“The 12-degree cast stainless-steel club that started TaylorMade and the metalwood era in 1979, funded on a $24,000 house loan by founder Gary Adams. A museum piece, not a gamer; interesting to a collector, useless to your scorecard.”
Gary Adams funded TaylorMade's launch with a $24,000 loan against his own house and leased a 6,000-square-foot building in McHenry, Illinois in 1979 to build it: a 12-degree cast stainless-steel driver head under 200cc, deliberately sized to resemble a persimmon wood at address so tour pros wouldn't reject it on looks alone. Unveiled at the 1979 PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando as the '1 Metalwood,' it earned its lasting nickname when Adams hand-wrote a sign referencing the steel's Pittsburgh origin. Ron Streck gave it its first PGA Tour win at the 1981 Houston Open (then the Michelob-Houston Open), the moment other tour pros started taking metal drivers seriously. It is the club that killed the persimmon-wood driver.
This is the club that created the metalwood driver category outright — every driver made in 2026 descends from what it started. Documented independently across Wikipedia, ProGolfNow's history of Gary Adams, SwingYard's TaylorMade timeline, and PGA Tour's own coverage; TaylorMade itself validated its historic weight by releasing a 40th-anniversary tribute (the 'Original One' Mini Driver) in 2019 rather than letting it fade as a forgotten early SKU.
Historically for any early-1980s golfer wanting more manufacturing consistency and weather/crack resistance than a wood driver could reliably deliver. Today it is a display and collector piece, not a playable gamer for anyone chasing distance, forgiveness, or modern performance.
Launched into a driver market still 100% dominated by laminated persimmon woods from Ping, Wilson, MacGregor and Titleist. TaylorMade followed it with the Burner (1983, a 7-degree driver) as the metalwood shift accelerated; by the mid-1990s the entire driver market had gone metal, a transition this club started. TaylorMade's 2019 'Original One' Mini Driver reissue is the closest modern equivalent — an explicit homage, not a functional descendant.
Genuinely more consistent than the laminated persimmon woods it replaced, since a cast metal head could be perimeter-weighted more reliably than carved wood — but by any modern standard this is a tiny, shallow-faced, sub-200cc head with almost none of the forgiveness margin of even a mid-2000s metalwood, let alone a modern 460cc titanium driver.
Calibrated across the whole catalog — a tour blade scores low here on purpose; it means control, not ease.
Cheap and plentiful for a 45+ year old club: clean original examples with matching original shaft, grip and headcover run roughly $40-100 in 2026 on eBay and vintage-club sites. Value is driven far more by condition and completeness than by scarcity — TaylorMade sold this in real volume across 1979-83, so it is bought for nostalgia and display, not because it is rare.
Reading is one thing — hitting is another. Book a bay and see the numbers for yourself before you buy anywhere.
