PostSportsPlus: Meet Bob Parsons, the billionaire dreamer whose latest mission is to make the world’s best golf club
An eccentric, bombastic, forward-thinking 71-year-old entrepreneur, Parsons is a squillionaire with every creature comfort imaginable. He owns his own golf resort. He founded GoDaddy.com. He spends hundreds of thousands each year on new golf equipment. He gives away more than $20 million annually to charity.
But Parsons is an envelope-pusher, and for this avid golfer, he saw firsthand a need that wasn’t being met. They told him about the need to limit development costs so they could hit specific price points to keep up with the competition. And that whatever time they had to develop new clubs was constrained by a strict release calendar.
Parsons founded PXG in part after being frustrated that the $200,000-$300,000 he was spending each year on golf equipment couldn’t buy him a set of clubs with which he was satisfied.Two-time major championship winner Zach Johnson, who grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, worked in the bag room as a teenager at a golf club where Parsons was a member.
“We were probably one of the poorest families in a poor neighborhood,’’ he recalled. “We had less than nothing. Mom and dad were both gamblers, and I love them to death. I wouldn’t trade ‘em for anybody. They were great parents. My mother taught me fractions so I could read the racing form. When I was in school, I was a terrible student [he said he flunked the fifth grade], but I nailed the fractions.
“I watched the Indy 500 that she led for 20 minutes, and we were thinking about having a good spokesperson,’’ Parsons recalled. “I would always ask people, ‘You ever hear of Danica Patrick?’ And they’d say, ‘Yeah.’ I was hunting in Alaska at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and there was a guy I met and I asked him, ‘You ever hear of Danica Patrick?’ He says, ‘Oh yeah, she’s a race car driver.
“When I first met him, I didn’t know who Bob Parsons was,’’ Nicolette said. “He was a fellow golfer who was a friend of a friend, and we went out and played nine holes of golf and I laughed until I cried with the stories he would tell. It was one of the most fun nine holes I’ve ever played. To hear Nicolette and Schweigert tell it, Parsons didn’t sell them solely on the opportunity to work with a seemingly unlimited budget, but to be inspired.
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