HAYDEN, Idaho - When Henry-Griffitts, Inc. was founded back in 1983, the idea of custom-fitting clubs to individual golfers was met with the sort of reaction typically reserved for truly innovative concepts.

"Everyone thought we were nuts," recalls current CEO Jim Hofmeister, who joined the company in 1985. "I was the first one out in the field and the amazing part was just how much resistance we got - from golf companies, from pros, from the golfing public - for attempting to do something that was so clearly beneficial to golfers."

Today, the idea of clubfitting has gained currency with golfers and teaching professionals (and grudging acceptance from competing equipment manufacturers) for one simple reason: It works. Looking back over the course of 20 years, we can see how much custom clubfitting and manufacturing - a practice Henry-Griffitts pioneered and continues to champion - has impacted golf and the golfing consumer for the better.

"There was a statement we issued way back when we did our first ad," remembers Randy Henry, who co-founded HG with fellow golf pro Jim Griffitts, who passed away in 1993. "It said, 'We're going to change the way golf clubs are sold in America.' We believed that then, and if you look around, you can see that we've done it."

How has clubfitting changed golf? Let us count the ways.

Blowing up standard specs
Starting in 1983, Henry-Griffitts has ignored the standard manufacturing specifications. Instead, its network of Certified Teachers customizes 14 crucial elements of club specifications to suit each individual player - something other equipment companies have routinely done for tour pros but not for amateurs who purchased this standard equipment off the rack. Beginning in the early 1990s, HG's philosophy had an important impact: The idea of clubfitting obliged competing equipment-makers to completely change their manufacturing specs, not to mention their entire approach to golf retail.

"Until then, manufacturers built a set of clubs to a certain specification and if your body or swing didn't conform to those particular specs, you weren't going to be successful," Randy Henry explains. "It was a great deal for manufacturers; they sold the same clubs to everyone. The idea of an 18-25 handicap consumer playing the same equipment as is played on Tour is just absurd, but that was the norm back then."

Henry adds that this cynical retail initiative actually resulted in a sort of false bravado. "It encouraged good players to believe that 'I can hit it with anything.' It also encouraged teachers to believe they could teach anyone to hit it with anything, which is a dangerous notion for teachers and students. But boy, the manufacturers loved it. They made a fortune.

"But we have forced them to consider the consumer public."

This process of readjusting the major manufacturer's specs is still underway. Witness the recent "revelation" that off-the-rack clubs are way too strong for average players, meaning they feature too little loft, shafts that are too stiff and improperly placed deflection points, among other factors. Henry-Griffitts realized all this 20 years ago and has been attempting to remedy the matter, one golfer at a time, ever since.

"Think of all those guys who fall backwards when they hit the ball; that club's too strong," Henry explains. "If you're propelling something forward, you fall forward. In golf, so often you see people fall backward. It's evidence of this club-strength dynamic. More evidence: Why is a 3-wood often easier to hit? Because the loft, the weakness, allows people to put a good swing on it. Equipment affects motion

"Unfortunately for golfers, the major manufacturers are still in something of a Catch 22: They have all these amateurs hitting off their back foot with weak swings, so the stronger they make the equipment, the better golfers hit it. However, to let a guy sit on his back foot and continue to sell him this real strong equipment - that doesn't make sense. Better to fit him properly and improve the swing; get him off that back foot. That's what we do.

"We're teachers, and what sort of teacher would fit someone if it meant promoting a bad swing? We're about improving the swing through equipment. Equipment should affect motion for the better, which is why fitting and teaching go together."

Thanks to Henry-Griffitts, most major club manufacturers now offer limited fitting options on certain club lines, though none insist on fitting every club they sell, as HG does (including putters). Some have adopted the lie board that Henry-Griffitts patented, but none offer a teaching cart like HG's, which puts at the Teachers disposal a range of club specifications unmatched in the industry.

Other manufacturers might employ quick-and-easy methods of fitting, such as the measured distance from a player's fingertips (or knuckles) to the ground and extrapolating out to produce a "custom" set.

"That was considered a fit before we came along," Henry says, "but it's not at all comprehensive, to be honest. We fit on an individual basis, paying attention to individual swings and games, while others do it on a mass-produced basis. We're small enough to pay attention to the little things, which still matter."

A small man's game?
Jim Hofmeister likes to cite George Archer as evidence of how much clubfitting has opened up golf to the big man: "Look at his swing. That's what a man his size was obliged to do in order to hit the ball straight!"

For a hundred years prior to the mid-1980s, the standard length of the driver was 43 inches. "Yet once we got started this company, everything we found over thousands of fits was that people had gotten bigger," Henry says. "And as they'd gotten bigger, lies on standard-spec, off-the-rack clubs had essentially become more upright. We discovered very quickly that bigger people were 10 times more successful using the longer clubs we fit them with, compared to clubs ordinary manufacturers provided. We also saw the benefits of longer clubs fit to medium-sized players. This applied not only to the average guy, but to tour players, too."

During the 1980s, Henry-Griffitts was extremely active on the PGA Senior Tour; at one stage HG was the Tour's no. 2 iron supplier. In the late '80s, Randy Henry fit Senior Tour player Homero Blancas with a 45-inch Henry-Griffitts driver and, again, there was resistance to this idea. "No one out on Tour believed any human being in the world could hit a club that long," Henry recalls. "Well, they'd probably take that back today. In the early days, we extended 3-woods to driver length to give larger folks the fit and leverage they needed. Over 20 years ago: 44-inch 3-woods! We had thousands of players hitting that club, turning it over and controlling it.

"As the club got longer, we realized we could put bigger heads on it. It's harder to hit the center of the clubface with longer shafts, of course, but if you develop that skill you get the benefit of added distance. There is give and take on both sides of the skill-level issue. The farther away you are, the harder it is to be consistent. So what happened? Larger heads with longer shafts, because a larger head, while expanding the sweet spot, also makes the club feel shorter, more in proportion. It was a natural progression, and we saw all this 20 years ago."

Today, of course, 45- and 46-inch drivers are common place, and Henry notes that longer shafts throughout the bag - something pioneered by HG - account for the game's added length as much as new-generation balls. The dynamism of this combination also makes it even more important to find the perfect combination of club components for each and every person. "Every inch is worth 8-12 yards for majority of people," Henry says. "Right now the average driver is 45 inches. That combined with the ball? Well, there's your 25 yards."

More important to Henry and HG, however, is the effect longer shafts and different specifications in general have had on participation. Golf is no longer a game designed for people 5'6" to 5'8".

"Look at most guys on the Senior Tour; everyone is in that range," Henry says. "Then look at the size of PGA Tour players today. Clubfitting has brought so many more people into the game. With clubfitting, they're all able to play their best. This is true for the Tour, of course, but it's also true for anyone 6'4" who walks in off the street - they're told they need to be club fit. Before, that wasn't an option and maybe they quit. Now, it's an option.

"This used to be a short man's game, but it's becoming a big man's game. When equipment is fit to these guys, there's no reason why they shouldn't hit it higher and farther. You'll always have phenoms like Tiger who still uses a 43.5-inch driver, which is unbelievable. But soon you'll see really tall people become great players. And they'll have a huge advantage. I'm talking 7-footers.

"People will read that and think we're crazy, but we're used to hearing that."

A Place for Teachers
Henry-Griffitts was founded by two golf professionals, Randy Henry and Jim Griffitts, and in a golf world increasingly dominated by corporate conglomerates, HG continues to be the only equipment manufacturer operated by golf pros, for golf pros, to the benefit of golfers. CEO Hofmeister is a PGA Professional, and each one of HG's Certified Teachers is an experienced swing teacher. This informs the fitting process, obviously, but it has also driven most everything the company has done for 20 years.

Not surprisingly, the other major beneficiary of HG's innovation and philosophy has been the teaching profession itself. "Back in the mid-1970s, you've got to remember that discount houses were just coming in," Hofmeister points out. "With discounters undercutting prices the way they were, pros thought the only way to survive on the retail side was to start their own discount houses! We felt the professional had another way to serve golfers and improve their games via his or her expertise, in addition to simply giving lessons - and that way was custom clubfitting.

"Our Teachers, for example, have learned to weaken the club so we can strengthen the swing. But how to weaken a set a clubs, and how much? That's an analysis only a qualified Teacher is equipped to make. The Henry-Griffitts philosophy wouldn't be workable without our network of teaching professionals.

"They are the glue."

Today there are more than 500 HG-certified Teachers plying their trade across the country. The HG World Team includes high-profile swing gurus and hundreds of other, less well known but similarly dedicated instructors who recognize the symbiotic relationship between teaching the golf swing and fitting pupils to equipment that maximizes performance.

There are schools of thought when it comes to teaching the golf swing, but golf professionals generally go their own way, incorporating their own personal beliefs into the teaching process. That more than 500 golf professionals have bought into the Henry-Griffitts philosophy is testimony to its efficacy and flexibility.

Of course, with this many free-thinking Teachers in the ranks, HG has for 20 years been a veritable hot-house of innovation. This was the company that introduced off-set woods in 1983, a decade before its competitors developed the good sense to follow suit. Today, off-set woods are common place.

HG's patented ICS system - whereby screw-on clubheads allow Teachers to mix and match 4,888 different spec combinations - is the reason Henry-Griffitts fitting carts are the envy of the industry. The company's laser-aided Fit2Aim putter-fitting system, which applies the same interchangeable-component methodology to flat sticks, debuted in 1999 - four years prior to the similar, yet far simpler systems introduced by competing manufacturers this year.

The innovation continues. On its new Model 82 driver, HG employs a revolutionary manufacturing method called LeviCast, which allows the titanium to be cast in a very thin shell - without the impurities and voids resulting from the normal casting process. Perfected by HG partner Work's, Inc. of Nagoya, Japan, LeviCast produces a head with the thinnest cast-titanium shell possible - about 0.7mm, a 30 percent reduction in thickness compared to other cast titanium heads.

"Developing a club like the Model 82 is what we dreamed about when we founded Henry-Griffitts back in 1983," Henry says. "It's cutting-edge technology. Its performance is out of this world (it's the best combination of long and straight on the driver market today). And we have the ability to customize its specs to fit individual players. This is what we had in mind 20 years ago.

"If only we knew about titanium back then."