It is amazing how good each of the
various club making companies’ products really are. However, the remarkable thing is how one particular club can work
so much better for one person and there can be a different club that performs
better in the hands of different individual.
All of the
companies try to achieve the same goal by similar means. A player’s club designed for a better ball
striker has a very thin sole, with a high center of gravity and very minimal
offset. At the other end of the
spectrum, game improvement or game enhancement golf clubs are designed with
extreme perimeter weighting, large soles, and a great deal of offset. And every one of the club designers follow
this general formula.
But the
strange phenomenon that all of our fitters have experienced is that each of the
clubs from the various club makers seem to work better or worse for players of
the same ability.
Whether it
is weight distribution, aesthetics, or just overall feel, each player had a
different opinion on what they like best.
That is why outdoor club fitting is so important. A player can try out all of the appropriate
head and shaft combinations with our interchangeable fitting systems, see ball
flight, which can be seen and measured with ball flight monitors, and use feel,
an intangible that is personal to each individual, to determine what the best
possible match is for them.
Don't judge a book by it's cover
Nowadays, conventional wisdom on
both driver design and fitting states that the ultimate goal is a high initial
launch with low backspin. Most people
hit a driver that has too low of a launch angle for their particular
swing. Therefore, low center of gravity
mixed with a higher loft makes sense for 95% of golfers out there. It’s been tested, its been proven, it flat
out works on the course.
Well today I had a fitting that was
completely counter-intuitive.
Joe S., an older, unassuming, slight man came in for a full
bag fitting. After deciding on a nice
set of TaylorMade Burner irons with a super-tight dispersion, we moved on to
driver.
His main complaint was a lack of
distance and a block out to the right.
Based on those factors, the driver he ended up with absolutely does not
make a lot of sense on paper.
After running through all the usual
suspects and remedies for his ailment and watching balloon balls sail out of my
fitting bay, I took a shot in the dark and pulled out a Ping i15. Now normally a driver like that is designed
for excellent ball strikers with high club head speed who miss to the left if
at all. But as I was running out of
options, I took a stiff-tipped regular flex shaft with an 8 degree loft and let
him take some cuts with it. To both our
surprise, a high rocket of a shot with low spin and perfect trajectory ascended
out of the tent.
Now to be sure it wasn’t a fluke, I
had him go back and forth with it between the runner up, a G15, five different
times and each time he picked it up he destroyed it.
The moral of the story, in club fitting, no matter
what something says on paper, the ball flight is the key factor and sometimes
combinations that people have no business hitting work out the best. That is way there are still lower lofted
drivers still being produced.
