drivermaker said:
How much influence does a pro have on your future cue buying choice? In golf, there's tremendous influence and some of the bigger name pro's are paid 8-10 million dollars A YEAR to play a specific brand name club in order to affect buying habits.
Hey, Driverdude, hope everything's good by you.
Ignoring the fact that golf has a higher profile than pool for a moment, there are several reasons for this. Amont the most overlooked reasons is that golf club technology is a fast evolving science, and the fact that the pros all seem to hit it further than they used to seems to, very visibly, corroborate that the equipment in golf is improving continually and significantly. Buying a new set of clubs every two years is typical of even typical weekend players at all skill levels. As a good set of clubs costs about $1,000 these days, all these golfers spend $500 a year on equipment (and probably as much on golf balls). Nobody in their right mind believes that cuestick technology is a rapidly evolving science in which the equipment being made today is clearly superior to that of yesterday, and that the equipment made two years from now will be indisputably better than that of today.
Perhaps Predator was the last to have some success convincing players that their shafts represented an important advance in the science of cuemaking, but I think that was a big, though obviously well-marketed, hoax, and I am not of the opinion that the advent of the Predator shaft has contributed anything of importance to the evolution of pool equipment.
On the forum, we like to reminisce about how the cuemakers of yesteryear, such as George Balabushka and Gus Szamboti, were the best ever, and yes, guys like George and Gus deserve their legendary status. Still, tell me about a golf club maker of the past held in similar regard. You can't because the club makers of yesteryear didn't make equipment as good as that of today.
... and that's why, when I visit my dear old dad, I love to hit a few balls with his Palmer cue which he bought in the mid 1960's, but feel no particular urge to hit the links with the Spalding golf clubs he used back then.
