2008 Hot List: Golf Digest

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Golf Equipment: golfdigest.com

Photos by Charles Laberge

February 2008

If you walked down the range on pro-am day at any PGA Tour event and stared into the bags of all those lucky amateurs, you'd come to one sad conclusion: Too many average golfers must not believe golf equipment is getting any better. That helps explain why you would so often find outdated, overworn and ill-fitted clubs in nearly every bag.

Leigh Bader, golf-industry visionary and co-owner of Joe & Leigh's Discount Golf Pro Shop in South Easton, Mass., one of the game's largest retailers, senses the growing disconnect between golfers and golf-club technology. Perhaps it's confusing.

Perhaps it's distrust. Perhaps it's just ignorance. Whatever the case, Bader saw more evidence at a recent event for the New England Golf Course Owners Association. "Of the 80 bags," Bader says, "I'd bet 40 had garbage in them." It gets worse. National Golf Foundation statistics indicate that more than three-quarters of Baby Boomer golfers respond negatively to the statement "I enjoy playing with the latest clubs." A recent survey of leading golf retailers suggested that two of the top-selling driver models were "Lowest price" and "Used."

We recognize it's the rare golfer who can afford to run out and buy a new set of clubs every year. But still, a lot of consumers are asleep at the wheel of their golf carts when it comes to digging the newest equipment. Too many are playing irons that appeared in the late 1980s, and too many are hanging on to their 400 cubic-centimeter drivers from the turn of the century. If you haven't thought about upgrading your equipment in the past six months, let alone the last six years, you have more than a little catching up to do.

Consider the Golf Digest Hot List a wake-up call, a crash course in understanding how the game's latest technologies are different -- and that much better -- than what we've ever seen before. The equipment designers engineering significant advancements in our clubs and balls are doing so with the needs of average golfers in mind. Tiger, Phil and Vijay will have to wait their turn.

This multi-page package is home to our most ambitious review of the game's top equipment. We spent four months analyzing, discussing and, yes, hitting the game's best clubs and balls. All together, we reviewed 552 individual products and narrowed that group to 240 finalists. With all the different shafts and lofts, our equipment closet contained more than 2,000 pieces. In addition, more than a ton and a half (literally 3,255 pounds) of new golf equipment made the trip to the CasaBlanca Golf Club in Mesquite, Nev., for our annual Hot List Summit, a two-week total-immersion experience in golf equipment that brought together amateur players, leading teachers, top retailers and scientific experts. More than 50 contributors and editors were involved in this year's project.

The result is what we believe to be the 130 most significant products in the game. Our process is substantial, certainly, but we believe it has to be if we're to uncover the equipment you should be trying. This stuff ought to be enough to snap anyone out of the technophobic doldrums. Trust us, we've done the work for you. This stuff is worth a look. Just open your eyes.

The Process

Discovering Excellence

The Hot List is a search for the exceptional, and it requires an exhaustive effort. The exercise lasts an entire year, beginning with frequent visits and discussions with R&D experts at every meaningful equipment company and culminating with the Hot List Summit, conducted this year at the CasaBlanca Golf Club in Mesquite, Nev.

The mission of the Hot List is to provide a guide that all golfers should use as a starting point in the search for new equipment. For the first four years of the Hot List, we elevated one product to the position of Editors' Choice. We have come to see that too much has been made of this single designation when the intent has always been to identify the superior products (plural) in each category. We know one club isn't for everybody. Still, though we consider several hundred products, the majority don't earn our approval. Golfers should take these recommendations and build their choices from there. Every year we have tried to improve our process. This year, we increased our panel of players from 12 to 20, including a group of high-handicappers who helped our understanding of super game-improvement irons and anti-slice drivers. The expanded panel was especially important this year because we increased our Performance/Playability criterion to 40 percent of a product's score. Our players and teachers hit clubs fit to their specifications, and players hit only the products geared to their abilities. (For example, no one higher than a 5-handicap hit irons in the Player's category.)

Also, we used robot testing to provide a better picture of each driver's characteristics. We employed industry leaders Golf Laboratories Inc. and the TrackMan ball-flight analysis system. We robot-tested a 10.5-degree sample driver from each of our finalists. We also used TrackMan (above) extensively in testing several performance concepts at this year's Summit.

As in the past, we consulted with a group of leading retailers to better understand the marketplace and conferred with a team of scientists to better understand the strengths of each product's technology. The four judges take input from our panels, and then, product by product, criterion by criterion, using a 100-point scale, cast the only votes on the Hot List. It's an extremely deliberate process, but to discover shades of excellence, it must be.

Equipment Terms

Know the difference between COR and MOI

Bounce

The degree to which the sole of a club angles up and away from the ground plane when the club is in a square setup position. In general, more bounce is better for soft sand and high, lush grass; less bounce is better for firm sand and turf.

Bulge

The face curvature from heel to toe that corrects spin on mis-hits.

Camber

The radius measurement of the sole from front to back or heel to toe.

Center of Gravity (CG)

A theoretical point that defines the average location of weight in a clubhead and the internal point about which an object rotates. A low CG helps to launch the ball higher. A club's CG isn't always found at its geometric center.