Acushnet Company – Titleist
The History of the #1 Ball in Golf
The Digital Archive Group
Phil “Skipper” Young founded the Acushnet Process Company in 1910, focusing on manufacturing various rubber-based products including water bottles and bathing caps. The Titleist success story began one Sunday in 1932, when Phil, a dedicated amateur golfer, missed a well-stroked putt in a match with his friend, who was head of the x-ray department at a local hospital. Convinced that the ball itself was at fault, Young and his opponent went to the hospital, x-rayed the golf ball in question, and found that its core was, in fact, off-center.
It took Young and fellow MIT graduate Fred Bommer three painstaking years to perfect the first Titleist golf ball. Applying a lesson well learned, Young implemented a process check that is still in practice today: every Titleist golf ball is x-rayed.
This story is just one of many valuable pieces of the 90-year-old history that resided in the Titleist physical archive at the company headquarters in Fairhaven, MA. The Titleist archives, estimated at over 1,000 linear feet, contain valuable information on the company’s founding, evolution, and growth, its brands and services, its contributions to the golf industry, and its stories and experiences that have made Titleist what it is today – The #1 Ball in Golf.
TDAG archivists and image technicians digitized
- 20,000 pages of catalogs and advertising materials
- 35,000 photographs, slides, and negatives
- 2,500 media assets
- 1,400 lab books – 200,000 laboratory research journal pages
Post-digitization, all materials were rehoused into labeled archival storage boxes.
TDAG assisted in the creation of a keyword-searchable Acushnet/Titleist DAM (digital asset management) platform.
