Acushnet’s Young Master Craftsman Raises the Bar on Custom Wedges

By Tony Dear

Thirty-five-year-old James Patrick (“JP”) Harrington is well aware how fortunate he is to have the financial backing of the Acushnet Company (Titleist, Footjoy, Bob Vokey, Scotty Cameron, etc.) as he attempts to establish his own wedge brand in a very competitive market.

After all, folks like Wally Uihlein, Acushnet’s President and CEO, don’t exactly go around doling out company money to just anyone.

Harrington, originally from Wisconsin, now lives and works in the golf equipment epicenter of Carlsbad, Calif. and spends two days a week fitting affluent customers ($2,000 for a three-to-four-hour session, which includes three Harrington-built wedges) who really do appreciate quality workmanship. He spends the other three days building those customized golf clubs.

It’s hard to know where Harrington’s career story begins – he graduated from Arizona State’s PGA Professional Golf Management program in 2002, worked as a club repair/custom-build technician at both Hot Stix and Cool Clubs in Scottsdale, and spent a few years in his mom’s garage in Wisconsin grinding wedges and building a cult following online.

He built or tweaked clubs for a handful of PGA Tour players, including Aaron Baddeley who won the 2006 Verizon Heritage—his first victory in the US—a couple of weeks after Harrington had ground his entire set of MacGregor irons. And in 2010, he traveled to Japan to learn from the forging/grinding masters at Kyoei, one of Hijemi’s original forging houses.

But, someone who wasn’t aware of the years of grind (pun very much intended) that preceded Harrington’s rise, might point to a day in his mom’s garage in 2012, or was it 2013, when it really all began for him.

Sitting on a chair in the garage listening to Harrington talk about wedges for three hours or so was Dennis Doherty, Acushnet’s Senior VP of Human Resources. A couple of weeks later, obviously encouraged by Doherty to go and see/hear Harrington himself, Uihlein sat in the same chair.

“Obviously I was extremely nervous,” Harrington remembers. “But honestly, once we got started, I just let fly and my passion for making wedges just burst out. We spoke for quite a while and, at the end, I ground a wedge for him. I still have the Wally Wedge in my workshop.”

Shortly after that, Harrington was installed in Carlsbad, and he is now a young but significant member of the Acushnet family.

He is not there to replace Vokey one day. Vokey continues to build Titleist wedges and is irreplaceable anyway. No, Harrington is there, at the moment atleast, to build JP Wedges. There is one model currently available, but it comes in 36 different loft/lie combinations and is meticulously customized for each client, meaning no two JP wedges are ever the same (well, very rarely anyway).

JP Wedges launched officially in May, and word is quickly getting out about this “new” wedge-maker. Actually, JP Harrington is not new. He’s been doing this for 15 years, but the golf world is ready, at last, to recognize his ability.

$2,000 for a custom-fitting at Titleist Performance Institute in Carlsbad – includes three custom-built wedges. Wedges also available ($500 each) through the JP Wedges concierge at 800-324-3350.
jpwedges.com