Roger Cleveland has had a huge impact on the golf equipment industry.
He founded Cleveland Classics which later became Cleveland Golf and was responsible for making some of the best woods and wedges in the game.
After selling Cleveland, he went to design clubs for Callaway and still designs some of the best wedges in the game today.
We met him at the PGA Show in Orlando…
Where did you grow up?
Long Beach, California.
How did you get into golf?
I was 12 and some friends of mine were going off playing one weekend. I asked where they were going and went along, got a rental set and really enjoyed it. It started there.
I then bought a set that had a 3, 5, 7, 9 iron, a 3-wood, a driver and a putter.
Within a year-and-a-half I broke 80.
What was your first job in golf
I was in sales and I worked for a company that’s not in existence now. They did putters, then came out with an iron set but that gave me a taste of it and I enjoyed it.
Then I was with a travel company that only specialised in bringing professional golfers to tours.
Back in the late 1970s there weren’t places to play so we had US pros who didn’t get on tour and we took them to Asia and Australia.
The first club I made was a reproduction of Bobby Jones’ Calamity Jane. I took it back to the PGA Show to see if there was any interest.
I sold about 500 of them and then felt like I was really in the golf business.
The big companies at that time were Spalding, Macgregor and Wilson but they weren’t making really good persimmon woods at that time.
A lot of the art had gone out of it. I thought I could make better ones so I took a chance, I didn’t have a lot of money so I didn’t have anything to lose.
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