Clarke leaves Wilson

Reporting from Chicago

Monday, February 20, 2023

Tim Clarke is out as president of Wilson’s golf division. Clarke, who led Wilson’s return from the brink of irrelevancy to its traditional position in the sport as a respected equipment manufacturer, has left the Chicago-headquartered sports giant.

Clarke’s next stop is undetermined.

The only announcement Wilson made Monday was to note one of their putters ranked second in a poll.

Wilson, a leader in golf since the 1920s, was foundering when Clarke joined the sales department in the 1990s, the result of a succession of owners, notably Pepsi, with clumsy ideas on how to grow revenue. Most of those ideas failed to do that, also damaging a brand that was one of the big four in the persimmon-wood era, with MacGregor, Spalding and Acushnet-Titleist.

He took over as boss of the golf division late in 2006 and began to rebuild the brand, bringing back the Wilson Staff line of products, re-establishing alliances with club pros, and upgrading the quality. Wilson had been known for first-rate products before expanding into department store and off-course sporting-goods store sales with a lower-priced group of products that proved inferior to both their better products and the lower-cost lines of their competitors.

Clarke signed a handful of players to endorsement contracts, and one, Padraig Herrington, immediately paid off with a victory in the 2007 British Open, then repeated and added the PGA Championship in 2008.

The hard return to relevancy showed up in the bottom line. Wilson Golf became profitable again on a year-to-year basis. John Barba of the My Golf Spy website, which broke the news of Clarke’s departure on Monday, reported that at one point, when Wilson had been spiraling downhill, the golf division lost $15 million one year.

Barba reports Wilson global VP and research and development chief Bob Thurman will take over on an interim basis. Thurman has some 25 sports-equipment patents to his credit, including for golf ball dimple patterns.

Wilson isn’t back in the big four yet – that’s generally considered to be Titleist, TaylorMade, Callaway and Ping – but it’s closed the gap. Gary Woodland’s U.S. Open win in 2019 kept the brand’s streak of winning at least one major a decade since the 1920s alive. The sight of a Wilson bag on TV once again was as important.

This year, Clarke supervised the relaunch of Wilson’s Dynapower brand, created in 1956 and a top-seller in the business for years.

“As we were developing this new series of distance-focused products for 2023, we were prepared to re-enter the adjustable driver category with truly innovative solutions, as well as launch a powerful new set of irons. This family of products truly represented the start of something,” Clarke said at the time. “When we considered naming for these products, we thought it was time to bring back a name that resembled power, and something that was synonymous with groundbreaking.”

Now, someone else will have to carry the Wilson name forward.

– Tim Cronin