Marty Jertson is a PGA Professional who also happens to be a senior design engineer at Ping.
Not only did he help design great clubs like the Ping G30 driver – he put them to good use as a player making it into the PGA Professional National Championship on five striaight occasions.
He also to qualified for the PGA Championship in 2011 and 2012.
NCG chatted to him on the Ping stand at the 2017 PGA Show…
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in a rural mining town in Arizona, a couple of hours east of Phoenix.
I took up golf as a kid because there wasn’t much else to do in my hometown.
I always knew about Ping, and the golfers that played the clubs. We mined copper in my town and there was copper in the old Ping i2s, so that was a bit of a fun connection between my hometown and Ping.
When did you get into golf and why?
My dad grew up in LA and caddied at Riviera.
He had a lot of West Coast connections to the game – he watched Jack Nicklaus win the US Amateur at Pebble Beach for example.
He was a left-handed golfer, which was rare for someone of his age, so I grew up mirroring his swing. From the age of about seven, my parents would drop my brother and I off at the golf course – a little 9-hole course, nothing fancy – at 7am and then pick us up on the way home at around 6pm.
What was your first job in golf?
I played on the golf team at college, where I studied engineering, and that was when I got a bit better.
I decided to turn pro right after I graduated, which was a risky decision. I played professionally for about a year and a half, then when that started to fizzle out I met someone in the engineering department at Ping.
Advertisement
I got an interview with John Solheim, the grandson of Karsten. He invited me to work part-time at Ping, helping out with some of the design on the G2 driver. Then when I decided to stop playing I joined them full-time.
