Each Thursday we do a little blast from the past and have some fun with it. In this installment, we thought we would showcase the latest and the greatest from Tommy Armour Golf from over 20 years ago.
The Year of 1988
Entertainment
Best Picture – Rain Man
Best Song – Don’t Worry, Be Happy – Bobby McFerrin
Best TV Show – The Cosby Show
Sports
NBA Finals Champion – Los Angeles Lakers
Heisman Trophy – Barry Sanders
Super Bowl Winner – Washington Red Skins
World Series – Los Angeles Dodgers
The Masters – Sandy Lyle
U.S. Open – Curtis Strange
British Open – Seve Ballesteros
PGA Championship – Jeff Sluman
Money Leader – Curtis Strange $1,147,644
THP spent some time with the legendary club maker that created the Tommy Armour 845s irons to find out what went into the process.
THP: How did it all start?
JH: PGA Golf changed its name to Tommy Armour and I accepted a job with them.
THP: How did a marketing person at Maxfli go to club maker at Tommy Armour?
JH: Well, it was really a collective thing back then. The PGA was going through some major changes and they already owned the Tommy Armour name for licensing. They really needed a set of irons to put them on the map and I was the guy that came up with them?
THP: It was your first club design?
JH: It actually was the first design I ever came up with. Every player knows that they want to design their own clubs. I was no different. So I went to work and what came to be was the Tommy Armour 845s.
THP: So your first iron ever ends up being one of the legendary irons of recent history.
JH: Yes. From there I really never looked back. The way I always looked at it was there were 8 transition points on an iron. Each one can be slightly different from iron to iron but too much change results in a bad club.
845s Launch
The Tommy Armour 845s irons were introduced to the sales force at a meeting at the American Resort in Wisconsin in August of 1987. It came with a custom fitting system. “The original forecast was 7,500 sets and I think we shipped over 30,000 in 1988”, said John Hoeflich.
The Clubs
What are your thoughts of this amazing “new” technology?
Did you play them?
These images are scanned pages of the original catalog for the Tommy Armour 845s irons. The creator of these irons was kind enough to send over one of the original catalogs for us to scan these images.
