The dew kicked off of Fordie Pitts’ shoes as he walked towards the practice tee at Grayhawk Golf Club. There was an unusual chill in the air, even for February in Scottsdale, and the sun had just peeked out over the mountains in the distance.
Pitts set his Trackman launch monitor down in the grass, preparing, along with others on the Titleist research and development team, for the next two days. They’d be gathering valuable information from Tour players around the ProV1 prototype for the 2025 season, a vital part of the process in golf ball development and innovation.
It was still 2024 at the time, and with a year until production, there was still time to tweak and make minor adjustments. The information they would extrapolate from the likes of Camilo Villegas, J.T. Poston, Doug Ghim and a handful of other professionals on this day would help shape the final model of what would be the 25th anniversary of the ProV1.
Pitts purposely keeps information from the players to get an honest reaction and unbiased feedback. He has the players warm up with their current Titleist golf ball, then takes a prototype ball and places it in front of the golfer, with no information, and asks him to hit it.
As the sun starts to warm the air, Tour players start to give their feedback. Instantly, they can tell a difference and start giving keys to Pitts, a 30-year veteran at Titleist, on what they’re feeling and seeing from the new ball. It’s Pitts’ job to decipher the code of feedback given to him and turn it into actual data that can be used.
And it has to be the correct interpretation, because consistency is the blueprint of success for the Pro V1 golf ball. Without consistency, the Pro V1 isn’t celebrating its 25th anniversary today.
“The performance north star on the (2025) products focused exactly on that,” Pitts said. “It was really about just making each product even more consistent than prior, that was the main goal. We weren’t necessarily designing them to be significantly longer or spin radically different, it was a more consistency story.”
That has been the entire story for a golf ball that changed the game and the company striving to continuously improve on the previous model.
A total of 34 patents went into the creation of the original Pro V1 and over the last 25 years, more than 125 patents have been implemented on subsequent generations. The Pro V1 and Pro V1x were teed up a total of 4,103 times in the 2024 season, compared to 649 for the nearest golf ball competitor.
Utilizing 25 years of data, research and Tour testing to build what Titleist believes is the best ball in golf, Pro V1 has come a long way from its origins. But it hasn’t strayed from what it was originally designed to do; consistently bring maximum performance at an elite level with no exceptions.
So how has Titleist continued that success over 25 years, how has Pro V1 remained one of the most trusted golf balls in the sport and why do so many Tour players trust the performance?
It all lies within the walls of Titleist, the people that work there and a mentality that they should always improve and should always strive for better.
Origin of Pro V1
Prior to the development of the Pro V1 golf ball, golfers really only had the choice of whether or not they wanted to focus on distance or spin. The options included solid core balls and wound balls that made you choose one performance factor over the other.
Titleist sought to correct that and developed the Pro V1, which combined both aspects to provide distance and control.
Some Tour players were skeptical that it would work, but over 40 players made the switch to the ball on its initial launch. Eventually, the ball took off and became what it is today as the best-selling ball in golf.
“When I think of Pro V1, I think of it as the golf ball. Capital T-H-E,” Titleist Senior Vice President of Golf Ball Marketing and U.S. Sales, Jeremy Stone, said. “In the sense that it’s just ubiquitous. If you’re playing golf, and I go down to the grassroots level. More often than not, you show up on the first tee and someone’s like, well yeah, I’m playing a Pro V1.”
The initial breakthrough of the Pro V1 was revolutionary and Titleist quickly worked to build on what it had found from an R&D standpoint. In 2003, the ball had a new core formulation and dimple design that made it even longer with improved flight consistency.
The Pro V1x made its debut in 2003 based on feedback from Tour pros that they would like to see some performance tweaks from the Pro V1.
“How you get from ‘Gosh, I’d love (the Pro V1) to do this’, into a dual-core with a unique dimple pattern that flies higher and spins more. That’s the magic of what these guys do,” Stone said. “Prior to Pro V1, there wasn’t golf ball fitting. Prior to Pro V1x, the addition of Pro V1x, which was the original custom performance option, that opened the door for where we are today with golf ball fitting.”
No longer having to choose between distance and control changed the game and it opened new doors for Titleist to keep pushing the boundaries on what this ball could do.
“The first thing that popped into my head was just cutting edge, because it’s one of those that when Pro V1 was released, it was completely transformational in terms of what it delivered from golf ball performance,” Titleist Vice President of Golf Ball Research and Development, Mike Madson, said. “And from our side of things as scientists and engineers, we always want to make everything better. How do you make something even better than what’s transformational is an incredible challenge.”
It's a challenge that Titleist has been up to over the last 25 years, however, and they have continued to meet expectations.
Some of those expectations are set by the same Tour players testing with Pitts in Arizona, who rely on the ball’s consistency to earn their pay.
Back on the Grayhawk practice tee, Villegas hits the prototype and immediately sees a difference in ball flight and spin. He projects what he sees to Pitts, who confirms the numbers on his TrackMan.
Villegas knows his game inside out and was continuously conveying exactly what was happening with the ball moments after impact.
“I think the most important thing for me is the spin, I tend to be a low spin guy. As the tournament goes on and I got a little more heat on the line, I tend to get a little stronger and less and less spin,” Villegas said. “So, I have to be very careful about the low spin shots. Therefore, when I practice, I’m always looking for my ball to be almost spinning a little bit more than I want, because when I turn to the golf course, it tends to go a little bit down.”
He plays the 2019 version of Pro V1x, tried the 2021 version when it came out, but it spun a little too much for his liking and then felt the 2023 version spun on the low side. He notes that he doesn’t mind if the 2025 model has a little bit more spin than his and that the balls feel very similar off the club face.
Tour validation
Having the vote of confidence from the world’s best golfers plays a large part in the ball’s success. That Villegas knows exactly what his ball will do means he doesn’t have to guess and can have confidence in his swing.
That notion of trust is always at the forefront of innovations and was at the top of mind for Madson and his team with the 2025 model.
“It’s one of those things that when we were going through the product development cycle and we were talking about what our North Star is going to be for that new product,” Madson said. “We’re trying to figure out what that performance improvement might look like, the underlying requirement for every single golf ball is Titleist consistency. Because we will all tell everyone that the most important performance attribute of any golf ball is consistency.”
Because of that mindset, Titleist didn’t put extra emphasis on this 2025 model just because it was the 25th anniversary. The commitment to complete performance already protrudes throughout Titleist’s factories.
The team looked at hundreds of prototypes for this 2025 model, as it would in any development year, and continued to test them until the performance was at the level they needed.
That process begins with testing prototypes on robots, looking at the data and throwing out the models that don’t work. The engineers might keep some attributes and scrap others and will then move to outdoor machine testing.
They’ll start to loop in players, study the data, make improvements and adjustments and narrow it down to three or four prototypes that they are happy with. Once those final prototypes are decided upon, Pitts and his team go to the Tour players for feedback.
At Grayhawk, the players went through short irons, long irons, driver and then moved to the practice green to hit chip shots to test spin.
Hitting every kind of shot they might encounter on the course to test the ball’s performance; Villegas comes away from the testing happy with where the 2025 model is at. But he doesn’t commit to making the switch from the 2019 Pro V1x to the 2025 Pro V1x.
He still wants to do testing of his own at home, on the golf course and in a variety of conditions. He, and the other Tour players under Titleist’s umbrella, take the testing as serious as they can because it could mean the difference between a stroke here and there.
“The game at our level is so tight and a good season can be separated by just a couple of points here and there,” Ludvig Aberg said. “So, if you can find just a little bit that’ll make you a little bit better, a little bit more consistent, or a little bit more control, I’m going to be up for it.”
The Tour players are essentially an extension of the research and development team and have helped shape what the past models of Pro V1 and Pro V1x have looked like. Titleist has invested time and resources in ensuring the needs and wants of those golfers are met with their ball and that complete performance is achieved.
Putting the data to work
Once the Titleist team feels confident with the feedback from the Tour players and with the data it has received through testing, it’s time to put the new ball into production. Hundreds of prototypes, countless hours of testing and over 25 years of research were put in to build the most recent version of Pro V1 and Pro V1x.
Titleist has the luxury of building off of a successful and consistent golf ball and the goal wasn’t to reinvent the wheel, but to maintain the performance it has already seen.
The challenge, however, is to not rest on their laurels and continue to innovate while staying true to what the golf ball really is.
Titleist knows they can’t make every golfer happy with two golf balls, but continuing to adapt to the game and getting feedback from Tour players is what has kept the Pro V1 at the top of the list for 25 years.
For Pitts, days like he spent at Grayhawk are a crucial part of that process to continue developing golf balls that have complete performance. He put in nearly 10 hours on the practice tee with countless Tour pros over the course of two days in hopes that all the work they had done would pay off.
Finding ways to improve a ball that has already had so much success isn’t easy and it requires a mindset and culture that’s always seeking curiosity and what might be next. For Titleist, this 2025 version of the Pro V1 isn’t just a few years of data put into a ball that might be better.
It’s the culmination of 25 years of PGA Tour wins, new materials, hundreds of patents, a foundation of trust built with the everyday consumer that this is the best their golf ball can be and a culture that prides itself on innovation, improvement and consistency.
Because it has always been a story of consistency for the Pro V1 and it will always continue to be that way as long as Titleist produces the ball.
“The first patent awarded to the Acushnet Golf Division was not for a golf ball, it was for a mechanical golfer to be able to test and prove out the consistency of our golf balls,” Stone said. “The innovation that surrounds the golf ball that empowers Fordie to do the job better, or Mike to do the job better, or anyone else. For us to better understand and interpret the performance, I think, is also a really interesting heritage and history piece that these are the investments that are required if you want to deliver the best golf ball on earth.”
