The Rest of the List

A reader asks, "Will the editor post the testing results of all other clubs and balls that did not get a gold or silver rating in the 2008 Hot List?"

Golf Digest Equipment Editor Mike Stachura responds:

Just as we don't post the results for courses that do not make the grade in our ranking of the 100 Greatest Courses, we don't post results for products that are not elevated to Gold or Silver status on the Hot List. The Hot List is about singling out the most significant products, which is different than the idea of assigning a grade to every single product introduced in the last year. That said, we do have a scoring system and we can put our results in some kind of perspective. For instance among our 240 finalists (listed on our website), not one of these products received a final score of less than 70.56, and the average for those finishing last among finalists was 82.23. What does that mean? Bottom line: The difference between making the list and not making the list is small, but in our minds, significant. Only products that demonstrated consistent excellence across multiple criteria ended up on the list. The list isn't about good products. There are loads of those. It's about exceptionally great products, and those are relatively few, less than 25 percent of the total of 552 products that made the Hot List.

--Bob Carney