This week, Golf Digest’s crack equipment team traveled to lovely Sandestin Resort in Destin, Fla., for the 2010 Golf Ball Hot List Summit. During three days of intense testing, 10 low-handicap player panelists are putting more than 50 models of golf balls through their paces at the resort’s Raven course. Here’s the hitch: the balls’ logos have been covered with ink, so no one knows what balls they’re testing on any given group of holes. The raters are asked to judge the balls in three categories: performance on full shots, performance on and around the greens, and overall feel. No easy task, according to tester Liam Branagan, head pro at one of the courses down the street. “It’s really tough to tell a difference between the different balls in the same category,” he says. Indeed, the exercise is an eye-opening experience for the whole group as the logo-free balls had them focusing strictly on the performance benefits of the spheres. “I’d never played anything but one brand my whole life,” admits Joe Knight, a local-senior-tour player, “but I can tell that there are others that work just as well.”
Every twosome of testers is accompanied by an editor who takes down notes and scores. These are no ordinary rounds of golf: each tester hits some 25 to 30 approach shots, chips, pitches and putts per hole. It wears on their bodies, but part of the selection process for testers are finding those able to withstand the grind. Still, those who spent an hour warming up on day one spend less time with the clubs on the range the second morning and opt to focus on stretching instead.
So what happens to the balls after the player testing is done? “We’ll send them back to the office in Connecticut and keep them in our equipment closet until the list has been decided,” says assistant editor Ashley Mayo. “Then we’re planning to pack them up and send them to the U.S. troops in Iraq as practice balls.” Little will these troops know that some of the ink-covered balls they’ll be hitting into the desert cost four dollars a pop retail.
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Stina Sternberg
