Witnesses to History: Jim Sorenson

In the middle of Bloomington, Minnesota there’s a municipal course called Dwan Golf Club. In the clubhouse there’s a picture of Jim Sorenson with his wide smile. He’s wearing Hawaiian leis draped around his neck and the Publinks Standish Trophy in his hands.

Like Sorenson, I, too, grew up in Bloomington and played at Dwan. Sorenson’s title was a big, big deal for us. One of our own had risen up from the scrappy 5,300-yard, Par 68 track to become a national champion.

Had Sorenson been a better baseball player, however, things might have worked out differently.

“I was playing on the ninth-grade baseball team at Oak Grove Junior High but it wasn’t going very well,” Sorenson told me. “The golf coach at Kennedy High School approached me about playing golf. I gave it a shot and ended up lettering all four years.”

After graduating from high school in 1981, Sorenson went to Texas Lutheran, an NAIA school outside of San Antonio which he described as “perfect for me at the time.” Sorenson could practice on campus and had two nice courses to play nearby. After three strong seasons at Texas Lutheran, Sorenson transferred to Texas Christian in Fort Worth, Texas. As a transfer, he sat out a year and focused on his studies and his game. The move paid off, as Sorenson would become an All-America selection at TCU. His golf improved so that he was confident enough to tee it up with the best amateur players in America. When the ’85 Publinks came, Sorenson was ready.

The People’s Championship

The Public Links Championship was a USGA championship for the public golfer. It was the People’s Amateur, if you will, free from the entitled stench of the country club types. Winning it brought not only the pride of being a champion, but for a time it also meant a spot in the Masters.

Sadly, the spirit of the USGA Publinks wasn’t always honored. Many private club players would simply join the closest muni so they could play in the event. Before long, international players saw the Publinks as a fast track to the Masters (see: Trevor Immelman, 1998). The last Publinks championship was held in 2014.

In 1985, the tournament was held at Wailua GC on the island of Kaua’i. Sorenson, 24 at the time, had recently lost his mother making for an emotional and meaningful tournament. He would not only go on to win, he would do so by recording the largest margin of victory ever in a USGA event, closing out Jay Cooper 12 and 11 (the record has since been tied).

Suddenly, the kid who grew up playing backyard golf off Old Shakopee Road was on golf’s fast track.

“I’ll Make You the Best Player In the World”

One important prelude: There are few people who were as universally respected and revered in golf as the late Jackie Burke, who played an important role in what happened next.

In 1986 Sorenson was invited to play in the prestigious Champions Cup at Champions Golf Club in Houston. The club and the tournament were co-founded by Jackie Burke and Jimmy Demaret, who both felt it important to bolster and support high-level amateur golf. The Champions Cup was their flagship amateur event. Before the tournament started, Burke approached Sorenson.

“Jackie Burke comes up to me and says, ‘I hear you’re the best player here,’ to which I say, ‘I don’t know about that. There’s a lot of great players here’ Then Jackie gets closer…and he gets serious…and he says, ‘Come to Champions Golf Club. Stay at my house, eat my food, and I’ll make you the best player in the world.’” Sorenson paused. “And so that’s what I did. I mean, it was Jackie Burke. And somehow I went from shooting 65 to 85. We just never clicked.”

Sorenson worked with Burke for months and months. The results just never showed up. His game was reeling, and soon, he was going to be on the world stage.

You’re a Long Way from Dwan, Kid

The 1987 Walker Cup was held at Sunningdale just outside of London, and Sorenson was selected to be part of the team by a young Florida-based lawyer named Fred Ridley, who served as the team captain.

Sorenson’s game was not at its peak (see: Burke, Jackie), but he loved the Walker Cup experience and remembers it fondly.

“Being at Sunningdale was incredible. It’s like the Augusta National of England,” he said. “I was playing a practice round with Billy Andrade and Jay Sigel. We were walking down the first fairway and all of a sudden Andrade points across our fairway and says, ‘Hey! Look! There’s 007!’ Sure enough I look over and it’s Sean Connery wearing knickers playing some golf….Unreal.”

But wait, there’s more: Later that night Sorenson and a teammate wandered into the basement of their hotel for one of the more peculiar meetings of his life— a random Ping-Pong match with Seve and Carmen Ballesteros.

The time for fun and games was over, and on opening day the Great Britain & Ireland side paired their heaviest hitter, Colin Montgomery, against the kid from Dwan GC. Montgomery would win the match 3 and 2, but Sorenson would go on to win 1 ½ points for the Americans, who would rout the GB&I side 16 ½ to 7 ½.

Most of the players wouldn’t see each other again until the 1988 Masters, as the participants of the Walker Cup were traditionally invited to play in the tournament. There was one catch: They had to remain amateurs. Sorenson, however, decided to turn pro.

The United States team with the trophy after winning the 1987 Walker Cup at Sunningdale Golf Club, Berkshire. Back row, left to right: Jay Sigel, Bill Loeffler, Captain Fred Ridley, Brian Montgomerie, Len Mattiace, Jim Sorenson; front row, left to right: Billy Mayfair, Billy Andrade, Bob Lewis Jr, Chris Kite and Stewart Alexander

“I bet I’m the only player to turn down a Masters invitation,” Sorenson told me. There was a notable fatigue in his voice, as if he had said that a million times before in his life. It also sounded like he hated saying it.

I told him he was absolutely not the only one. Off the top of my head, I recalled that Australian Bruce Devlin had passed on the invite after winning the Australian Amateur in 1959, and most recently 2024 British Amateur winner Jacob Skov Olesen had passed on Augusta National’s invitation.

You might be wondering why an All-America, national champion, Walker Cup-winning golfer couldn’t wait a few months and go pro after the Masters. Sorenson told me, “At that moment, I felt like if I was going to go pro, now was the time,” and with more than a little nudging from Burke, he took the jump.

The Not-So Glamouorous Side of Pro Golf

Sorenson hit the road trying to make it as a golf professional. His first run at Q-school was unsuccessful, as were subsequent efforts. He played mini-tour events. He played on the Asian Tour. He played wherever he could. At one point, Sorenson played for 11 consecutive weeks in 11 different countries.

Sorenson needed to find some money to keep playing. He took a job just outside of Tulsa at the Golf Club of Oklahoma giving golf lessons.

“The place was beautiful,” Sorenson said. “First-class club. Oil money, no expense spared.” Sorenson was giving plenty of lessons, but he still felt unfulfilled. “People weren’t getting better at golf. We’d have great lessons, but they weren’t getting better.” This led Sorenson down a path to try to find training aids that would help. “There was a lot of stuff on the market, but none of it was the answer.”

A Voice from Above

One day, as Sorenson was approaching the double-door entrance to a Payless Cashways Hardware store in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, Sorenson’s life changed forever.

“I was walking into this store by myself. I’m telling you, there was nobody around. Suddenly, I hear this voice say to me, ‘You will find what you’re looking for today.’ Clear as could be. I will never forget that moment as long as I live.”

“Oh, my God.” I said.

“Yeah...” Sorenson said.

“I went back to the part of every Home Depot or Lowe’s or Payless Cashways that has the steel rods. I grabbed a 5/8th-inch threaded rod of steel. I looked around, didn’t see anyone around me, so I started swinging it.” Sorenson knew almost immediately that he was onto something. “It was too heavy to get over the top or off the plane of the golf swing.” After some tinkering he had a tool he could confidently use with his students at the Golf Club of Oklahoma.

From Poland, to Tulsa, to First Customer

Roman Jasinski was one of the premier ballet dancers in all of Europe and the founder of the Tulsa Ballet. “He was a tremendous athlete, obviously,” Sorenson told me. Jasinski was among the first to try Sorenson’s hardware-store golf aid. “I’d have Roman swing the steel rod five times and then hit three 5-irons. He started just smoking the 5-irons. Just ripping them. We’d do it again, and again. He kept ripping the ball! He was so jacked! So at the end of the lesson, he says, ‘I have to have this club’ and I tell him, sorry, Roman, it’s mine and I need it for my other students. But he insists and insists and he won’t stop. Finally he says, ‘Name your price.’ I was reluctant, but said something like, ‘I don’t know…how does $60 bucks sound?’ And in that instant I became an entrepreneur.”

Not just any entrepreneur, but the creator of one of golf’s most memorable training aids, the Momentus.

The Momentus Is Born

Apologies to Roman Jasinski, but the Momentus’ first real traction started at the top with PGA TOUR players. “The 1996 Tour Championship was held at Southern Hills in Tulsa. I was able to get a badge and took a few on the range. It was the top 30 players on TOUR. Of those 30 guys, 20 of them wanted a Momentus,” Sorenson said. One of those 30 players was a rookie named Tiger Woods. “Butch Harmon, Tiger’s coach, was there so I said to myself, I’m gonna get one of these to Tiger, which I was able to do through Butch.”

Sorenson was anxious to hear what the prodigy thought of the Momentus. He called Harmon multiple times, and finally Harmon answered and told Sorenson that not only did Tiger use it almost every day, he loved it, and wanted to know if he could get a heavier one. Sorenson was thrilled and wasn’t shy about pursuing Woods to be an endorser. There was one big problem: Woods didn’t want anyone to know he was using the Momentus so his competitors wouldn’t catch on.

He may not have been able to talk Tiger into being the face of the Momentus, but another young up-and-comer, David Duval, was also a believer in the product. Sorenson had met Duval in 1996, knew he was an advocate for the product and what it had done for his game. The two connected and Duval directed Sorenson to talk to his agent, Charlie Moore.

The Big Break on the Golf Channel

By the winter of ’96 Sorenson and his wife had moved to Atlanta, and he was assembling the Momentus clubs by himself in a 10- by-20-foot storage unit with no air-conditioning, no electricity, just Sorenson and his grit. His “office” was the second bedroom in their apartment. He was teaching some golf lessons, and also selling his training aids out of his trunk, and had a small retail deal with a chain of golf stores. He managed to scrape together a little money, but believed a celebrity endorser would really make the product pop.

If not Tiger, who better than David Duval? He called Duval and made his pitch. “Double D is a pretty stoic guy, but he was passionate about the Momentus,” Sorenson shared. He used it and believed in it. He told me to get in touch with his agent Charlie Moore, so that’s what I did.”

It turns out Sorenson’s first big sales spike would come not from the boost of a Duval endorsement, but rather from a quick appearance on the Golf Channel.

“There was this little feature on the Golf Channel called the Motorola Update that would air during Golf Central,” Sorenson remembered. Ever the grinder, he reached out to the Golf Channel multiple times trying to pitch his product for the feature. Finally, the Golf Channel returned his call. “A producer called and asked if I could be in the Orlando studio by 8 o’clock in the morning. I’m in Atlanta so “yes” is the answer and I drove through the night to get there.”

After filming the spot the producers told Sorenson they’d call him before it aired. “Three months go by and they never call back. Then on a Friday, they called and told me it’ll be on the following Monday and Tuesday, multiple times a day.” He pauses to laugh. “We didn’t have cable, so we went to the neighbors’ house to watch it. The feature aired, but the 800-number to order was on the screen for such a short time, I didn't think anything would happen.” Jim and his wife walked back home.

“When we walked in the phone was ringing.” He manned the phone for hours taking orders on a carbon order pad, writing down card numbers and shipping addresses. “I had all these orders coming in and 100 voicemails.” The Motorola Update worked. “The price kept going up!” he said with a chuckle. “At the beginning of the day, they were $79.99 and $99.99 by the end of the day.”

By 1998 the scrappy amateur-turned-entrepreneur had a legitimate revenue stream, he found a bigger production site, and he even found some laborers through the local Lutheran church—Bosnian refugees who had relocated to Atlanta. Sorenson’s vision for the Momentus was growing, and so he decided to go big.

He threw pretty much all the money he had at creating the first Momentus infomercial and buying airtime on the Golf Channel. Duval was officially on board, and he hired PGA TOUR Productions to shoot the infomercial with Duval at TPC Sawgrass. Sorenson was literally all in, spending over $100,000 on production costs and airtime.

“The day the infomercial aired we had a watch party at our place. The first airing cost me $30,000, so I needed to sell 400 units to break even and the people at the party kind of knew that was the break-even number.” Sorenson paused to sigh. “I called the people who manage the orders as soon as it finished. I asked them how many orders we got and they told me 40.”

“$40,000?” I asked.

“No, 40 units," he said. “We sold 40 units. Everyone started quietly walking out of the party. I blew $30,000. It was a bust.”

Sorenson spent the next few months licking his wounds from that loss and tried to figure out how he could turn it into a win. He knew it wasn’t the product. Was it the messenger? Could it be that Duval, known for being a bit of a soulless mercenary on the golf course at his peak, might not be the best pitchman? Who could say. But Sorenson knew something had to change.

John Walls, Tulsa’s Relatable Sports Guy

John Walls was a local Tulsa KOTV sports anchor who also worked as a presenter on the original Duval infomercial. Sorenson wondered if taking the celebrity (Duval) out of the equation and focusing on a relatable everyday type of golfer might do the trick. Walls brought a bunch of his television buddies out to Cedar Ridge Country Club to shoot new testimonial scenes in the 102-degree Tulsa heat. Sorenson cut the new footage himself. “I spent 300 hours re-editing the piece to get it just how I wanted it,” he told me. He had a production team in Seattle put some polish on his edit, and the new infomercial was ready for the Golf Channel.

After the new edit aired in 1999, he called the people who manage the toll-free ordering service again. Remember how for the first run Sorenson needed 400 sales to break even? Well, this time when he called they had some slightly better news. The first airing of the remix sold 12,000 swing trainers.

Sorenson had over $300,000 of revenue in the first month of the relaunched infomercial. For the next 26 months, Sorenson ran his infomercial multiple times a day and cleared over $32 million dollars of revenue in just over two years.

It seemed like every golfer in America had the Momentus. The aid was still popular with professionals, and Sorenson’s friend Todd Hamilton came on board to endorse the product, claiming it had helped him win the 2004 Open Championship.

Sorenson has never sold out. He’s continued to innovate beyond the original Momentus iron and there’s now a Momentus putter and driver, to boot. Beyond golf, the company has expanded into tennis and baseball and found success in both. Today, Sorenson runs his business from Evergreen, Colorado, where he’s lived with his family since 2001. He still plays a little golf—and don’t be stunned if you see him on the Champions Tour or in the U.S. Senior Open sometime soon.

Next on the Tee

I asked Sorenson what was next, and he wasn’t shy in telling me that “this could be the best thing yet.” This, of course, was a massive claim considering the success of the Momentus Swing Trainer. His latest invention is a product called the Bunker Wizard and, folks, it might be the best invention since the push cart. That’s just my opinion, but consider the words of noted YouTube golfer Peter Finch: “Whoever designed that [the Bunker Wizard] like, Nobel Prize, easy.”

I’ve been in and around the golf business for over 40 years. I’ve never seen anything as wildly logical and drastically needed as the Bunker Wizard. I wondered why it wasn’t everywhere, and Sorenson was candid in his response. “I’ve been battling Long COVID for three years.” This stunned me because for the nearly two hours we spoke, he was animated and projected high energy. He’s finally breaking out of the fog, but during that time he found himself without the energy to launch a new product as much as he’d like to do it.

Nobody knows what the future holds, but I do know that every single person who has ever uttered a word to me about Jim Sorenson, going back to when I was a collar-popping teenager in the eighties, has said nothing but the best things about the man. I also know that come what may, be it Colin Montgomery, Long COVID, or even the doubles Ping-Pong team of Seve and Carmen Ballesteros, you can’t keep a good man down.

Let’s raise a toast to Jim Sorenson, a fighter, an entrepreneur, a champion, and one of my first golf heroes. More importantly, a helluva good man.