GOUGE: Today is the first day of genuine heavy lifting at the annual Hot List Summit. When you sit in a room full of Ph.Ds like we did this morning with Hot List Technical Panel, you better bring your "A" brain. I was with them until they started talking about quadratic equations and velocity cubed, but for the most part I think the liberal arts majors in the room (I majored in philosophy) didn't get lapped by the field. I prefaced our annual meeting with the eggheads by referencing the old game show The Liars Club. That's perhaps a bit harsh because the technology we see is genuinely impressive. As I recently wrote, the deep thinkers at golf's leading companies are not merely looking for a needle in a haystack, they are looking for the needle because the only room for innovation anymore is within the eye of that needle. So sometimes the technology stories we receive for the Hot List need the kind of fine-tooth comb treatment that only our team of engineering wizards can provide. The Golf Digest Hot List engineering Ph.D team consists of George Springer of Stanford, Jack Hu of the University of Michigan, Martin Brouillette of the Universite de Sherbrooke, John McPhee of the University of Waterloo, David Lee of Gordon College and John Axe, a retired expert in condensed matter science and neutron scattering from Brookhaven National Laboratory. These guys are plenty smart, for sure, but they speak in simple terms that even a guy who made it through college without taking a single science course can understand. Like Martin Brouillette reminded us early on, "The golf ball is blind. It doesn't care about any of this technology. Where it goes at impact is a function of the center of mass of the club, the moment of inertia tensor and the COR [coefficient of restitution] distribution on the face." In other words, how you get there is largely immaterial. Generally speaking, not everything in golf equipment works because of what you see when you look at the club. That might include things like the grooves on a putter face, the shape of a cavity on a game-improvement iron and whether a driver can in and of itself increase your swing speed. We investigated all of those topics and more during an intellectual steel cage match of a morning and early afternoon, but the most amazing discovery was how eager the team was to try out all the new stuff on the range and the golf course. And every one of our dream team found several new items to add to their shopping list for next golf season. So for all their critical review, they found plenty to get excited about. In other words, they're all golfers, too.
BOMB: I hear ya, my friend. Not only are they plenty smart (heck, they own more Ph.D.s than John McCain has homes), but they can also speak in simple terms, such as when one said, "There is technology and then there is baloney technology." That's the real value of our academic panel. They don’t just answer our questions, but help us toss the b.s. flag on a claim that might sound good on paper, but just doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Backing that up is an intense desire to get to what makes clubs work. Brouillette, for example, conducting a putter face study that included more than 250 different experiments. Such attention to detail allows us to discover technology that makes sense. That makes a difference. That is significant and in the end, makes it worth it for our readers to dig into their wallets yet again for a new piece of golf equipment. And shockingly, we had little trouble following along, making that two-day crash course in physics we took last year from John McPhee well worth that eight-hour drive home after the flight from Toronto got canceled. When the discussion turned to MOI matching on irons, more than one cited "The Physics of Golf" by Theodore Jorgensen--a book published nearly a decade ago--to make the case it was nothing new. And some of what we learned had nothing to do with specific clubs, but with theories about golf equipment (you might want to try a shorter shaft in your driver, they say). On the topic of clubs, however, our eggheads were generally impressed by what the manufacturer's had to offer this year. "Last year was pretty boring," said Brouillette. "But the manufacturers have come up with some very interesting concepts this year, particularly in irons." When a man of Brouillette's credentials (and golf swing) is intrigued by some of the clubs that may find their way onto the Hot List, well, you should be, too.
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