Welcome to the weekly meeting of Golf Club Junkies Anonymous.
I’m Jim. I’m a golf club junkie. I’ve had this addiction for years. I have a garage full of golf clubs. I have a golf net in my living room, where I hit golf balls. I have a putting green in my backyard, where I putt under the lights.
People say I’m nuts. So what else is new?
Lately I’ve been dreaming about square drivers, triangular drivers, geometric drivers, and all high-MOI drivers.
MOI, or moment of inertia, is my friend. It is your friend as well, because MOI is a term for resistance to twisting in a golf clubhead. The higher the MOI, the less the twisting on an offcenter hit.
In other words, high MOI means more stability at impact, no matter where the ball strikes the clubface.
In this week’s print edition of
Golfweek (cover date June 9, 2007), we explore many of the ramifications of the new generation of high-MOI drivers. The most visible of these drivers are the square ones.
Square drivers look weird. They look unconventional. They look like a spatula.
But they work. They produce straighter shots on offcenter hits. They can turn wild golfers into semi-straight golfers.
Why is this?
From one of the June 9
Golfweek stories, here is Nike design chief Tom Stites on the square concept: “Think of a wide wheel base sports car. The wider the base, the more stable the car around turns.
“Filling in the squares of the corners of a driver makes the moment of inertia more. It’s like the wheel base of the sports car – it does the same thing as increasing the distance between the wheels of the car.
“If the mass of the driver is distributed to the extremes, the club is better equipped to resist any offcenter destabilizing force (offcenter hits). If the club more effectively resists changing its face angle during the three or four milliseconds of impact, it will send the ball less offline. It will also impart less side spin to offcenter shots.”
Nike’s Sumo2 and Callaway’s FT-i are the two most popular square drivers. Nickent has a new square driver, the 3DX Square, and A.J. Sports is selling a square head, the Z460X2, designed to synch with the popular A.J. Tech shafts.
Titleist’s 907 D1 has something of a triangular shape, and numerous other drivers have geometric shapes that brand them as part of the modern generation of drivers.
Call it Generation G, for geometric.
Although K.J. Choi won the Memorial Tournament with the Sumo2 – Choi’s second PGA Tour win with the square driver – most touring pros don’t want to be square.
Why? Because working the ball is difficult, if not impossible, with the square drivers. Furthermore, square drivers are designed primarily for inconsistent golfers who generate plenty of offcenter hits. Touring pros don’t have this problem.
The most popular driver manufacturer on the PGA Tour is still TaylorMade, and the company has stayed exclusively with round-headed, or pear-shaped, drivers that feature movable weight technology.
So what’s the best thing about all this driver commotion?
Golf club junkies know the answer: It’s that all the pronouncements and predictions about the doom of drivers were incorrect. In fact, innovation and interest in drivers has gone up, not down.
After the U.S. Golf Association enacted new driver regulations – for spring-like effect, for MOI, for shaft length – naysayers were fond of warning that drivers were dead. There was no room left for design exploration, they said.
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!
Golf club engineers and designers are brilliant. Many have come to golf from the space and aeronautics industries. They are creating marvelous new products.
One of the best examples of a golf company adapting to the modern era is provided by Cleveland Golf. Known for years primarily as a wedge company, Cleveland now has become a major player in both irons and woods.
How? Through forward thinking. Through the willingness to take design chances. The Cleveland HiBore XL driver, belonging to the Generation G era, is a space-age-looking driver that has caught the imagination of many golfers.
“The Cleveland HiBore XL has just exploded for us,” said Butch Marmon, vice president of sales and marketing for Golf Discount of St. Louis, which boasts 19 retail stores, two golf courses and two stand-along ranges. “It has been our No. 1 driver for the first four months of bringing it back.”
Bringing it back? There is no such thing for the golf club junkie. The worst that can happen: It goes in the garage, to be used another day, probably by another golf junkie.
Golf club addiction can be a wonderful thing.
Posted: 6/7/2007
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