GREAT AMERICAN TEACHING PROFESSIONAL – TONY WRIGHT

Tony Wright has had a lifelong love for the game of golf.  He was born in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, on August 3, 1949.  He was a caddy at the St. Clair Country Club in Washington, Pennsylvania as a youth.  He was fortunate enough to win a Western Pennsylvania Golf Association caddy scholarship that provided him full tuition to attend Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he received a B.S. in mechanical engineering in 1971.  He then went on to obtain a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and mechanics from the University of Minnesota in 1976.  After obtaining his Ph.D., he started working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) – a U.S. Department of Energy R&D laboratory – in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1976.  He had a successful career at ORNL for almost 35 years, and he retired from there at the end of April 2011.   Wright has continued to play golf at the Oak Ridge Country Club for the past 20 years.  About five years ago, he decided that he would like to become a professional clubfitter and has devoted these past five years to continuous learning about the science and art of effective clubfitting to help golfers play and enjoy the game more.  He has attended a number of schools and training sessions to learn clubfitting.  For the past four years, he has been a member of the Association of Golf Clubfitting Professionals (AGCP), and presently is a Level 9 Certified AGCP Professional Clubfitter.  Learning more about effective teaching of the golf swing and how to identify swing faults is an important element of his efforts to improve the quality of his clubfitting efforts.   Wright and his wife Diane live in Oak Ridge and they have two sons, two daughters, and three grandchildren.