April 27, 2005 TAG Heuer has announced a limited-edition launch of the world's first professional golf watch - a watch light and durable enough so that you can wear it to the tee without fear of compromising your shot. Fusing sports and glamour, the TAG Heuer Professional Golf Watch is the result of a partnership between Tiger Woods and TAG Heuer and a limited run of just 8000 pieces will be released worldwide next week.
Calling upon Tiger Woods to collaborate on the design of the world's first-ever professional golf watch was an obvious choice. At just 28, Tiger Woods has had an unprecedented career, winning 56 tournaments in eight years on the PGA tour, including eight major championships. Only the second golfer to hold all four professional major championships at the same time, he is the career victories leader among active PGA players, and the career money list leader, with US$54,432,856 in tournament earnings worldwide.
A TAG Heuer Global Ambassador since 2003, Tiger Woods has already played a key role in the design and development of a number of TAG Heuer timepieces, including the sold-out limited edition LINK TIGER WOODS SPECIAL EDITION.
However, for the first time, with the TAG Heuer Professional Golf Watch, Tiger Woods' specific expertise in the field of professional golf was called into play.
"This is an extraordinary achievement," says Tiger Woods, who extensively tested the TAG Heuer Professional Golf Watch prototypes and then wore the pre-series in the 2004 Boston PGA Tournament. "At the beginning of the project we ran into problems. Golfers have very precise reasons not to wear a watch---the added weight on the wrist, the strap being too loose or too tight, not to mention the intense demands the game puts upon the wrist. But by working systematically through these and other obstacles with TAG Heuer's amazing team of watchmakers, engineers and designers, we were able to overcome them all."
"Now, for the first time, golfers can wear their watch in total comfort," says Tiger Woods. "This is amazing. Golf experts have always said that you should take your watch off before you step up to the tee, and TAG Heuer has proven them wrong. I myself experienced this in the 2004 Boston Deutsch Bank Tournament. It's a great watch and a true pleasure to wear."
Since 1860, TAG Heuer has led Swiss watchmaking tradition by overcoming obstacles and challenging conventions. It has also revolutionised the timing of a number of high-level sports, from sailing to skiing to Formula One and Indy Car Racing, where precision is demanded at an unprecedented 1/10,000th second.
Today, with the TAG Heuer Professional Golf Watch, TAG Heuer launches into a new domain and takes on a new sporting challenge. The first-ever professional sports watch, the TAG Heuer Professional Golf Watch achieves every objective set for it by Tiger Woods.
Objective Number One: Absolute comfort
The clasp and folding buckle of a conventional watch are often awkward and can hurt the wrist when playing golf intensively. The standard placement of the crown at 3 o'clock can also penalize the golfer when the wrist is bent. To overcome these obstacles, TAG Heuer integrated the clasp into the watch head with a revolutionary patented system and moved the crown across the dial to 9 o'clock.
A regular watch often slides on the wrist, snagging on the golfer's glove. When the strap of a regular watch is too loose, the watch hits the wrist and glove, which is uncomfortable. Too tight is uncomfortable too, as the wrist's diameter changes during the course of a game--even during the course of a single swing.
To combat these problems, TAG Heuer developed an exclusive, ultra-flexible rubber strap with amazing elasticity. The strap never slides, prevents any shock on the wrist and adapts its length to any change in wrist diameter.
Objective Number Two: Optimizing performance and precision with elegance
As a regular watch is often too heavy, the golfer’s swing and putting precision can be affected. Made of ultra-light titanium, stainless steel and silicon rubber, the super-slim TAG Heuer Professional Golf Watch weighs only 55 grams, making it an astonishing 60% lighter than a TAG Heuer 2000 Steel watch.
Says Tiger Woods: "Its so incredibly light you literally forget it’s on your wrist--until you need it." This extraordinary slimness also makes the TAG Heuer Professional Golf watch one of the most elegant and dressy luxury square-shaped watches on the market.
Objective Number Three: Watch resistance to golf-swing shock
Another reason golfers don't wear their regular watches while playing is because watches are very quickly damaged by the repetitive and violent shocks generated by golf swings. The TAG Heuer Professional Golf Watch's ultra-light weight, strap elasticity and anti-shock design and construction gives an incomparable 5,000 G of shock absorption--45 times more than the shock received by the watch during a golf swing.
The limited edition TAG Heuer Professional Golf Watch, with Tiger Woods' logo on the dial and signature on the case back, is a sophisticated quartz timepiece with a streamlined profile. The indexes and markers are hand-applied and luminous.
The stainless-steel folding buckle on the black silicon extensible rubber strap is incorporated in the case, with safety pushbuttons at 10 and 2 o’clock. Like the peerless sportsman who helped create it, it is the pure embodiment of precision-driven performance.
An exceptional piece of contemporary design, it also exemplifies TAG Heuer's unique position as the high-tech, high-glamour partner of such luminaries as tennis star Maria Sharapova, Formula 1 drivers Juan-Pablo Montoya and Kimi Raïkkönen and Hollywood superstars Brad Pitt and Uma Thurman.
Designed for golfers, the TAG Heuer Professional Golf Watch is a highly covetable object that will attract avid watch lovers as well as golfing purists around the world. Expect a street price under US$1000 though the recommended retail is US$1295