Nike Just ‘Does It’ And Pulls The Plug On Clubs, Who Benefits?

They did it, folks.

They finally figured it out.

Some genius in the Nike boardroom must have spurted:

“Hey, no one’s buying these expensive golf clubs, why the hell are we still trying to sell them?”

Great question, one that brought about Wednesday’s decision by the shoe and apparel giant to do what it does best — sell shoes and expensive performance clothing.

Despite paying guys like Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy hundreds of millions of dollars to let their clubs rattle around in their golf bags, no one, virtually no one buys Nike golf equipment.

So the decision came easy.

Nike has vaporized the “Vapor” and the rest of the stuff that sits around in the retail stores and collects dust.

Face it, Tiger Woods could have probably won in his prime with a set of  Sam Snead Blue Ridge irons in his bag. Fact is, Eldrick performed quite nicely with Titleist clubs before he went to the dark side of the force and sold his soul to the Almighty Swoosh.

Same for Rory McIlroy. The kid could hit the ball with a bunch of irons from the club barrel in your garage.

Which leaves at least two big name stars up for grabs for the remaining companies.

Don’t look for either to go to PING.  TaylorMade is a possibility but TaylorMade’s future is uncertain, Adidas, like Nike, figured out this golf club-selling gig ain’t cuttin’ it and is trying to unload TaylorMade on some unsuspecting corporate sucker. None has been conned, er, found yet.

Wilson Staff? Probably not. There’s always Callaway, a company that should benefit from the Nike departure.

Titleist is making an all-out move to go public. Why not? If you can’t make money selling golf clubs, why not con Joe Everyman out there into buying stock in your company so the Korean suckers who bought the damn thing in the first place can recoup some of their dough? With public money out there, why not?  The offering hasn’t materialized yet, but it’s coming.

With an infusion of public offering money, it could help Titleist keep Jordan Spieth and possibly add Woods or McIlroy, both of whom were once in the fold.

There’s also some good young talent available. Tony Finau just signed with Nike, how’s that for a shot in the chops? Same for Brooks Koepka.

The smart company in all of this is Oakley. Oakley took the gobs of cash it makes from selling over-priced eyewear and decided to get into the golf-rag business where markups are extremely high. Good profit to be had, even when you gotta blow the old stuff out you’re still making better margins than companies selling brand-new golf clubs.

Nike and Adidas have been around for a long time. But both were relative newcomers to golf.

It was Woods that spurred Nike to started making golf balls in 1998 then clubs in 2001.

The benefactors of this Nike exit should be all the companies — PING, Titleist and TaylorMade and Callaway are the dominant equipment people.

The new guy on the block is Bob Parsons, founder of Go-Daddy.com.  He sold the company for $2.25 billion and he’s personally worth $1.9 billion. When you’ve got that much moolah, you can do just about anything you want, including starting your own line of golf equipment. Say hello to Parsons Extreme Golf.

Now there’s the perfect future home for Eldrick Woods.  No doubt Bob will get on the phone and make some sort of lucrative offer to the guy we haven’t seen play in more than a year:  “Hey Tiger, how about $200,000 for every time you play in a tour event?”

That might not cost Parsons a lot of dough, who knows how much gas is left in Tiger’s tank?

With the money Parsons has, he can buy virtually anyone he wants and they claim to make better clubs than anyone. So if you are McIlroy or Woods, wouldn’t you listen to Parsons’ Pitch?

Landing one of those guys would be huge for Parsons. Huge.

In the meantime, the busiest guy in the Jupiter area will be the UPS driver, delivering all those test clubs to Woods’ palatial mansion, or,  if no one’s home, just drop ’em off at The Medalist.

“Clearly he and I need to be thinking about a change on the hard goods side,” said The Great Stiney, aka Mark Stineberg, Tiger’s agent.

Yes, Nike is through paying people to play clubs that no one buys.

It wasn’t a hard decision, was it?