How To Become Arnold Palmer

By Dan Goodgame/Huntington Beach

Golfers, like inept mechanics, are quick to blame their tools. If their tee shots wander or their putts fall short, they are more likely to lay out $900 for new equipment than to practice or seek instruction. This faith in technology -- and in throwing money at a problem -- has brought thousands of duffers and millions of dollars to an eccentric California clubmaker named Clovis ("Duke") Duclos.

A former aerospace engineer, Duclos (pronounced doo-cloh), 53, is one of the most successful new entrepreneurs in the fast-growing field of high-tech golf clubs -- sticks designed to compensate for poor swings. His putters, irons and metal woods are specially weighted to help golfers keep their shots on line. Demonstrating with a five iron at a course down the coast from his oceanfront home in Long Beach, the 6-ft. 3-in. Duclos jokes that "if you can't hit it straight with these clubs, you need a physical." Apparently, many golfers believe his pitch. Duclos's fledgling Huntington Beach-based company, Slotline Golf, doubled its annual sales to $8 million in 1986 and expects to do twice as well this year.

The design of Slotline's "inertial weighted" clubs was inspired in part by the work of Karsten Solheim, the entrepreneur who developed the well-known Ping putter in the 1960s. Solheim found that if a putter's club face is heavily weighted in the heel and toe but light in the center, putts tend to go straighter. Even if the ball is not hit in the center of the club, the putter usually does not twist much. Duclos has taken Solheim's idea a logical step further. In Slotline's Big Moment putter, the weight difference between the tips of the club and its center is twice as great as the differential in Ping putters. Slotline putters cost about $60 to $79, compared with $40 to $75 for Ping clubs and $30 to $50 for a traditional-style model.

Making golf clubs was a radical departure for Duclos, who spent 15 years as a McDonnell Douglas engineer, working on the Saturn rocket and Skylab programs. Golf was his passion, and he became convinced that "clubs really weren't designed to take full advantage of the principles of physics." In 1975 Duclos took a leave from his job and began to experiment with club improvements in his home workshop. He first invented a putter with a slot and a white line in the center that helped golfers position their eyes directly above the ball. To finance the manufacture of this "slotline" club, Duclos ^ took out a $30,000 second mortgage on his home. His initial designs did not catch on, and the early years were lean. Unwilling to give up his new ambition and go back to engineering, Duclos helped support himself for a while by playing blackjack in Nevada.

Slotline finally took off in 1982, when Duclos came out with his exaggerated version of the heel-and-toe-weighted putter. Duclos claimed he had measured his putter's superior performance and ran newspaper ads under the headline PUTT 2.5 TIMES BETTER. Since then Slotline has sold more than 400,000 putters. Last year the company introduced heel-and-toe-weighted irons and sold 12,000 sets in 15 months; 6,000 sets of its new metal woods were sold in seven months. In June, Slotline began construction of a new factory in St. Andrews, Scotland, the cradle of golf. The plant will be able to ship clubs tariff-free to the big European market.

Despite the growth of his business, Duclos spends enough time on the fairways to keep his handicap at a respectable 6. Besides the Long Beach home, Duclos and his wife Mollie own a vacation cottage near the famed Old Course at St. Andrews. Off the links, he relaxes by playing Beethoven and Mozart on a Kawai grand piano, accompanied by a $17,000 Kurzweil synthesizer that can replicate the sound of a symphony orchestra.

Golf purists sneer at the clunky look and feel of Slotline clubs, but a few pros have become converts. Slotline putters have helped Arnold Palmer and Billy Casper win tournaments on the senior tour, and Kathy Baker used one in her victory at the 1985 U.S. Women's Open. But most of Slotline's customers have much more modest goals. Thom Smith, 42, a tax lawyer in Fairfax, Va., says he chopped his handicap from 19 to 13 after he began playing with a set of Slotline irons. "I don't get to practice much," he says, "so I need more forgiving clubs." Forgiveness, though, came at a price: $468 to Duke Duclos, the merchant of high-tech golf.