As you might imagine, playing golf as long as I can remember life – and then tacking on 40 years in the golf equipment industry – has given me a broad perspective on the evolution of golf clubs and the game we play. Those six decades of observation and experience have not yielded a shortage of things that make me scratch my head and . . . and just wonder why that is?
Of course, beginning golf in the 1950s and developing into a pretty good teenage golfer in the 1960s meant that I learned with persimmon woods, forged blade irons and balata balls – that’s all there were back then.
Over those 40-plus years in the golf equipment industry, I have observed the evolution of all our clubs from those earlier “states of the art”. No one then would have imagined the technology we now see in drivers, irons, putters, shafts . . . But all that technology leaves me scratching my head all too often; I would like to share just a few of those puzzling observations and get your take on them, OK?
1. What really makes today’s drivers so much longer? It is impossible to isolate any single technology and how much it affects driving distance. Since those days of steel-shafted persimmon, we have had quantum leaps in shaft technology, heads have gotten nearly 3x the size, we have pushed perimeter weighting to the max, created faces of exotic metals that act like trampolines, and now the multi-material infusion of carbon fiber to further manage mass distribution. While all of those things have contributed to the distance gains, as far as the driver is concerned, my take is that it mostly boils down to two primary things.
A) Drivers are up to three ounces lighter than they were back then; that’s a weight reduction of 15-25%, so of course we can swing them faster . . . and clubhead speed makes the ball go further, and
B) We all swing harder than ever before because the penalty for an off-center hit has been dramatically reduced.
In my opinion, all the other technologies only tweak the effect of these two advancements. What do you all think?
2. What's the deal with “matched sets” of irons? From the advent of “matched sets” in the 1920s (a development pioneered by Spalding and Bobby Jones), irons have been designed so that the lowest-lofted 2-iron (now 3 or 4) through the highest loft club marked ‘P’, ‘A’ or ‘W’ all look alike. That’s always puzzled me, because the impact dynamics of a 25* iron are radically different from those of a 40* iron, and even more so to a club of 50* or more loft. Only recently have manufacturers begun to modify the mass distribution through the set to give higher launch angles to the longer irons and lower trajectories to the short irons, but when will they take this to the optimum and break the chains that bind – the restriction that all the irons in a set must look alike? [NOTE: I know that mixed sets have been offered and failed, so maybe it’s us golfers that won’t let them do that.]
3. What about those adjustable drivers/fairways. The advent of the adjustability device has completely taken over the driver category. There are no premium drivers sold today that are not adjustable, but I’ve always been puzzled by one very important aspect of this. To be truly “adjustable”, the driver shaft would have to perform in an identical fashion regardless of the position to which it has been rotated. But even the finest graphite shafts are not completely symmetrical in flex performance. In the roughly two-tenths of a second from the end of the backswing to impact, the driver head is accelerating from zero to 100+ mph, and shaft is exhibiting a lot of split-second dynamics. The fact is that those dynamics will likely change depending on the orientation of the shaft into the clubhead. The problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know about any specific shaft. I’ll leave the rest of this conundrum to your own head-scratching.
4. Forged blade irons vs. mainstream wedges. Being a wedge junkie, this one puzzles me the most. Statistics indicate less than 2% of all golfers are gaming a true single-piece forged blade iron (though a large percentage of tour players still favor them.) I’ve heard all the reasons:
“The thin top line is intimidating.”
“I can’t get the ball flight I need from the lower lofts.”
“I’m not good enough to play these.”
“They are not forgiving enough.”
What's truly puzzling is that in spite of this aversion to hard-to-hit blade irons, 95% or more of all wedges sold are of the same design favored by the tour players. Single piece cast or forged designs . . . just like tour blade irons. Heavy and stiff steel shafts . . . just like tour blade irons. I can’t make sense of that, but with very few exceptions, that’s all the industry gives us, isn’t it?
Let me share a little secret that no one will tell you. On an “Iron Byron” swing robot, a tour blade 9-iron is more forgiving of mishits than any of the current mainstream wedges. Does that make any sense at all?
It never did to me, which is why I started pioneering radically different wedge designs almost thirty years ago . . . with my most recent breakthroughs manifested in the Edison 2.0 wedges. These are definitely "not your father's wedges". (Those of you old enough to remember the Oldsmobile auto brand would remember that analogy!)
I'm sure there are lots of other things about the golf industry that make each of you scratch your heads in wonder or disbelief, so share those with all of us.
What makes you go “Hmmmmmm”?
1 comment
I believe that each club in the bag has a job, and hence should be gamed by an instrument that accomplishes it. It fills a distance gap and might be a different brand, have a different shaft, look odd even- but if it fits your need who cares. A driver needs to get you in the fairway at least 75% of the time, at a distance that allows you the best chance to get on or near the green, a faiway “wood” helps you progress down the fairway to get nearer or on the green, etc, etc, building a set is piecing together 14 clubs that accomplish this
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