By Mike Stachura
Illustration By Henry Campbell October 2007

It was like someone had asked LPGA Tour player Christina Kim whether she would rather putt with her sand wedge, holding it in her teeth. Hit 3-wood off the tee? Why on earth would anyone do that? The conservative strategy of gearing down with a 3-wood off the tee to keep the ball in play just doesn't make sense anymore, at least in this tour professional's eyes.

"You've got to love the driver," Kim says. "That's the club I started playing with, and it's the one I always pound. I just don't hit 3-wood off the tee very often.

"My driver is far more accurate than my 3-wood."

That statement doesn't necessarily have to be true to be a powerful indication that the technology advantage of the driver might be fundamentally changing strategy off the tee, and not just for tour players but for you, too. A Golf Digest test of 20 average golfers ranging in handicap from 3 to 20 showed that there was relatively little difference in accuracy between 3-wood and driver tee shots, despite the typical 3-wood being about two inches shorter and having about four degrees more loft than today's driver. And with a distance advantage of more than 20 yards with the driver, the test suggests that average players might want to rethink their attitude toward the 3-wood (see page 107). The debate isn't that black and white, of course. For instance:

> Is the average player as well-fitted to his 3-wood as he's fitted to his driver?

> Is the 3-wood in most average golfers' bags as technologically advanced as the driver?

> Or is it simply the case that average golfers just aren't very accurate with any longer club, and so the driver's extra distance makes it, for lack of a better phrase, the lesser of two evils?

Our testing showed a slight benefit for the 3-wood over the driver for better players with faster swings. This reflects what we often see on the PGA Tour, where players choose the 3-wood or even a hybrid off the tee as a position club because the driver simply brings more trouble into play. It also falls in line with the idea that average players (for example, players who swing less than 95 miles per hour with the driver or hit the 7-iron less than 150 yards) mis-hit shots much more than tour players. Most mis-hits you make with a driver will be playable. Make that same move with a 3-wood, and you might not hit the ball at all.

Some designers will tell you that the most technologically advanced 3-woods are better than their predecessors in many of the ways that today's 460-cubic-centimeter drivers are better than those perfect blocks of oil-hardened persimmon from the 1970s.

"From an average-player standpoint, our current 3-wood is a way better club both off the tee and from the fairway than any fairway wood of a dozen years ago," says TaylorMade's Tom Olsavsky, senior director of product creation. "It's just that nobody cares as much. They essentially look the same, so there's no big story there."

Still, a number of 3-woods have gotten larger, and some have faces with springlike effect or coefficient of restitution (COR) readings equal to the U.S. Golf Association limit of .830, just like drivers. Says club designer Tom Wishon, who has two fairway woods in the Wishon Golf line that boast maximum springlike effect: "Even though we cannot keep the off-center COR as high on a fairway wood in relation to the center as we can with a driver, it is still a fact that if you start with an .830 in the center of the fairway wood, the off-center hits are still going to be pretty darn OK."

Traditionally, the increased loft of a 3-wood helped neutralize the effects of excessive sidespin, but sidespin control is what today's drivers are all about. They're designed with a heel-biased weighting to launch shots with less slice spin, and newer drivers with a higher moment of inertia (MOI) stay more stable on off-center hits. Does this make drivers straighter than 3-woods? Some believe it's getting closer.

"One of the main reasons the old 3-woods worked is that the extra backspin made the ball more stable as it went whatever amount off line," says Tom Stites, Nike's director of product creation. "In the old 3-woods you did not see much of the results of sidespin because the extra backspin drowned it out.

"Now the modern driver has less face twist plus less sidespin. Less does not need to be drowned out."

In other words, the 3-wood's benefits as a driving club might not be as necessary anymore. And the modern driver's primary benefits (better launch conditions across a greater area of the face) are nearly overwhelming compared to the 3-wood.

"Today's drivers, while long, are lighter and easeir to swing, and I think that helps with control as well," says Jeff Colton, senior vice president of research and development at Callaway Golf. "Their overall weight is extremely light compared to what it was 15 to 20 years ago. There's no question that the penalty in drivers has been reduced substantially through technological gains and has maybe diluted the differential between the 3-wood and the driver."

BE AGGRESSIVE?

Intuitively, the suggestion to bomb the driver all day seems excessively aggressive. We've all seen or experienced the wildly off-line tee ball, or even the persistent slice, with our big, new drivers. But a wild miss with a driver isn't going to be miraculously cured by putting a 3-wood in your hands. As for the persistent slice, there are plenty of drivers designed today to correct any undesirable ball flight.