BackAdvances In Golf Technology Make The Game Easier
The single biggest recent trend has been the march towards fully adjustable clubs, a trend that matured with TaylorMade's R1 driver
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When Englishman Justin Rose won the recent US Open, it was a big victory for the talented and overdue golfer, for England, which hadn’t had a champion since 1970, and for technology—Rose’s bag contained all of the most significant recent trends in golf club design.
The history of golf technology has been one of continuous improvement, with some seismic leaps along the way, such as the moves from leather balls to rubber or wooden shafts to aluminium, but the current round of advances is the most notable in decades—especially for recreational players. The single biggest recent trend, by far, has been the steady march towards fully adjustable clubs, a trend that matured with the release earlier this year of TaylorMade’s R1 driver—the one Rose used at Merion.
All irons and woods feature two key dimensions that affect ball flight. Loft is the degree of angle in the face of the club relative to the ground, or up and down. Club face angle is the angle relative to a line perpendicular to the target, or left and right. Increase the loft and the ball flies higher with the same swing. Make the club face more “open," or canted to the right, and the ball curves to the right (for right-handed golfers). In a perfect world, these adjustments would be simple, but golfers live and play in an extremely imperfect world where these dimensions need to be synced to the idiosyncrasies of each golfer’s swing, nearly as unique as fingerprints. If your swing produces a club face that is open at impact, the solution is to use a slightly closed club face to counteract this. If your swing does not produce enough height on your drive, choose a driver with more loft. That sounds simple, but there are two big problems. One is that most golfers must buy equipment in advance of fully knowing their swings in order to have a swing. The second is that for the vast majority of recreational golfers, their swings are in constant state of flux, changing from day to day, week to week, season to season—especially if they are taking lessons.
TaylorMade is not alone. Nike rolled out a driver with similar features (12 lofts and three face angles) globally in February, the VR S Covert ($300), which most of its sponsored pros such as Rory McIlroy are now playing. Callaway’s RAZR Fit Extreme ($400) has adjustable face angle weighting but not loft, and Ping has tweaked its flagship G25 drivers so each can be varied by half a degree of loft up or down, so a 10.5 degree driver now runs 10-11 degrees. About a dozen other adjustable drivers have arrived from smaller manufacturers such as Adams and Cobra.
But while adjustment was introduced with drivers, it is quickly spreading throughout the golf bag. Justin Rose also carried TaylorMade’s RocketBallz Stage 2 Tour 3-wood, and all fairway woods in this line ($230) feature adjustable loft. So do the new rescue clubs in the RocketBallz Stage 2 series, which for most golfers, pros and amateurs alike, have replaced less forgiving long irons and boomed in popularity. But while TaylorMade has yet to add face angle adjustment to these clubs, Nike’s new Covert series brings the complete two-dimensional adjustability to its fairway woods ($249) and rescue clubs (which it calls hybrids, $229).
Adjustable drivers, fairway woods and rescue clubs are today’s big technology story, but the other major improvement, especially for amateurs, has been in putters.Because of the seemingly simple stroke, putter selection has long hinged on aesthetics and almost mystical qualities, such as a “lucky" putter, rather than technology. But while the focus of most players has traditionally been on aim and speed rather than the putting itself, scientific studies have increasingly shown that the moment that matters most is when the ball leaves the face of the putter. That is because every putt, no matter how long or short, begins as a skid before the ball actually begins rolling. Like a tire, a rolling ball is surprisingly steady, but it is much more vulnerable to being thrown off by imperfections in the surface during the skid. The sooner the ball begins rotating the better the putt will be, period, and it is only recently that manufacturers began using two proven technologies to accomplish this: softer synthetic inserts in the face where the ball makes contact, and micro-grooves across the face of the putter, usually in tandem. As former PGA Tour player and putting legend Dave Stockton Jr, generally acknowledged as the world’s top putting guru and coach to many top professional players,told me, “No matter what, start by buying a grooved insert putter. They’re proven and there’s no reason not to use one." For most amateurs this change can be dramatic, and simply switching to this style of putter, perhaps the easiest change in golf, can immediately produce more consistent rolls with no changes to your putting stroke. At first only handful of companies, mainly Rife and TaylorMade, focused on these advances, but now grooved insert putters are widely available—Justin Rose used one, the TaylorMade Spider blade, to hoist the US Open Trophy at Merion.
Larry Olmsted is a golf and travel writer, and a columnist for Forbes and USA Today. He is on Twitter at @TravelFoodGuy.
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