Geared to The Max

By John Skow

DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT CARbon fiber is? Modulus graphite? Boron? They used to put boron into gasoline, or at least into gasoline ads. Now it goes into wildly technological golf clubs and tennis racquets. Or is that argon? Or titanium? Neither of which is to be confused with something called Kevlar -- the stuff they make bullet-proof vests from. Kevlar these days is a very hot item. There are bulletproof Kevlar canoes, for example. And water skis. And bicycle tights. (A lie: the Kevlar bike tights, for the moment, are imaginary. But remember, you saw them here first.) The rest of these molecular rarities, however, actually exist at your neighborhood sports store. Bring your platinum card.

Americans, especially high-mileage males, suffer a peculiar kind of dementia in the presence of gear; they are likely to buy any piece of overpriced sports equipment, so long as it has a digital readout or is made of something crucial to the success of the space station. Or both; Panasonic is advertising a tiny hand-held Global Positioning System (GPS) device, a little brother to the satellite navigation system developed for the military and now used in aircraft and yachts. This astonishing dingus will consult the stars (satellites, actually) and tell you, on land, in the air or at sea, how lost you are. Cheap at $1,295.

This all may sound like a joke -- your tax dollars at play -- but to the endlessly industrious elves who push sports gear, recycling military and space technology is bottom-line serious. Last year American sporting-goods makers sold $11.6 billion worth of gear, about $600 million more than in 1991. Add sports clothes and shoes, and you get $33.3 billion wholesale. Add bicycles, motorcycles, RVs, snowmobiles and boats and you get, or they get, $46 billion.

Selling sports stuff to people who don't need any more of it involves positioning your product as close as possible to the intersection of two powerful psychosocial forces. One is the Vector of Incompetence: if you can't hit a decent forehand or chip shot or jog half a mile without seeing spots, do you take yet another futile lesson or try once again to puff yourself into condition? No, you buy a new racquet, or set of irons, or a frightfully expensive pair of illusion-enriched running shoes.

The other force is Gear Freakery. This is almost exclusively a male obsession, perhaps because a lot of gear has vaguely military associations (guns, of course, are gear). A definition is elusive, but a wristwatch that just tells time is not gear. A wristwatch that also reads out altitude and barometric pressure is gear to make a grown man whimper. L.L. Bean sells one made by Casio at $69.

Makers of tennis and golf equipment are the quintessential competitors in the gear market: their sports are so difficult to learn that most players spend their lives gazing wistfully up at mediocrity's underside. Repeated discouragement, of course, leads to repeated equipment purchase. But gear possibilities are poor; you don't really want moving parts or a liquid crystal display on a racquet or a three wood.

The answer is to provide a gearlike association, the way sports shoes have done by gluing on wildly colored pieces of leather and rubber, supposedly of different density and (nifty gear wording here) torsional rigidity, so the shoe looks like a machine. Prince, the firm that in 1976 invented the big, fat tennis racquet for big, fat weekend players, brought out a big-head "Vortex" racquet three years ago. It was the latest in a triumphant evolution of big racquets made of ever more exotic materials, including graphite and boron, and similar alarming materials. The Vortex was made of, let's see, "visco-elastic polymer." Which, of course, was what they made the skin of stealth bombers out of.

That was great, but that was then. The Vortex is all but history. And the aerospace industry, beset by peace and recession, has not brought out any dark-of-the-moon materials in the last couple of years. High-impact modulus- polymer-visco-graphite is just as good as it ever was, but the new has worn off. This year's Prince entry in the country-club weapons race is called the Extender. Made of graphite and liquid crystal polymer, the Extender is bigger than the usual big-head (116 sq. in. vs. 110), and its oval shape is supposed to give it a bigger sweet spot, for those of us with shaky hand-eye coordination. Brand loyalty wobbles here; there's an outfit called Weed that makes a 138-sq.-in. war club.

Some gear actually does work a little better than the earlier models it is supposed to supersede. At Easton Aluminum's big test lab in California's San Fernando Valley, techies have succeeded in stiffening the "flex" of an arrow's aluminum shaft by thirty-thousandths of an inch. Result? A faster arrow and reduced wind resistance. But after radical sports-gear breakthroughs (big-head tennis racquets and golf clubs, high-back plastic ski boots), the improvements are marginal and often largely cosmetic. Mountain bikes, for instance, are madly popular everywhere, but they are not really all that useful in the Northeast, where mountain trails are brutal and steep, composed mostly of rocks the size of refrigerators. You can't navigate them with a bike or, for that matter, with a humvee (the ultimate gearmobile, short of James Bond's Aston Martin with its ejecto seat).

Let's say, however, gotta-have-it disease strikes and you decide to buy a mountain bike. Call it an urban pothole bike. You can get a perfectly good steel-frame model for about $400. But "perfectly good" is bean-counter talk, pitched at too high a logical frequency for the gear freak to hear. No gear- head wants a $400 bike when for $800 or more he can get a model with an aluminum frame or even one with a frame made of Boralyn ("an advanced metal matrix that was classified until 1992" and was used to make Apache helicopters) that is stronger and weighs a pound or so less. But wait: technology now offers front and rear springs ("coil, with oil/air dampener," says Nashbar's catalog) for mountain bikes, like those on motorcycles. These will double the cost of your machine -- count on $1,500 to $3,000 total -- and increase the likelihood of breakdown. They will also make your bike heavier, and it is a matter of debate whether they are desirable in terms of road feel and quickness of response. Nevertheless, gotta have one of those babies. Don't neglect mountain-bike shoes ($189), Lycra mid-thigh tights with racing stripes ($27) and a team bike shirt with pockets on the back.

Other gotta-haves, depending on depth and direction of one's gear neurosis, may include a variety of boats. Leaving aside oceangoing yachts (because yacht gear is so costly that spending money on it does not tax the ingenuity), there are ever more sophisticated kayaks. The tippy river variety requires skill, however, including the ability to do the Eskimo roll when your head is pointing down and the bottom of the kayak is pointing up. If you've got this maneuver licked, buy a two-seater model and practice the double-trouble Eskimo roll with your significant other. Sea kayaks, the kind with the little rudder on the stern, are ideal for unskilled gear-heads who have exhausted the possibilities of dry-land bankruptcy. These boats can cost $2,500 -- and yes, there is a Kevlar model. Necky sells it for $2,350. You need a waterproof Nikonos camera, $4,000, and Gore-Tex foulies (as nautical types call foul- weather suits), $557. An ultralight fiberglass-graphite paddle goes for $275. Bring your GPS receiver (see above) and your hand-held foghorn ($9.95). Sailboarders, for their part, now have carbon-fiber booms, roller harnesses, blade fins for greater lift, and subtly concave hulls, all satisfactorily expensive.

Scuba equipment has not changed much since the buoyancy compensator was developed a few years ago. Assuming you already own a boatful of scuba gear and are baffled about the direction new purchases might take, consider under- the-ice diving in winter. Your wet suit, luckily, won't handle the sophisticated gear requirement. You must have thermal underwear ($69) and an item your spouse has never heard of: a dry suit, $627. Bring your hand-held GPS unit. Yes, there's one that's waterproof.

Finally, if your gear hunger is grotesque but your skill utterly nonexistent, buy a bass boat. You can spend $29,000 or so on a 21-ft. skiff, with a 245-h.p. outboard motor (those bass are speedy), an electric trolling motor foot-operated from your bass-fighting chair, an electronic fish finder, a depth gauge, a water-temperature gauge, a stereo and an aerated well in case you catch something. Your on-board fax connects you with your divorce lawyer. Even if you know nothing even remotely nautical, you are dead certain to raise the pulse of thousands of gear freaks, who will share the same frenzied reaction: gotta have it.

With reporting by Dan Cray/Los Angeles and David E. Thigpen and Frederick Ungeheuer/New York