vancouver, me in Orlando, and now our new VP of North American distribution in Charlotte, NC.

GC: My hometown.

AB: There you go.

GC: If you need me to do some undercover work…

(laughter)

…Make sure this guy’s putting in the time … he’s not out to lunch 8 hours a day…

(laughter)

AB: It’s Charlie Gerber.  I have no illusions about Charlie.  I don’t have to watch him at all.

(laughter)

GC: Ok, but the offer stands!

AB: I hope you don’t mind the long answers.

GC: No, I want long answers.  My website is the “Anti-Twitter.”

AB: Yes, thank you.

GC: Our editorial platform – if I may be so pompous to call it that — is “talk ‘till the cows come home.”

AB: Having come from the deadline world, I always ask.  Even though you said we’re going long-form, if I’m rambling you can tell me.

GC: No, rambling is good.  But I draw the line at drooling.

(laughter)

Now tell me about the Miura irons. Obviously, you’ve played them.

AB: Yes. Which is an interesting experience, having been a cast player for many years.  And I’m a 23-index.  I’m fairly big and strong so I can hit the ball but I’m far from …  if the definition of “athleticism” is being able to make a complicated repeating motion, I’m not an athlete.  That’s all there is to it.  But I am an avid golfer.

Coming from the cast world and the perimeter-weighted world into the forged world, I did it with some trepidation.  But Miura-san has developed forgings with cavity backs that are maybe a little more subtle than the cavities you see in some other clubs, but they still get the job done.

He’s an expert at moving around weight, positioning the center of gravity where it should be.  Delivering the kind of forged satisfaction in your hands and forearms with a good hit that a lot of us remember from the Wilson and MacGregor heyday.

So when I took my new CB 501s – which is a cavity-back with a weight bar in the bottom – and hit them, I found that if I put an extra quarter of a second of preparation in my mind into striking the ball, it became habitual.  And playing this week, I probably struck more good iron shots than I’ve done in a long time.

So now my challenge is to tell people who think they’re somehow not worthy of forged clubs, that they really need to give it a try.  Although they might not want to hit the smallest blades, there is a forged product that they can find satisfying.  That has the flight for them, that delivers the feedback in their hands that they’ve been craving.

And not to denigrate cast clubs, but forged offers so many advantages and such satisfaction for a good hit, I think more people should try it.  And we have the technology to widen the population of people who can play forged.

GC: Those are still made by hand, the perimeter-weighted clubs?

AB: Yes.  The perimeter-weighted irons are forged the same way our tournament blades are – with a giant forging hammer that delivers …

GC: I’ve seen that video on YouTube.

AB: … three important strikes and then a number of subsidiary strikes to shape the club, put the grooves in, and then the finishing work begins after the hosel is spun on.

Miura-san doesn’t believe in forging the golf club from the toe all the way to the hosel.  His discoveries have shown that that stretches the metal out into too big a structure.  So you don’t have the tight, molecular structure … the tight grain that leads to a satisfying impact with the ball.

What he came up with was to forge the club from the toe to the heel and leave a space on to which the hosel can be attached.  Well, how do you do that?  Imagine a hosel-less head.  Take that product of the forging, the head with no hosel.  Take it back to the factory, take a separately-forged hosel piece, which is essentially a cylinder with a receptacle for the shaft … and with a machine that holds everything in place, spin that hosel at very high speeds against the place where it’s supposed to attach to the head.

The heat generated by the friction makes a weld.  The weld, of course, makes a scarf.  There’s a ring of waste material resulting from the weld around it … but now the hosel is firmly on there.

GC: That’s interesting.

AB: Yeah.  Then the machine removes the scarf and the finishers start polishing the club head and chroming it so that you would never know it was ever two pieces.  Plays like one piece, but the grain structure is so much tighter than you’d get in other forged irons.

GC: That attention to detail sounds exactly like what Ben Hogan would have done in the early years of his golf club company.

AB: Precisely!  I’d like to think that Mr. Hogan would have respected the way Mr. Miura does things.  By developing his own processes and by insisting on doing things not in an arrogant way but in a forthright way … doing things his way because he’s tried it so many times and he’s determined that this is the best way to forge metal and finish it.

GC: And when did Miura-san start working with metal forgings?

AB: He’s been involved in metal work in golf clubs for at least 40 years.  His private label, I believe, goes back to 1994.  He has done contract work for other manufacturers.  The back-channel talk in the golf industry is that this man has made clubs that have been used to win major championships.

It is true.  He has.  And you would recognize the major championship winners.  But we don’t talk about that publicly for a couple of reasons.  In almost every case, the major championship winner in question had an endorsement deal with another company … the company that came to Mr. Miura and said, “Would you please forge the irons for our player and stamp them with our name.”  It was a contract job; there was nothing wrong with that.

We don’t want to embarrass that company, we don’t want to embarrass the player, and we think the product speaks for itself.  We just consider it more fair-play not to take advantage of that.

But the point of the story is, if you walk up and down a PGA Tour range at a top event, stop a player and say, “Do you know who Katsuhiro Miura is?”  he’ll say, “Oh, yeah, I do.  He makes outstanding irons.”

GC: Oh, really?

AB: “I have a set, I gave a set to my Dad.”  He’s well known among aficionados of golf metal.

GC: Hattori Hanzo sword!

AB: Hai!

GC: Hai!

(laughter)

Adam, what’s going to happen when this becomes very successful – knock on wood – and all of a sudden the orders start pouring in?

AB: That’s a really good question.

GC: You’ve got this hand-crafted, slow process of creating clubs … there’s going to be pressure to get them out the door quickly…

AB: Yes.

GC: So what’s going to happen?

AB: That’s an excellent question.  We have some unused production capacity; we can produce more than we do now and we can sell more than we do now.  But it’s never going to be enormous because of the hand-crafted element that you just referred to.

So we’re going to grow in a way that is manageable.  For instance, we have 77 dealers in the U.S.  We’re going to open more and try to get into geographic areas that I think are under-served.  But we’re never going to do it in a way that betrays the dealers who got us where we are.

GC: Ok.

AB: Second – and just as important: we’re never going to expand our availability so fast that we outpace our ability to provide product and flawless customer service.  That’s really important.

We’re going to make sure that we grow noticeably but never in a way that would damage the image of the product.  So yeah, we’re going to be more available, but because of the nature of the product, it’s never going to be an explosion.

GC: So you’re never going to have your clubs made in some huge factory in China?

AB: No.  I think we lose our distinction once it gets out of the hands of the Miura men.  There’s no point in doing this — being on the high end in quality and charging the prices we charge — if we can’t offer a distinctive product.

GC: And approximately what does an iron set cost?

AB: It depends on the model you choose, but it can be anywhere from $1700 to $2400 for a set of 3 through pitch.  And, of course, that depends on your shaft options and grip options as well.  That said, the traditional set is changing.  A lot of people come to us nowadays for 5 through pitch, or 6 through pitch.  Or they’ll mix a set so that they might use, for example, one of our cavity-back models in the 3- and 4-irons, and then the tournament blades, 5 through pitch.  So that adjusts the cost a little bit.

We realize that it is a high-priced item and we don’t try to hide that or work around it.  We also know that once people get a chance to hit the product, the price objections tend to evaporate.

The prices are where they are because of the materials and the processes. We think it’s as good a product in golf club terms as a Rolex is or a Tag Heuer is in watches.  But they are high-priced for the same reason: their materials and processes are superior.

GC: Where does Miura-san get his steel from?

AB: He has sources in Osaka and that general area — which is the heart of the Japanese steel industry – that he’s known for years and that he trusts.  He wants to make sure that the carbon content in the steel is as low as possible while still making it strong.

Too much carbon … you get above a certain percentage … and the steel gets brittle.  You can’t bend it for loft and lie.  And, of course, it affects the feel.  If there’s no carbon, it’s too soft and you can’t propel anything with it.  So he’s very careful about the carbon content and making sure there are aren’t impurities that might make the steel difficult to work with.

Having been around steel as long as he has, he can almost pick up a billet and say, “This one didn’t pass quality control, let’s move on to that pile over there.”

GC: Let’s say I go to my local dealer and I want to order an iron set, how long does it take to get my eager hands on them?

AB: Depending on the heads, he might have them in stock.  So it would only take as long as it would take for him to trim the shafts and get them in.  One thing that’s interesting that our dealers tell us all the time … the receptacle, the hole in the hosel for the shaft is really small.  Sometimes that has to be drilled out.

That’s on purpose.  Miura-san wants to ensure a tight fit.  So if it takes a tiny bit more labor, the dealers sometimes don’t like it but they do it … and they get a tight fit because of it.  Another way to do that is to sand the shaft … it depends on the shaft.

GC: And if the dealer doesn’t have the heads in stock?

AB: He would order them from Japan through our North American office in Vancouver, so you’re talking about a matter of days or maybe weeks.  Custom options are available: if people want Miura-san himself to grind something special into the clubs or to stamp something or personalize them, that’s available, too.  Of course, at a premium cost and it takes a little bit longer.

Otherwise, it doesn’t take much longer than any other custom product does.  And we want to make sure that continues.

GC: You’re going to sell your clubs mostly through private dealers?

AB: Yes.  We’re going to continue with the dealer approach.  And as I said earlier, in a way that respects our current dealers.  And as we move the company to the next level, in retail everything is on the table in terms of ideas.

We’re trying an off-course retail experiment in Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver.  Golf Town has a magnificent store there.  Golf Town is a great off-course specialty chain in Canada.  They’re expanding in Boston and we’re going to try there.

If our product can be sold there with the attention from the sales associates that a fitter would give – and provide fitting advice – we’ll continue carefully getting into off-course retail.  But I don’t ever see it being an enormous channel because I don’t want the product to become commoditized.

GC: As you know, the industry trend now is to get fitted, put yourself on the launch monitor and get all the stats.  I went on the Mat system at TaylorMade’s “The Kingdom.”  My fitter told me to take up bowling.

(laughter)

But what if someone wants to demo a Miura iron?

AB: This is something we’re working on.  If you go to a dealer or one of the retail locations and say, “This is what I know about my game, these are my specs, can I borrow a 6-iron?”  We’ll arrange it.  I’m never going to send anybody away who wants to try the clubs without some way to try them.

The other thing is, if a whole set of irons doesn’t make economic sense for somebody, I would steer them toward our wedges or our putters.  Our putters deserve more attention: they’re forged, they’ve got beautiful faces…

GC: I didn’t know you had putters.

AB: Yeah, we have what I would call “Anser-type” heads — blade models, and a wonderful new mallet coming out in the spring.  The putter is a good foothold product for somebody who wants to see what we’re all about but maybe doesn’t want to take the economic plunge yet. The wedges are especially good for that.

So I’m always going to find a way for somebody to try a product and then come back to us and develop a relationship.  I don’t ever want to send somebody away empty handed.

GC: It’s a great story.  I wish you all the success in the world.  I appreciate the underdog in all things, especially in golf.  And congratulations on having found something that you’re clearly passionate about.

AB: Very.  And if I can borrow a page from one of my adopted countries … our approach is a great deal more Zen-Buddhist.  We might, ostensibly, be going up against those big golf equipment companies but I see us beating a path of our own.

GC: Oh, you absolutely are in your own little universe.  Yours isn’t a mass-market product.  I think my readers are going to enjoy reading about the Miura story.  There’s something very purist about it, off-beat, a little romantic.  Not unlike myself, I might add.

(laughter)

Adam, best of luck with Miura Golf.  Come visit me next time you’re in Charlotte.  You can stay with us; I’ll make you a pot roast.

AB: Great. We’ll play some golf.

*******************************

Postscript: ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

[Translation: Adam, the Pittsburgh Steelers will lose the Super Bowl. You'd better hope Mean Joe Greene comes out of retirement!]