Big Bertha Diablo: A driver with an attitude

By DAVID ALLEN
Equipment and Instruction Editor, GolfChannel.com

The original Callaway Big Bertha driver was as synonymous with the word “power” as John Daly was in the early 1990s. Made of stainless steel and named after a World War I German howitzer, it was larger in volume, lighter and stronger than any persimmon-wood driver which preceded it, and helped spawn the 460cc super-sized driver heads we see today.
 
Over time, Callaway Golf spun the Big Bertha into the Great Big Bertha, Great Big Bertha II, Biggest Big Bertha and other similar names, with the hope that the line would maintain its heavyweight status among drivers. But in recent years, the feeling among Callaway’s innovation and marketing team was that the Big Bertha brand was starting to lose some of its luster; that it was becoming more synonymous with forgiveness and game improvement than power. They needed a brand name with more attitude.
 
Enter the Big Bertha Diablo driver. The word diablo means “devil” in Spanish; it also happens to be the name of Greg Sabella’s high school mascot. Sabella is Callaway Golf’s director of marketing for woods products.
 
“We thought that in some ways the Big Bertha got soft,” said Luke Williams, Callaway Golf’s director of innovation. “We wanted to make sure this driver had a broader appeal and a little more edge to it.”
 
Since hitting stores in mid-March, Callaway has had a devil of a good time marketing the Diablo. Print and television ads have run such slogans as, “Release your inner Diablo,” “Get medieval on your foursome,” and “Play with Fire.” It helps that Callaway’s poster boy for the Big Bertha Diablo is Rocco Mediate, one of the most popular players on the PGA Tour. Mediate first tested a prototype of the Diablo driver last September, three months after he gave Tiger Woods all he could handle in a 19-hole Monday playoff at the U.S. Open.
 
“The first ball I hit with it, I pretty much said, ‘Okay, I’m done for the year. This is the one,’ ” said Mediate. “It’s the best driver I’ve ever hit in my life. I absolutely love it.”
 
At the FBR Open in February, Mediate averaged 296 yards off the tee with the Diablo, an increase of 18 yards over the previous year. For the year, he’s averaging 282 yards per drive, a jump of almost 3 1/2 yards from 2008.
 
“It reminds me of the Biggest Big Bertha,” said Mediate, referring to the first Callaway driver he played back in 1996. “I can’t believe how good it is, how quickly it has become part of me. I can hit it up, down, fades or draws…whatever. I can really make this sing.”
 

The crown helps you visualize the proper inside path.

 
Mediate is known for his sweeping right-to-left draws, and the Big Bertha Diablo comes in draw and neutral clubhead shapes to help golfers create the ball flight of their choosing. The crown on the draw head is skewed toward the heel of the club so that as you look down at address, the head looks to be pointing right of the target. This helps you visualize the proper path on the takeaway, which is to the inside. Most slicers tend to take the club back to the outside and then swing down into impact from outside-in. The shape of the Diablo promotes the proper inside track into the ball.
 
At the same time, the face of the draw head is slightly closed, to help reduce the possibility of hitting a slice. The shaping of the head also allows more mass to be moved toward the heel of the club, which helps create a draw.
 
“For a player who slices the ball, we’re trying to do as much as we can to help them get the clubface back to square,” said Williams.
 
The neutral head is more symmetrical, and the weight more in line with the center of the clubface. The face is also less curved, to give golfers the ability to shape the ball in both directions. A weight chip is inserted in the head to allow the engineers to move weight toward the heel (draw-bias) or the center of the face (neutral-bias) and bring the center of gravity back, farther away from the face.