From Garage to Greatness

How PING Put Arizona on the Map

This week: The story of Karsten Solheim, a loud little putter, and the golf empire that changed Phoenix forever.

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Karsten Manufacturing Corporation

Before Scottsdale was swarming with Tour vans and Troon polos, before the Valley became a snowbird golf mecca, one man was in a Phoenix garage trying to fix his putting stroke.

Karsten Solheim wasn’t a golf lifer.

He wasn’t raised in country clubs or coached by short-game gurus. He was a late-blooming engineer who found golf frustrating enough to reinvent it. Armed with a workbench, some steel, and too much brainpower, he started tinkering with putters in his garage in California.

One of his early prototypes made a distinct ping sound at impact, which stuck as a name and a calling card for a brand that would grow into one of the most iconic in golf.

1959: The First “PING” in the System

Solheim’s first creation, the PING 1A putter, didn’t look like much. It was flat, boxy, and… let’s be real, weird. But it worked. The genius lay in how it redistributed weight—heel-toe weighting, which made off-center hits more forgiving. Revolutionary at the time. Still standard today.

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