Pro's Don't Need High Tech Gear
PHILIP MARTIN NWAnews.com
My geekiness is manifested in an electronic subscription to a weekly bulletin on golf equipment published by an irascible man named Frank Thomas. He regularly answers questions from golfers — most of whom are interested in hitting the ball farther — in his newsletter, in a wry tone that cuts through most of the pseudo-scientific cant that surrounds golf marketing. Thomas believes most golfers are suckers for industry hype and technological “innovation,” and most of us would be better off if we saved the money we spend on new sticks and put it toward lessons.
(His recently published book — Just Hit It: Our Equipment and Our Game — reflects his skepticism of game-changing gear in its title. Unlike a reliable swing, the book can be bought — and Thomas’ newsletter subscribed to — at his Web site www. franklygolf. com. The book is $ 22. 95, the newsletter free. )
Thomas is probably the best credentialed person on the planet to write about such things; he is credited with inventing the graphite shaft and a device called the Stimpmeter that measures the relative speed of putting greens. For 26 years he was the technical director of the United States Golf Association, which means he played a big part in determining which clubs and balls conform to USGA standards. In some ways he reminds me, in attitude and prose style, of Bill James, the baseball statistician who revolutionized the way the game was analyzed and in the process devastated much of baseball’s conventional wisdom.
While Thomas is a similar debunker of wishful myths, he’s different from James in that he’s basically espousing rather than contravening one of golf’s most hallowed tenets, often vocalized by old clubhouse geezers as: “It’s the Indian, not the arrows.” Thomas believes most golfers are selfdeluding hacks looking to buy a game — they’ll pay $ 400 or $ 700 for a driver that promises them 10 more yards. And the sorry truth is despite the annual (or even more often ) upgrading of technology, the average male golfer still hits his drive — according to Thomas’ research — 192 yards. (They consistently estimate they hit it 30 or 40 yards longer than they actually do. )
Though my experience is necessarily skewed — I regularly play with some very good golfers, many of whom are young and strong and hit the ball prodigious distances — I tend to believe Thomas’ research. Especially when you allow for the mis-hits and pop-ups and wormburners the “average” golfer is prone to hit. Golf is such a difficult game that most people who try to learn to play it fail and end up giving up the sport.
People who have a vested interest in golf ought to be looking for ways to make the game easier for the recreational player (as opposed to harder for the best players ). The trend toward longer courses with faster greens is counterproductive for the golf industry, which enjoyed a mini-boom when Tiger Woods rose to prominence, and has slumped in recent years as all those new golfers inspired by Woods gave up the game.
Just because golf is hard, that doesn’t mean technological innovations don’t help. Thomas believes there have been only three genuinely significant advancements in golf club technology since 1970 or so. The first of these was the perimeter weighting on irons — and later metal woods and even putters — pioneered by Karsten Solheim’s Arizona-based golf equipment manufacturer Ping. Distributing weight along the edges of the club helped golfers straighten out mis-hit shots.
The second was the development of graphite shafts, which are lighter than steel but just as strong, allowing golfers to swing them faster, producing — other factors being equal — longer golf shots.
The third innovation was the accidental discovery of a springlike effect in titanium driver heads. Substituting lighter titanium for steel allowed club makers to make bigger club heads (which were more forgiving for average golfers, and eventually limited to 460 cubic centimeters in volume by the USGA ) but an unforeseen consequence of the new designs was a flexing of these thinner titanium faces that caused a kind of trampoline bounce.
For most golfers who swing the club at 80 to 90 mph, the USGA estimated that the greatest possible gain was maybe one or two yards. The average PGA tour player — with a swing speed of about 115 mph with a driver — could realize an extra eight to 10 yards of carry distance from the increased ball velocity. To head off an equipment arms race in which club makers would try to get closer and closer to an ideal “coefficient of restitution” (COR ) — resulting in ever longer tee shots that some thought might alter the character of the game or even render some championship courses obsolete — the USGA stepped in with limits on how springy a club could be.
Now virtually every driver on the market approaches the USGA-established (but otherwise entirely arbitrary ) COR limit of 0. 83. (A coefficient of 1. 0 would mean no energy at all is lost in the collision between club and ball — a physical impossibility. A coefficient of 0. 00 would mean that all the energy is lost — that the ball stuck to the face like a wad of gum. )
It’s primarily for this reason Thomas allows that if your driver is more than a couple of years old, you’d probably be well served by buying a new one — or, he suggests, a year-old one, which will cost half as much and work just as well.
While a longer, straighter drive doesn’t necessarily mean a golfer will play better, there’s no question that in the past few years golf equipment manufacturers have made it easier to hit a golf ball longer and straighter. It’s still not easy, and despite what you hear around the clubhouses, the chances of the average male golfer hitting a 300-yard drive is probably about the same as his dunking a basketball. For most people it’s just not going to happen. On the other hand, the difference between hitting one of today’s high-tech titanium shoe boxes and, say, a mid-1990 s Callaway Great Big Bertha feels like the difference between calculus and business math. To someone who learned to play in the era of persimmon-headed clubs, hitting one of these new drivers feels like cheating.
BALL GO FAR That’s not to say I’m still hitting the caramel-colored wood legendary club maker Irving King built for me when I was in high school; my current driver looks like a fastback computer hard drive on the end of a 44 3 / 4-inch graphite pipe. (It’s an 80 gram Adila VS Proto “By You” in the stiff flex ). And I probably hit it as far or farther than I hit my prized King driver when I was young and strong and hit the ball what, in the 1970 s, was considered prodigious distances. I don’t care if you think it looks silly, I’m not giving it up.
Thomas — who invented the graphite shaft — would probably argue that I’d get just as much out of the club if I was using the stock shaft that comes with the driver. In his newsletter he often points out that original equipment manufacturers (which club geeks like myself refer to as O. E. M. s ) such as TaylorMade, Cobra and Callaway fit their clubs with shafts that perform well for the overwhelming majority of golfers.
Only touring pros — who get their equipment for free — and extremely skilled players looking to tweak their clubs for specific variables probably ought to bother with “exotic” shafts like the Adila VS Proto. Which, at a retail price of about $ 180 uninstalled, is hardly the most expensive option out there. The Ozik TP-7, a version of which is used by K. J. Choi (a Korean player ranked in the world’s Top 10 ), carries a suggested retail price of $ 1, 000.
Choi is one of the few players on the PGA tour to use one of the new square-headed drivers, in his case the recently released Nike SUMO 2 5900 driver. Most of Nike’s tour staff — players (including Tiger Woods and 2008 Masters champion Trevor Immelman ) paid to use their product and display the trademark swoosh — use the marginally more traditionallooking Nike Tour 460 driver, which allows them to better shape their shots. Ernie Els is probably the biggest name to employ a square-headed driver at this time — he uses a Callaway FT-I LCG, which stands for low center of gravity.
The square shape — the SUMO 2 measures about 5 inches square — seems to be more than a marketing gimmick. After the club manufacturers nuzzled up against the COR limit, making their drivers as long as possible, the next step was to make them as easy to hit as possible. And it turns out that geometry may be the last frontier available to club designers. Almost every major club designer, even conservative Titleist, has a “new geometry” club on the market. Most of them — like the TaylorMade Burner, Titleist D 1 and the Cobra L 4 V series — are bullet-shaped.
Unlike increased COR, which proportionately benefited better golfers (or at least longer hitters ) more than average or struggling players, the new advances in design do nothing to help the pros (who don’t need the kind of help the new clubs provide ) and a lot to help those who have trouble hitting a golf ball in the direction they want to hit it.
It might be that the lousier a golfer you are, the more these new clubs could help you.
My geekiness is manifested in an electronic subscription to a weekly bulletin on golf equipment published by an irascible man named Frank Thomas. He regularly answers questions from golfers — most of whom are interested in hitting the ball farther — in his newsletter, in a wry tone that cuts through most of the pseudo-scientific cant that surrounds golf marketing. Thomas believes most golfers are suckers for industry hype and technological “innovation,” and most of us would be better off if we saved the money we spend on new sticks and put it toward lessons.
(His recently published book — Just Hit It: Our Equipment and Our Game — reflects his skepticism of game-changing gear in its title. Unlike a reliable swing, the book can be bought — and Thomas’ newsletter subscribed to — at his Web site www. franklygolf. com. The book is $ 22. 95, the newsletter free. )
Thomas is probably the best credentialed person on the planet to write about such things; he is credited with inventing the graphite shaft and a device called the Stimpmeter that measures the relative speed of putting greens. For 26 years he was the technical director of the United States Golf Association, which means he played a big part in determining which clubs and balls conform to USGA standards. In some ways he reminds me, in attitude and prose style, of Bill James, the baseball statistician who revolutionized the way the game was analyzed and in the process devastated much of baseball’s conventional wisdom.
While Thomas is a similar debunker of wishful myths, he’s different from James in that he’s basically espousing rather than contravening one of golf’s most hallowed tenets, often vocalized by old clubhouse geezers as: “It’s the Indian, not the arrows.” Thomas believes most golfers are selfdeluding hacks looking to buy a game — they’ll pay $ 400 or $ 700 for a driver that promises them 10 more yards. And the sorry truth is despite the annual (or even more often ) upgrading of technology, the average male golfer still hits his drive — according to Thomas’ research — 192 yards. (They consistently estimate they hit it 30 or 40 yards longer than they actually do. )
Though my experience is necessarily skewed — I regularly play with some very good golfers, many of whom are young and strong and hit the ball prodigious distances — I tend to believe Thomas’ research. Especially when you allow for the mis-hits and pop-ups and wormburners the “average” golfer is prone to hit. Golf is such a difficult game that most people who try to learn to play it fail and end up giving up the sport.
People who have a vested interest in golf ought to be looking for ways to make the game easier for the recreational player (as opposed to harder for the best players ). The trend toward longer courses with faster greens is counterproductive for the golf industry, which enjoyed a mini-boom when Tiger Woods rose to prominence, and has slumped in recent years as all those new golfers inspired by Woods gave up the game.
Just because golf is hard, that doesn’t mean technological innovations don’t help. Thomas believes there have been only three genuinely significant advancements in golf club technology since 1970 or so. The first of these was the perimeter weighting on irons — and later metal woods and even putters — pioneered by Karsten Solheim’s Arizona-based golf equipment manufacturer Ping. Distributing weight along the edges of the club helped golfers straighten out mis-hit shots.
The second was the development of graphite shafts, which are lighter than steel but just as strong, allowing golfers to swing them faster, producing — other factors being equal — longer golf shots.
The third innovation was the accidental discovery of a springlike effect in titanium driver heads. Substituting lighter titanium for steel allowed club makers to make bigger club heads (which were more forgiving for average golfers, and eventually limited to 460 cubic centimeters in volume by the USGA ) but an unforeseen consequence of the new designs was a flexing of these thinner titanium faces that caused a kind of trampoline bounce.
For most golfers who swing the club at 80 to 90 mph, the USGA estimated that the greatest possible gain was maybe one or two yards. The average PGA tour player — with a swing speed of about 115 mph with a driver — could realize an extra eight to 10 yards of carry distance from the increased ball velocity. To head off an equipment arms race in which club makers would try to get closer and closer to an ideal “coefficient of restitution” (COR ) — resulting in ever longer tee shots that some thought might alter the character of the game or even render some championship courses obsolete — the USGA stepped in with limits on how springy a club could be.
Now virtually every driver on the market approaches the USGA-established (but otherwise entirely arbitrary ) COR limit of 0. 83. (A coefficient of 1. 0 would mean no energy at all is lost in the collision between club and ball — a physical impossibility. A coefficient of 0. 00 would mean that all the energy is lost — that the ball stuck to the face like a wad of gum. )
It’s primarily for this reason Thomas allows that if your driver is more than a couple of years old, you’d probably be well served by buying a new one — or, he suggests, a year-old one, which will cost half as much and work just as well.
While a longer, straighter drive doesn’t necessarily mean a golfer will play better, there’s no question that in the past few years golf equipment manufacturers have made it easier to hit a golf ball longer and straighter. It’s still not easy, and despite what you hear around the clubhouses, the chances of the average male golfer hitting a 300-yard drive is probably about the same as his dunking a basketball. For most people it’s just not going to happen. On the other hand, the difference between hitting one of today’s high-tech titanium shoe boxes and, say, a mid-1990 s Callaway Great Big Bertha feels like the difference between calculus and business math. To someone who learned to play in the era of persimmon-headed clubs, hitting one of these new drivers feels like cheating.
BALL GO FAR That’s not to say I’m still hitting the caramel-colored wood legendary club maker Irving King built for me when I was in high school; my current driver looks like a fastback computer hard drive on the end of a 44 3 / 4-inch graphite pipe. (It’s an 80 gram Adila VS Proto “By You” in the stiff flex ). And I probably hit it as far or farther than I hit my prized King driver when I was young and strong and hit the ball what, in the 1970 s, was considered prodigious distances. I don’t care if you think it looks silly, I’m not giving it up.
Thomas — who invented the graphite shaft — would probably argue that I’d get just as much out of the club if I was using the stock shaft that comes with the driver. In his newsletter he often points out that original equipment manufacturers (which club geeks like myself refer to as O. E. M. s ) such as TaylorMade, Cobra and Callaway fit their clubs with shafts that perform well for the overwhelming majority of golfers.
Only touring pros — who get their equipment for free — and extremely skilled players looking to tweak their clubs for specific variables probably ought to bother with “exotic” shafts like the Adila VS Proto. Which, at a retail price of about $ 180 uninstalled, is hardly the most expensive option out there. The Ozik TP-7, a version of which is used by K. J. Choi (a Korean player ranked in the world’s Top 10 ), carries a suggested retail price of $ 1, 000.
Choi is one of the few players on the PGA tour to use one of the new square-headed drivers, in his case the recently released Nike SUMO 2 5900 driver. Most of Nike’s tour staff — players (including Tiger Woods and 2008 Masters champion Trevor Immelman ) paid to use their product and display the trademark swoosh — use the marginally more traditionallooking Nike Tour 460 driver, which allows them to better shape their shots. Ernie Els is probably the biggest name to employ a square-headed driver at this time — he uses a Callaway FT-I LCG, which stands for low center of gravity.
The square shape — the SUMO 2 measures about 5 inches square — seems to be more than a marketing gimmick. After the club manufacturers nuzzled up against the COR limit, making their drivers as long as possible, the next step was to make them as easy to hit as possible. And it turns out that geometry may be the last frontier available to club designers. Almost every major club designer, even conservative Titleist, has a “new geometry” club on the market. Most of them — like the TaylorMade Burner, Titleist D 1 and the Cobra L 4 V series — are bullet-shaped.
Unlike increased COR, which proportionately benefited better golfers (or at least longer hitters ) more than average or struggling players, the new advances in design do nothing to help the pros (who don’t need the kind of help the new clubs provide ) and a lot to help those who have trouble hitting a golf ball in the direction they want to hit it.
It might be that the lousier a golfer you are, the more these new clubs could help you.
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