It could have been such a beautiful story for Jesse Ortiz and
Orlimar Golf—a classic tale where Cinderella finds the glass slipper and marries
the prince. Where the hero discovers the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Where everyone lives happily ever after.
Once upon a time, Orlimar was a small family-owned company outside
San Francisco that made a line of highly regarded persimmon woods. Orlimar clubs
were well known in the Northern California area and had been in the bags of
players like Johnny Miller and Ken Venturi.
Then in the mid-’90s, Ortiz discovered magic by combining a
stainless steel body, maraging steel face and copper tungsten weights into one
club. The TriMetal, which debuted in January 1998, was a shallow-face fairway
wood that made it easier for golfers to get the ball up in the air, particularly
from difficult lies. It was revolutionary in its concept of using three metals
in a golf club, and golfers flocked to it.
Orlimar went from $1 million to $105 million in annual sales in
two years. But just as quickly, the rags-to-riches story ended sourly amid debt,
lawsuits and selling away much of the company in attempts to raise capital.
“When you’ve got a company that goes up as quickly as they did, their
infrastructure, their financing, their capital weren’t ready for it,” says Dale
Robbins, president of Dale’s Winning Edge, a major retailer in Knoxville,
Tennessee. “They started trying to be too much in chasing Callaway and
TaylorMade and all the other companies and it put them out of their niche.”
Needing investors to launch the TriMetal, Ortiz went into
partnership with businessmen Ed Dolinar and Rich Oldenberg in 1997, giving each
one-third of the company. Dolinar, Oldenberg and Ortiz became co-chairmen of
Orlimar Golf, but in effect, the family lost control of the company.
