Bill Morgan doesn’t like guesses. Though he can come across as a kind of Dr. House heading the technology team behind the Titleist golf ball empire, he dismisses the comparison to the incisive but
cantankerous medical diagnostician of TV fame, though he
admits to being a fan.
“House ended up making a lot of guesses,” Morgan says,
his eyes narrowing like laser beams behind round wire-
frame glasses that are not quite nerdy enough to be cool.
“I’ll play hunches, I like checking things out, but I am never
comfortable with guesses.”
At his core Morgan just wants to know why, and not in a
wondering, whimsical way, but in an iron-clad, “I’ll-show-you-
the-data-and-reverify-the-conclusions-and-answer-any-ques-
tions-before-you-ask-them” way. That relentless pursuit doesn’t
An inquiring mind wants to know
BILL MORGAN’S FORTE IS ASKING PROBING QUESTIONS, WHICH HELPS TITLEIST KEEP ITS BALL LINE GROWING
always win him the Miss Congeniality award (Mike Kramer, VP
of golf ball manufacturing and operations at Acushnet, says,
“You need his sense of urgency, but if everybody were like that,
there would be chaos.”) Still, Morgan just wants to know.
Under Morgan’s watch Titleist revamped its ball philosophy from wound to solid-core construction in what seemed
like the blink of an eye. Morgan knows, though, it was at least
a decade in the making. Atop that transformation was the
revolution that was the Pro V1, the solid-core, multilayer
urethane-covered ball that fundamentally changed both the
landscape of elite professional golf and produced a seismic
shift in the golf ball marketplace.
But Morgan, whose name is on 87 ball patents, downplays
his role as Titleist’s senior VP of research and development,
golf balls, emphasizing the team and suggesting he’s far from
