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Charles Schwab Presents
Adam: Golfers don't need more marketing. They just need more truth.
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The Challengers.
A series about people who
Question. Engage. Succeed.
Adam Beach
Adam: My name's Adam Beach, and I am the owner of MyGolfSpy. My very first article I ever wrote, late '90s, was The Man With 500 Swings, and it was based off of my dad. Every day I would go play golf with him, he would have some new thing from the Golf Digest magazine that he swore was going to fix his game, or some new piece of equipment or some training aid or some gadget, and everybody on the golf course the next weekend, you would find doing the same thing. You go, "Why are you doing that?" I thought if the claim from driver companies, if this year it's longer, this year it's straighter, this year it's better, then why aren't golfers hitting 500-yard drives?
Adam: So I went back and bought magazines for 50 years. I went back and I cut out every ad that every company had ever put out, and they all said the same thing. But I thought, "How is it possible that a billion-dollar corporation can tell you a club is longer and not actually test and prove that the club was longer? How can a training aid be pitched to a golfer that it's going to lower your score, when no one has ever tested any of this stuff?" I looked at my wife at the time and I said, "I'm going to start the Consumer Reports of golf," and we started MyGolfSpy in 2008.
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What if we made golf architecture approachable?
Adam: Before we started testing golf balls, even I included would buy a dozen balls and go, "Yeah, buy a dozen balls. I guarantee you all those 12 are the exact same." "We're going to cut open some golf balls. Let's see what's inside." And so we went and bought PVC cutters from Home Depot and start cutting open golf balls, and we spent two and a half years building a data database.
Adam: What we found was something completely eye-opening and disturbing. We were finding ground-up tire material inside of golf balls. We were finding three to five different balls on the inside of the cover that says they're the same ball. The cores were off center, and the uniformity between layers were awful. And then we tested on a robot, and we saw these balls flying 40 yards offline, like going straight and then just curving 40 yards, left, right, short, long. We went, "That's not the golfer, that's the golf ball." They knew that they were creating these balls. I mean, it was almost every ball company except Titleist.
Adam: So then we said, "All right, how do we fix this?" Data became a thing that was the validator for me. We created a ball app and we started publishing the results of it, and it's some real nerd stuff, but what it did was it forced the manufacturers to start paying more attention, because they knew, "Today could be the day that they cut open our ball and exposed us for what we were doing." And I would say the average quality control score back then was probably about a 50. Now we're probably in the 75 to 80 range, out of 100, so golf balls have definitely gotten better because of MyGolfSpy for every single golfer in the world.
Adam: And over the years, there's so many myths that have been broken in this facility that have changed the way golfers buy things, do things. The line versus no line. Yes, it makes you better on shorter putts, but guess what? The farther you get away from the hole, it makes you worse. And then there's the wet wedge test, right? There's water involved in almost every shot you hit, in regards to the dew on the grass or the wetness of all in the ball, and no one had actually ever tested does that actually impact your performance.
Adam: And what we found, you would lose about 70% of the spin off of a brand-new wedge by just introducing a small bit of water. So now, almost every manufacturer has introduced some type of hydrophobicity into their wedge designs. It's one of those small things that we've tested inside this facility that has then expanded out into golfer's bags around the world.
Corey Fisk [off-screen]: When you're trying to pick what's the best equipment to play your very best, well, there's a lot of white noise out there, and I think MyGolfSpy has made consumers think.
Corey Fisk: My name's Corey Fisk. I am a director of sales for FootJoy for the Western United States. I've been in the golf business for 27 years. Adam is the single most motivated human being I've ever met. There's zero chance you're going to ever tell Adam how to think. He is not influenced by outside forces. He wants the truth and the facts to rule the day. He really doesn't care what the brass at any given company has to say. It's more about working hard to do the best for the consumer at all times.
Adam Beach: I think if you put the money first, you're never going to achieve the objective, if the objective is putting the golfer first. But what I knew was that the manufacturers were going to try to influence us as we had more influence. So if I took ad dollars from them in the beginning, I knew they would email and say, "Don't publish this, don't say that," but we want to make the cream of the crop rise to the top and all the other fluff just go away, right, and our writers and videographers and podcasters and social media people need to tell these stories to all these different people. That takes time and money.
Adam Beach: So how do we do that? The solution I came up with is, yes, we are going to accept advertising from anyone, but your product has to be highly-performing and cross a threshold that we draw. It has to work for golfers, or else we won't take advertising from you, when you make the golfer first and you put the golf companies back at the end of the line.
Adam Beach: I'm on a mission, man. I wanted to give the power back to the golfer and keep checks and balances on the industry that didn't have any checks and balances, but that takes trust. If I tell you a golf thingamajig works great, and you end up buying it and it works like I told you, you're going to now trust me more today than you did yesterday, and that circle of trust just has to keep going.
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Ask questions. Be engaged.
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Own your tomorrow®
Adam Beach: When you really think about it in simple terms, does this equipment make you better, keep you the same, or make you worse? Let's find out.
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©2026 Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. All rights reserved. Member SIPC. (0326-3R01)
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Thanks to
Corey Fisk
MyGolfSpy
Papago Golf Club
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