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Thirteen years in the golf industry and I never encountered James McCormick. Along the way, I did indeed meet crackpot inventors, gullible fools, hopeful dreamers, nasty bastards and outright charlatans among a lot of thoroughly decent and gifted people.
McCormick is in a league of his own, though…
Golf Equipment makes a lot of money, and training aids can be a gold mine. I challenge anybody, though, to find any group of competitors who research, chase, ogle, buy and believe in training aids for game improvement more than golfers do. And these products can cost as little as a few cents for tees made out of elephant dung up to around £20,000 to have a fully functional golf simulator in your own home.
But to make £60 million out of your crackpot golf gadget takes some chutzpah.
The ever-aspirant golfer would have risked under £13 ($20) to put The Gopher golf ball-finder in the golf bag, hopeful of shaving off a stroke or saving a Pro V-1 from the jungle, and if it turned out to be bunkum, then he’d be out of pocket to the tune of a kebab-for-two.
But McCormick changed the label and sold these for a reported £33,000 a pop…TO LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES… TO NATION STATES…TO SAVE LIVES. It made the scouser conman an estimated £60 million.
But there are serious questions that this episode raises. Unless intellectually deficient, the golfer presented with a miracle cure for anything game or course management related will apply a single judgement criterion: the sliding scale of risk assessment.
Golf gadget risk is graduated by price band – sub £20, sub £50, sub £75 and so forth. The richer the price tag, commensurately more nano-seconds are spent in consideration before buying it. And direct comparisons can be made with proven proshop purchases, such as a Kit Kat/ bottled water combo <£1.50, a sleeve of 3 balls <£5.00, cleat replacement kit <£20, a new putter <£100 etc. The risk of totally wasting your money rises commensurately with the outlay.
Now, the inventor of the Gopher Anti-terrorist Supa-Dupa Kryptonite is an undoubted shyster, but it appears that the people responsible for buying the gadgets on behalf of their governments clearly lack the judgement and sophisticated judgement of a weekend golfer in stupid trousers.
Countless dozens of lives already lost, and more in the balance as some governments continue to use these devices, because men in positions of responsibility applied the same powers of judgement and due diligence as they would in choosing between chocolate bars for sustenance over 18 holes of golf. Say what you like about North Korea – it wouldn't happen there.
These men belong in the dock alongside McCormick, because there is blood on the hands of all of them.