"Internally here, I call it aggregate incrementalism," says Jeff Colton, senior vice president of research and development for Callaway Golf. "It's the idea that as an R&D team, adding up tenths of yards of improvement is OK. You add up slight improvements in ball speed or aerodynamic patterns or off-center-hit robustness, and all of a sudden it becomes a large macro-effect."
Hot List 2009 changes. This relentless pursuit of innovation explains why we began our Hot List research this year with 471 candidates, each with a story to tell. Those that excelled in making improvement possible in the most intriguing and appealing ways found their way onto this year's Hot List.
Our process also has been improved in two ways: First, where appropriate, we have split a club category into two price divisions to reflect the market. As a result, we eliminated the need for Value as a criterion. Second, we've added the criterion of Look/Sound/Feel because readers aren't just interested in how the club affects the ball, but how it affects the player.
One more change: Our Hot List for golf balls will appear in an issue later this spring so we can review products that weren't available for evaluation this issue. It'll be our most complete examination of this segment ever.
Golfers have long been fascinated with technology as a means to improvement, but for much of the game's history new products have had no documented impact on the performance of average golfers. In the last decade that has changed significantly. Two strokes' worth of change. That's something we all can buy into, and what better place to start than the 2009 Hot List?
Coincidence? We think not. Handicap data provided to Golf Digest by the USGA (the blue line in the chart) shows a decrease in the average Handicap Index for men from 16.5 in 1994 to 14.6 in 2008 (the drop for women during this time went from 29.9 to 27.4). That coincides with the greatest expansion in golf technology in history. Annual equipment submissions to the USGA's Research and Test Center have nearly quintupled since the mid-1990s, and the number of products being tracked by research firm Golf Datatech has doubled (the red line in the chart). In 1997, there were 217 clubs and balls on its list. In 2008, there were 454, down slightly from a high of 475 in 2005.
--Mike Stachura
THE PROGRESS
THE TECHNOLOGY EFFECT: LONGER, HIGHER, STRAIGHTER
By Mike Stachura
The experiment was simple: Get some of today's equipment and some vintage clubs (courtesy of 3balls.com, a used-club website), mix in average golfers and fire up the TrackMan launch monitor to find out how much modern technology matters. Of course, when we say vintage, we're not talking about hickory-shafted spoons and niblicks. The oldest club we evaluated was less than 25 years old. Most were introduced within the last decade.
As expected, the results were convincing, starting with the driver, the single club that has improved the most in the past 20 years. We looked at four TaylorMade drivers from the past three decades ('85 Burner Plus, '97 Ti Bubble 2, '03 R580XD and the new Burner). According to our TrackMan ball-flight data, the new Burner driver averaged 28 more yards than the '85 Burner Plus, with significant improvement in dispersion despite the fact that the shaft in the modern Burner is about three inches longer. The results are dramatic, but what was more intriguing was the six-yard gain in distance -- and accuracy -- since the R580XD, a model just six years old.
We conducted this experiment with three generations of Callaway fairway woods, and the results were similar (straighter with each new generation and a 21-yard improvement in distance). Irons? It was the same story for low- and middle-handicappers hitting three Ping 7-irons introduced in the past two decades. The newest clubs produced more distance and a higher ball flight. Of course, your results might vary from ours, but you won't know until you try.
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