Equipment company legal disagreements are nothing new, and while most of the time, they are buried in the minutiae of lawyer letters traded back and forth and out-of-court settlements, sometimes they get very public and very nasty. Two of the top contending ball brands seem ready to trade legal blows over something seemingly as innocuous as a sales demonstration video.
As first reported by Front Office Sports, a TaylorMade lawsuit claims that Callaway is disseminating “misleading representations or descriptions of facts, false advertising, unfair competition, and [engaging in] deceptive trade practices” through its sales representatives and their presentations to retail clients. Currently, according to Golf Datatech reports, Callaway and TaylorMade are the top two golf ball brands substantially trailing perennial leader Titleist.
The claim was filed in U.S. District Court (Southern District of California, San Diego Division) on Jan. 15, with TaylorMade seeking damages for the “intentional false and/or misleading representations of fact concerning claims of purported superiority in the performance of its Chrome Tour line of golf balls and disparaging claims about the nature, quality and characteristics of TaylorMade’s TP5 and TP5x golf balls.” While the suit only specifies treble damages “to be determined,” it also asks for an “award of all profits Callaway earned as a result of its false and/or misleading advertising.”
The suit refers to claims it says Callaway’s agents and representatives made regarding the consistency of golf ball coatings in the manufacturing of the two company’s top balls. In essence, the suit details that Callaway’s representatives are using a blacklight demonstration to suggest that Callaway’s Chrome Tour golf balls feature a more consistent UV coating and that TaylorMade’s TP5 and TP5x golf balls show an inconsistent coating that makes its balls perform less consistently, even like “mud balls.”
That demonstration is inaccurate and not a valid indication of golf ball performance, the suit contends.
“[T]he patterns of UV brightener dispersion on a golf ball’s coating are not indicative of meaningful performance advantages or defects,” the suit reads. “The presence, thickness, or dispersion of UV brightener in one ball versus another bears no meaningful relationship to ball flight, distance, playability, or other performance attributes.”
As yet, Callaway has not responded to the lawsuit, but a company spokesman offered this statement to Golf Digest: “While we do not generally comment on matters in pending litigation, we continue to stand by the relevancy of UV light observations as related to the application of coating materials on golf balls and believe this is relevant information for the marketplace.”
The presiding judge is Gonzalo P. Curiel, who was appointed to the federal court in 2012 and is probably most well-known for his rulings in the settlement of the Trump University trial in 2018. No trial date has been set.
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