These are the irons just about every golfer should play
J.D. Cuban
When the Hot List started more than two decades ago, there was one category of irons. Now there are four. The equipment industry continues to delineate player types based on preferred head shapes and sizes and, most importantly, how certain designs might enhance your skills or mask your flaws. With all those changes, it’s the newest iron category that is both the hottest and the one offering the most enticing promises.
Long story short: Players-Distance irons might provide the best of all worlds for the majority of players still searching for better iron play.
First, let’s look at a little history. The Players-Distance category really emerged a decade ago with Callaway’s multipiece Apex irons, but there were even earlier inklings of this bridge-like iron between the one-piece, cavity-back Players irons that exuded precision and the wider-soled, oversize Game-Improvement irons that promised distance and forgiveness.
Farther back, irons like the Mizuno MP-H4 and even the Callaway Big Bertha Fusion irons of 20 years ago suggested that distance, forgiveness and precision could live together in the same package. Over the last decade, it has been stalwarts like TaylorMade’s P·790, the Titleist T200 and now T250 irons, Ping’s i500 series, PXG’s 0311 P and others joining every year to make Players-Distance irons the most intriguing type of iron in the game. It became its own category in the Hot List in 2018.
Players-Distance irons offer two key characteristics that make them appealing to a broad swath of avid golfers: relatively compact shapes mixed with distance-enhancing face inserts made of super-thin high-strength steel or even titanium alloys. Throw in some heavy tungsten perimeter weighting that sits low in the clubhead, and the end result is an iron that can do it all—distance, trajectory control, forgiveness (in physics, it’s called high moment of inertia, or MOI) and feel.
These clubs fit a better player’s eye while making an average golfer walk a little taller to the first tee. Indeed, one of the early successes of the category, the P·790, had sales that covered an almost bizarrely wide range. According to company research, the level of players who purchased the original P·790 irons included nearly a third with handicaps less than 8 but also 25 percent with handicaps over 12.
A collection of Players-Distance irons from 2019, shortly after it became a Hot List iron category.
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of Players-Distance irons is that second word in the name. Because thinner face inserts are a separate piece from the rest of the body, which is sometimes also hollow, engineers have gotten those faces to flex much the same way they do on a driver. Even those low-on-the-face impacts that are so common with an iron feature extra rebound because the faces wrap around the leading edge, or slots in the sole get the entire face to give more at impact.
Any iron can be made more forgiving by stretching its size. The appeal of a Players-Distance iron is that its size is relatively compact and still provides the off-center forgiveness of a larger design, according to Titleist’s Chuck Golden, senior vice president of club research and development. He explained that you can have a greater effect on forgiveness by pursuing MOI in an iron, noting that a couple yards on a 7-iron mis-hit can be the difference between hitting the green and going in the water. That kind of improvement with the driver might be a fraction of a yard, which is imperceptible on a tee shot.
“If you can get away with maximizing the moment of inertia as much as possible within a pleasing shape, that’s a hill worth dying on,” Golden said.
All of those theories make sense, but more compelling is what happens when we put Players-Distance irons in the hands of real golfers at the Hot List. Our testers found Players-Distance irons to feel nearly identical to traditionally soft and solid Players irons while providing better feel than Game-Improvement types. They found Players-Distance irons to launch just as high and to be considerably more forgiving than the Players irons. Compared to Game-Improvement irons, Players-Distance irons launched just as high and were equally as forgiving.
In terms of raw data collected at the Hot List, Players-Distance irons proved even more impressive. Our testers saw a nearly 10-yard distance advantage over Players irons. Compared to irons in the Game-Improvement category, Players-Distance irons flew the ball nearly half a club farther on average. They also reached a higher apex.
In short, Players-Distance irons likely will give you all the iron game you need. In fact, our players liked the versatility of these clubs throughout the entire set. Said one tester, “The look is super sleek, super elegant, super thin. They make you feel confident and aggressive. I wouldn’t mind staying hours and hours on the range with these.”
WHAT OUR HOT LIST PANELISTS ARE SAYING
Players-Distance irons clearly resonate with our testers at the Hot List Summit. Our players evaluate irons on a 5-point scale in both Look/Sound/Feel and Performance. When you combine the average score of our testers in those two criteria, Players-Distance irons earned a higher total score than the averages for any of the other three iron categories (Players, Game-Improvement and Super-Game-Improvement irons). Here are some of our testers’ favorite irons in this red-hot iron category:
Robert Shaw (+2-handicap), Titleist T250: “A very simple design that sits well behind the ball at address. Noticeably higher ball flight without being too spinny, which I enjoyed, especially in the longer clubs where I'm able to hit them into a par-5 green and stop it fairly quickly.”
Skylar Frankiewicz (7-handicap), TaylorMade P·790: “Absolutely electric. You can work the ball any which way. Like, if you wanted to, you know, go a mile straight, take a right, then a left, then another right, it can be done. Looks rich and looks very classy, like generational wealth classy.”
Tom Allen (7-handicap), Callaway Apex Ti Fusion: “I can throw anything at it, and it was just going high and straight every time. The turf never bothered it. It just plowed right through it. Super easy to hit. PW, 7-iron, 5-iron, they were all perfect down the middle and long.”
Wesley Gilmore (+3-handicap) Mizuno Mizuno Pro M-15: “They look pretty intimidating, but they play like a game-improvement iron. Very easy to get up in the air, fast through the turf, and I was able to hit them high or low, from pitching wedge throughout.”
Chris Carda (8-handicap) Ping i540: "A very hot face. This is a very good iron that hits the ball a long way, with very little loss of yardage on off-center hits. The club moved through the hitting area really, really smoothly."
Wayne Johnson (7-handicap) Srixon ZXi5: "A nice combination of both performance and forgiveness. Shots that weren't hit on the center or were thin still went nearly as far as those from the sweet spot. When I hit this one in the center, definitely got a good feedback click, and the ball jumps off the clubface."
