Marty Jertson doesn’t readily remember many of the details of his win in the CGA Amateur. But that’s understandable considering it occurred 16 years ago, and a lot of water has gone under the bridge since.

“That was a long time ago,” Jertson noted in a recent phone interview. “Kevin Stadler was in the field (and finished seventh). That was always a fun thing. He went on to win the Phoenix Open and all that stuff.”

With the 2017 CGA Amateur coming up next week — Aug. 3-6 at the Sonnenalp Club in Edwards, where Stadler won the 2002 Colorado Open — we thought we’d catch up with Jertson, who is still a fine golfer but has made quite a name for himself in a related realm.

Jertson only lived in Colorado for four years of his life (1998-2002), but it was in the Centennial State that the seeds were planted for what he’s become — the director of product development at one of the top golf equipment companies in the world, Ping. In other words, he heads up the design of new clubs for the brand that is currently used by Bubba Watson, Lee Westwood, Miguel Angel Jimenez, Louis Oosthuizen, Aaron Baddeley, Hunter Mahan and Harris English, among others.

Golf equipment product development and design is nice mixture of what Jertson learned and cultivated in his college years as a mechanical engineering student and golfer at Colorado School of Mines, where he was both an NCAA All-American and an NCAA Academic All-American as a senior in 2002.

“That same summer I won the Colorado state am (at Saddle Rock Golf Course), I think I qualified for the USGA Public Links,” Jertson remembers. “I won a handful of college tournaments. I graduated and decided to turn pro, go to Q-school and do that whole deal. I did that for about a year and a half after college. I quickly wised up that it was an uphill battle and that the odds were kind of against you no matter how good you are.

“I had a mini-tour friend, and one of his friends he grew up with went to CU and worked at Ping and he kind of got me an ‘in’ as an intern. When I decided to quit playing full-time, the company hired me full-time as a designer, and I’ve been doing product design ever since. I gradually got a little more experience and (four years ago) got the role I’m in now, where I kind of lead all the design efforts.”

When Jertson was at the School of Mines, he certainly didn’t envision this career path, even though it’s turned out to be a near-ideal occuption for him.

“Ironically, I didn’t,” the 36-year-old Phoenix resident said. “I just thought, ‘How would you even get into that?’ There’s no schooling for golf club design so it was never even seriously on my radar. I figured I’d do what a lot of the students at the School of Mines do and go into the oil and gas industry or petroleum or automotive or aerospace or something like that.

“I didn’t have my mind set on that or ever even really consider it. But in hindsight it’s obviously been an amazing fit for me.”

Jertson has worked on many Ping projects over the last 14 years, but ask him to name one club with which he played a major design role and that he takes particular pride in, and he gives a direct answer.

“I would say the G30 driver (left),” he said. “That was one of the projects I worked on (in 2013) and we just brought a lot of new technology to market, including some aerodynamic technology — the things on the crown called turbulators — and that driver caught fire on the market and was the No. 1-selling driver for a good chunk of time in the marketplace.”

Some people might look at the task of Jertson and people like him and see it as a bit frustrating: always trying to out-do yourself and design something better than what you’ve done before. But there’s obviously another way of looking at that issue, and that’s how Jertson views it.

“Sometimes it is hard, but at the same time that’s the fun part,” he said. “We kind of thrive on that exact challenge. I think what makes the job unique for both me and my co-workers here at Ping that do the same thing is that we’re all very passionate golfers so we get to experience the joys but also the pains of something that we can improve. If we have a club that goes too far left or right or springs too much, we personally experience that and get to work on it and try to improve it.”

In fact, that’s the thing he likes most about golf equipment design.

“That there’s no end in sight,” he said. “It’s a never-ending challenge. I think that a lot of the golf community thinks that manufacturers are highly regulated and they can’t advance anymore, but nothing could be further from the truth. On some design and research aspects, we’re just barely scratching the surface. So I like that I can do it literally my whole career and never reach an end, because there will always been advancement and challenges to design and manufacturing that we can overcome.”

Even though Jertson has long since given up playing full-time for a living — though he’s a longtime PGA professional — that certainly doesn’t mean that he doesn’t still have game.

Most notably, since 2010 he’s competed in six PGA Tour events, including the PGA Championship in 2011 and ’12. But he’s still seeking his first made cut in The Big Show. Elsewhere, he finished fifth in the national PGA Professional Championship in 2011 and seventh in 2012. And in 2011, he represented the U.S. in the PGA Cup, a Ryder Cup-like competition for club professionals.

Jertson said his ability to play at a high level is highly beneficial when it comes to his design work.

“It helps a lot, but at the same time we kind of challenge and train ourselves to be sympathetic and observational of the 15-18 handicapper, the club golfer, and how they play the game and the sport,” Jertson said. “Club design is kind of a renaissance thing. It’s art and science combined. The engineering background gives me the science and the playing background gives me the eye for designing and what looks good and feels good.”

So how does a designer appease both a PGA Tour player and an 18-handicapper?

“It all boils down to the age-old question of what do golfers want and need — longer and straighter,” Jertson said. “Longer, straighter, feels good, looks good. Within those categories, there’s different priorities for tour players and everyday golfers. But we always try to boil it down to the very simple problem we’re trying to solve. There’s a lot of overlap because a tour player wants longer and straighter and so does the beginning golfer.”

As for his own game, Jertson relishes the time he does get to play and compete.

“I love it,” he said. “I play in a lot of the Southwest Section PGA events now. It’s usually just constraints of the summer. I think if I played any more than I do, I’d maybe get burned out and fatigued by the game and the effort it requires to put in. But I like kind of playing as a hobby and still having the competitive aspect of competing against myself and the golf course and the field obviously. It’s fun to still be able to do that. Being a member of the PGA of America is a great opportunity to still compete against a lot of really good competitors — and occasionally get in a tour event or do something fun like that.

“Playing in six Tour events and working a pretty busy, high-responsibility job at the same time is something I take pride in — just being able to balance both of those things.”
 

The 1982 Masters champion didn’t directly answer the question, but his response did give a hint: “This is awesome.”

On that day, “This” was Kevin Stadler winning his professional debut at the Colorado Open in a three-man playoff, with Craig having caddied for his son all four days.

Throughout Kevin’s years playing amateur golf in Colorado and elsewhere, and during his professional career, Craig Stadler has been his son’s biggest champion.

And that will certainly be the case this week, as well, as the two become the first father and son to compete in the same Masters. The first men’s major championship of 2014 begins Thursday (April 10), with Kevin teeing off at 5:56 a.m. MT and Craig beginning play at 6:40.

“It’s emotional in a very, very good way,” Craig Stadler, a longtime Colorado resident, said this week at Augusta National, where he and Kevin were paired for Wednesday’s par-3 contest. “I had envisioned this and knew it would happen some day. I was hoping it would happen some day. I was pretty sure. The rest was up to him.

“But it was very cool on Saturday evening registering and then walking down and (seeing our) two names next to each other on the scoreboard. That got me a little bit. That was very cool. It’s going to be just a wonderful week and I hope he plays really well, and I hope I don’t embarrass myself.”

As a former champion, Craig Stadler receives an invitation to play the Masters as long as he’d like. But while Kevin has played 244 PGA Tour events and earned more than $9 million, it wasn’t until early February that he earned his first competitive invite to Augusta National. That was when he out-dueled former Masters champion Bubba Watson to win the Waste Management Phoenix Open near Stadler’s residence in Scottsdale.

While the Stadlers certainly haven’t been as close as they used to be — Craig and Kevin’s mother, Sue, divorced in 2006, and father and son very rarely had played golf together in recent years before coming to Augusta — Craig couldn’t have been more proud when Kevin scored his first PGA Tour victory. Not only was that important in and of itself, the main reason Craig continued to play the Masters — he’s now 60 years old — was in the hope that Kevin could join him in the field.

“If and when I do bow out, which probably will be this year, I can’t think of a better way to do it than playing with your son in the same tournament,” Craig said. “I mean, it’s awesome.”

As the son of a Masters champion, Kevin Stadler has attended the tournament many times over the years, even as a 2-year-old when his dad won in 1982. But before this year, Kevin had only played Augusta National once — during a winter visit with his dad when Kevin was 18 or 19.

“It was great to be able to tag along and walk around here,” Kevin Stadler said on Monday. “I couldn’t wait for April every year, when I was a kid, to come out here and just run rampant around the golf course and watch him and watch all the kids of other people play. I used to love tagging around at tournaments, watching the golf. It was what I got the most enjoyment out of when I was a kid.”

Obviously, being around all that good golf rubbed off on Kevin Stadler. In 1997 while attending Kent Denver, he won the state high school championship at Collindale Golf Club in Fort Collins. Two years later, at Fort Collins Country Club, Stadler claimed the title at the CGA Match Play. And in 2002, he added a second Match Play crown at the Country Club at Castle Pines, leading to him being named the CGA Les Fowler Player of the Year.

Also in 2002, besides Kevin winning the Colorado Open, he teamed up with Craig to earn the title in the Father/Son Challenge, which features past PGA Tour greats and their sons in a team event.

Two years later, Kevin Stadler won on the Web.com Tour the same week Craig prevailed in a Champions Tour event, making them the first father-son duo to win tour events on the same week since current Colorado resident David Duval and father Bob managed the feat in 1999. The last time Craig and Kevin Stadler have competed together on the PGA Tour was at the 2010 Bob Hope Classic.

This week, the Stadlers are making more father/son history. And Craig is reveling in how Kevin has stepped up his game in recent years. This season, Kevin has made 10 cuts in 11 events — he missed last week in the Shell Houston Open, his first MC since August — and ranks 16th on the PGA Tour money list with more than $1.67 million.

For his part, Craig Stadler has won 13 times on the PGA Tour and nine on the Champions Tour, and his victory last June in the Encompass Championship gave him the tour record for most time between victories (almost nine years).

“I’m so proud of the way he’s played the last three or four years,” Craig said of Kevin. “He’s been close a zillion times and finally got it done. …. He’s become a wonderfully consistent player. … I’m just going to kind of stand on the sidelines and watch, which is all I want to do, and just be supportive and root him on and hope more Phoenixes happen in the future — a lot more.”

For now, Kevin Stadler is looking forward to playing an Augusta National course that is in one way very familiar and in another very new to him.

“It’s going to be really, really fun to be on the inside of the ropes,” the 34-year-old said. “I feel like I know this place pretty well but I’ve never, ever played it (in competition). So it’s going to be a blast. I just don’t really know what I’m getting myself into, but it’s going to be really enjoyable.”