BOMB: Well, playing in my club championship these last two weekends confirmed two things for me. First, after 8 ¿ rounds in the last 10 days, I have a new respect for the guys who do this for a living. It’s harder to play every day than it looks, especially when grinding on every shot. But most important was how critical set makeup is. I’ve been a member at Rock Ridge CC in Newtown, Conn., for almost two years now and I’m just finally learning how to bat it around the 6,000-yard ballpark. And a big part of that was finally matching clubs to course. Although the 3-iron had long ago been ditched for a 19-degree hybrid, a few weeks ago I canned the 4-iron, too, in favor of a fifth wedge. I carry a PW, a 54-degree, a 58-degree and my old Cobra Trusty Rusty that is so beat up I don’t know the loft. I just know I can hit it 110 yards every time and chip like a fiend with it. The new addition, a 60-degree wedge. I had found I was left with too many 65-yard shots. That was three-quarter 58-degree shot that simply wasn’t coming off very often. Next up, something to combat the tee shot on the uphill, dogleg left seventh. Hybrid barely got up the hill but 3-wood was going through the fairway. And with my normal ballflight being a modest fade, that made things worse. The solution: a 17-degree Ping G10 4-wood—draw version, no less. Gene Sarazen would be proud.
My point being that so few everyday players think about putting clubs in the bag for the course they play. Not so with tour pros. Phil Mickelson changes his set makeup almost every week. Hell, he changed it for a playoff at BellSouth a couple of years ago. Lefty knew a playoff constituted a new round and he could change within the rules. The playoff would only be played on No. 18 so he took his sand wedge out and added a 3-iron and used that club to hit the green on his winning hole. In fact, many pros bring many clubs with them. Bernhard Langer, for example. Langer brings six—and sometimes as many as eight—wedges with him to each tour stop. When I asked Langer why, he said, "You never know what to expect. Sometimes the sand is soft, other times firm. Sometimes the rough is thicker. I have to make sure I have the right tools for the job."
The right tools for the job. Are you folks listening out there? And by the way, I actually learned three things last week. The third being that I need to work on my putting. Lost in the finals--a 36-hole affair--7 and 6. Congratulations to Jeff Ross--a most worthy club champion.
GOUGE: You learning something flies in the face of that adage about old dogs new tricks and chasing cars. Nevertheless, I think there's more here than meets the idea, as it were. Fact is, many of us could shoot the same score with fewer clubs, not more. Golf Digest's own Roger Schiffman played a 3-club tournament this weekend, shot the same score with 3 clubs (8-iron, 3-wood, putter) one day as he did with a full set the day before. The bigger problem with set makeup for most of us normal humans is getting a pretty good gauge on how far we hit each club in our bag and whether those differences are meaningful. A good club-fitter with an advanced launch monitor (see TrackMan) will be able to chart each club in your bag and tell you what your distance gaps are. If you're hitting your 3-hybrid the same distance as your 5-wood, for instance, you might want to figure out why. One of them is clearly the wrong club. Now, back to the enlightenment of our Rock Ridge CC finalist. Five wedges?! If your game has such subtlety that you can detect meaningful performance advantages between a two-degree difference in loft, well, you're some kind of golf ball trajectory savant. But good on you. For most of us, it just doesn't matter. It also points to the fact that we continue to rely on tools to solve our own inadequacies. The truth is, the 14-club rule is an anachronism, and a completely arbitrary one at that. As Frank Thomas has offered, reducing the number of clubs to 10 or so might be as good a clamp on technology's effect on elite golf as there is. It harms no one and still reasonably identifies the best players. The truth is for a chopper like me, I could play with 14 clubs from 14 different manufacturers with half a dozen different shaft flexes and at least as many different shaft weights, and shoot my best round ever. Which is exactly what happened the last time I did that. Your revelation has merit, though. People ought to reorganize their kits, as the Brits say. Five clubs you ought to chuck right now: any fairway wood with 15 degrees or less loft; any iron with less than 5-iron loft; any driver made before 2005.
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