Is Titleist’s Golf Ball Quality Really As Good As Everyone Says It Is?

We’re all reasonable people here so I’m sure there are a few things we can all agree on.

The first thing is an undeniable fact: Titleist sells an awful lot of golf balls.

I mean an awful lot. Depending on how you do your count, it’s very close to more golf balls than everyone else put together.

Another undeniable fact is that, according to MyGolfSpy’s past Ball Lab tests, Titleist makes consistently high-quality golf balls. Nine of the top 15 balls tested since Ball Lab started are Titleists, including three of the top four. The rest of the top 15 includes two from MaxFli, two from Wilson Staff and one each from TaylorMade and Callaway.

I don’t care who you are, that’s pretty friggin’ impressive.

We aren’t here to debate price or whether golfers who aren’t as good as you are should play a Pro V1. Rather, we’re here today to dive deeper into why Titleist’s golf ball quality has the reputation it does and whether it is deserved.

Ball Lab results suggest it is. We want to find out why.

Titleist’s golf ball quality: It started on the golf course

Phillip Young was an MIT graduate who, along with two college friends, founded the Acushnet Process Company in Massachusetts in 1910. The key word, as we’ll soon learn, was process.

Young’s first process was to recycle waste rubber into a workable material, and Acushnet soon became the world’s largest supplier of reclaimed rubber. During the Roaring ‘20s, a global drop in rubber prices forced Acushnet to refocus on manufacturing rubber items such as hot water bottles and bathing caps.

In 1932, Young was playing a match with a doctor friend and was having one of those days.

“My dad was normally a pretty a pretty good golfer, but he was hooking and slicing the ball all over the place,” said Young’s son Dick in an interview featured on Titleist’s On the Tee podcast. “He began to complain that there was something wrong with that damn golf ball.”

Turns out there was.

The putt that missed

On 18, Young swore he hit a perfect putt to win the match. The ball, however, had other ideas as it wobbled and veered away from the cup.

“They get into the pro shop and he kept complaining there was something wrong with that golf ball,” said Dick Young. “He talked his partner into going down to St. Luke’s Hospital and opening the X-ray department and they put the golf ball under the X-ray machine. Sure enough, it was cockeyed.”

Within three years, Young and his team set up the Acushnet Golf Division and, being a process guy, developed machinery and quality checks to make sure no one would have a round like he did that day. Just to be sure, Young insisted every golf ball be X-rayed before leaving the factory. That practice is still used by Titleist today.

Quality also extended to the distinctive Titleist logo that’s still in use. By staff decree, it was decided that Acushnet secretary Helen Robinson had the best penmanship in the company. Young asked her to write out “Titleist” in cursive and she nailed it in one take.

Fast forward to today …

This little trip into the past tells us a few things. First, 2025 represents Titleist’s 90th anniversary. Second, you don’t make golf balls for 90 years without understanding that process and culture are inseparable in the pursuit of excellence.

“The people I first worked with had already been here for 30, 40 years,” says Titleist Quality Director Pat Elliott, who started in 1991 as a summer hire. “They had a lot of the culture instilled in them about how important the Titleist brand is. I had no idea. I just knew I was going to a place that made golf balls.”

Elliott started at Titleist’s Ball Plant II making two-piece ionomer-covered balls. “That exposed me to a day-in and day-out manufacturing process. We’d receive new products from R&D. Their job was to make one golf ball. Our job was to make millions of golf balls just like that one.”

Machinery, patents and keeping it all “in-house”

Surprisingly, Titleist’s first patent wasn’t for a golf ball. It was for a machine to hit golf balls.

While not technically a “robot,” Phil Young’s “apparatus for testing golf balls” was a dual-pendulum machine that could allow for consistent and repeatable testing. Young, being one-part salesman to his two-parts engineer, also created the Acushnet Golf Ball Demonstration Machine. They put the “apparatus” on a trailer and brought it to golf courses around the country to show how Titleist golf balls flew compared to the competition.

Today, as it was in 1935, Titleist designs and builds all of its own machinery, tools, molds and test equipment.

“We still build our own robots,” says Richard Daprato, Titleist’s Director of Testing, Engineering and Analytics. “We like having full control over how our tools work. That way, our engineers can quickly respond to any issues and we can continually improve them.”

“We were Trackman before Trackman,” adds Elliott. “We built the first radar technology system for tracking golf balls in flight. This was back in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s. It was an 80-pound machine the size of a desk. We called it ‘portable’ but you needed a van to move it.”

Move over, Rover

The company’s latest development is something called “The Rover,” designed to study how balls are delivered to the green.

“We know how golf balls fly,” says Daprato. “We’re learning more about how they behave when they land.”

To create the Rover, Daprato’s team modified a JUGS machine (a device used to throw baseballs and footballs) to launch golf balls onto a green. It’s on wheels and looks oddly like the old Apollo Lunar Rover, hence the name.

“Initial launch is measured by a robot,” Daprato explains. “We know how far and how fast, the launch angle and the spin at impact. We then extrapolate the speed, angle and spin as it lands on the green so we can understand what happens when it hits.”

The testing team can make the green firmer or softer and even alter the grain. The Rover starts shooting balls at it.

“We measure thousands of impacts at thousands of different spin rates and speeds on three different iterations of green firmness,” says Daprato. “All of that data is used in the back end of our ball fitting app.”

Evolving technology

Back in 1935, Young and his team found that by changing the composition and pattern of the rubber windings around the core, they could make a more solid-feeling golf ball. Additionally, by varying the tension of that thread, they could make golf balls of different compression.

While the company stopped making wound golf balls not long after the Pro V1 came into existence, it’s still looking to improve the way it makes and tests golf balls.

“We used to control temperature and pressure with a dial when we were molding product,” says Elliott. “Today, it’s much more sophisticated. We have a computerized system in place to monitor temperatures and pressures continuously. If we see a slight deviation, we can adjust.”

“When I first got here, we’d hand-measure the balls in R&D,” adds Daprato. “Today, we do it three-dimensionally using photo technology. That system was completely built in-house.”

Elliott says even though Ball Plant II makes lower-cost ionomer balls, the in-process quality controls are virtually identical to those of the Pro V1 series.

“We take quality very seriously at Ball Plant II. There are subtleties to making a two-piece golf ball. We don’t have the casting process but the buffing equipment is the same, the press technique is the same.”

While two-piece balls won’t have as many in-process checkpoints as the Pro V1 series (90 for the three-piece Pro V1, 120 for the four-piece Pro V1x), it’s only because they don’t have as many layers.

“It’s the same attention to quality, though, and we have the same technology to support the process,” says Elliott. “We might as well be producing Tour-level balls at Ball Plant II.”

So, is Titleist’s golf ball quality all it’s cracked up to be?

MyGolfSpy’s Ball Lab and our biennial performance testing give us one more undeniable fact: there are a lot of really good golf balls out there. Some OEMs are more consistent box-to-box and ball-to-ball than others but, for consumers, there are only a few “red flags.”

However, when nearly two-thirds of the top 15 balls tested feature Helen Robinson’s handwriting, that says Titleist’s golf ball quality is all it’s cracked up to be.

That, friends, is very different from saying everyone should play a Pro V1. There are plenty of great options so how do you decide?

The answer is the process.

Smart consumers base most buying decisions, golf or otherwise, on performance, price and, not to be underrated, trust.

Trust, or rather the lack of it following that missed putt, is what got Phil Young to add a golf division to his Acushnet Process Company. And if there’s one thing any manufacturer of anything knows in his or her core, trust is built on consistent, reliable quality.

Consistent and reliable quality, if we follow the line logically, comes from the process.

“We make 360,000 Pro V1 golf balls every day,” says Elliot. “It’s always about building quality into the product as we produce it. We’ve implemented systems to check the product as we go along. Those systems allow us to check every single core and ball that’s being produced.”

Rest assured the legacy of Phillip Young and his contempt for a wobbly golf ball continues to thrive 90 years later.