BOMB: Well, for those of you that may have wondered what happened to us, the answer is simple: We’ve spent the last couple of weeks gearing up for our annual Hot List summit meeting which, as I write this, has us in Mesquite, Nevada at the Casablanca Resort. At least we don't have to worry about the weather like at the inaugural summit in 2003 when we spent one day dodging snowflakes.
The summit is, by far, the most extensive, expensive and exhausting undertaking done by Golf Digest all year. It involves more than 40 outside panelists and more than a dozen editorial and support staffers. But the Summit is merely the culmination of a year-long effort to provide the most comprehensive, helpful equipment coverage anywhere. Lord knows we’re certainly not here for the $6.99 buffet. And not everything that goes on here, will stay here, either. We’ll update our blog every day until the meeting breaks up on October 26th. Tomorrow we welcome a dozen women who will be testing product for Golf For Women magazine, so you'll want to check that out. But for now I'll let my partner fill you folks in on what happened today. That is if the chocolate cake he had for dessert didn't send him into sugar shock. Jeez, Gouge, that thing was so thick it looked like you needed a steak knife to cut through it. Or one of your swings with a wedge on the range this afternoon.
GOUGE: Seriously, is there any better test for a wedge's worthiness than it helping me get a ball in the air? Good thing the folks here in Mesquite have done a great job preparing the turf for our equipment evaluations. We’re not bruising the freshly overseeded grounds; we’re darn near deflowering it. The challenge the last few days has been putting some ideas to the test with the use of the best analytical tools in the business. The importance of loft on your driver and the importance of one shaft vs. another are two ideas we put under the microscope, among a handful of others (one of the others involves playing taps for your 3-iron). The results of those tests will be part of the next few issues of Golf Digest. And it’s a powerful microscope we have at our disposal. Trackman, the revolutionary ballflight monitoring device that literally sees and measures thousands of points during the flight of any shot from driver to wedge, reveals with alarming specificity what certain clubs and balls can do that others can’t, or in some cases, what they’re all pretty good at doing. Thanks to this device, we're not guessing here; we've got facts.
What's also a fact is how big this process has come in just four short years. The numbers of this year's Hot List enterprise are almost as great as the challenge of assessing quality in the golf equipment business. There are 240 products that have reached this final stage of evaluation, and perhaps fewer than half will be honored on the 2008 Hot List, which will be featured in the upcoming February issue of Golf Digest. In all, more than a ton-and-a-half of clubs and balls (yes, literally) have been shipped to Mesquite. (Friends, that's a lot of shrinkwrap and conservatively, well over a quarter of a million dollars worth of new product, much of which has yet to come to market.) Each driver has been tested on a swing robot by the experts at Golf Laboratories, and those results will be analyzed by the four editors responsible for equipment coverage in the family of Golf Digest publications, including Golf Digest, Golf World and Golf for Women. It is a massive commitment. It's not an idle few days on the range. As we've said before about the Hot List, it's a lot like what Vince Lombardi used to say about winning: It's not a some time thing, it's an all-the-time thing. Every trip we've made, every round we've played, every phone call we've made has been geared to the idea of better understanding the new technology in the game so that the average golfer can make sense of all that will be presented to him in the next six months.
There's no question the Hot List has become an enormous undertaking that goes beyond the intense two weeks of club and ball evaluations that occur every October. But it is enormous because the responsibility is enormous. The difficulty the average golf consumer faces today is almost uncomfortably unmanageable. Technology is bringing new and measurable complexity to the simple act of choosing the next tool you’re going to use to shank a golf ball off a tee marker. Our job is to make sure all that technology is understandable and meaningful. It is an exercise in delineating shades of excellence. Kind of like me and chocolate cake, and if you must know, Sunday night's was just one layer of icing better than Tuesday night's. Still, like the new Hyper X driver from Callaway and the r7 CGB Max driver from TaylorMade, there’s always something new with potential coming soon. What's that? You haven't seen those yet? You will shortly. Speaking of which, where's dessert tomorrow night?
