Much to the displeasure of my wife, one side of our garage looks like a PGA Tour Superstore.
“Why do you need so many sets of golf clubs?” she has asked more than once.
Hey, I’m down to four full sets, so I’m making progress. Besides, you never know when three friends from out of town are going to show up and want to join you for a round. Right?
All kidding aside, it’s difficult to explain golf club hoarding. Sometimes you need to bench one set, as punishment for poor performance, and put another set in play. That’s why I always keep two sets ready to go: one with my TaylorMade Burner Superlaunch irons in a stand-up bag and one with my Adams Golf A30S hybrid irons in a separate bag.
I rotate the sets throughout the year depending on my game, which lately has been in steady decline. But sometimes it’s just a matter of benching one club – usually a putter or a sand wedge – and hoping for better results.
The continuing technological advances in golf are great, but it also creates a problem: too many drivers, fairway metals, hybrids, wedges and putters. What goes in my bag today?
My weakness is “gimmick” putters, which is why I could start my own putter store. Suffice to say, my flat sticks are anything but flat. I own a TaylorMade Spider and a TaylorMade Itsy Bitsy Spider. I own a Tim Holman-signature “switch putter,” which can be used right-handed or left-handed. I own a Probe 2010 putter, with “break reduction technology” so the toe-alignment line on the blade is for right-to-left putts and the heel-alignment line is for left-to-right putts. Seriously.
I also own a “Perfect Round” putter, the blade of which is a heavy metal cylinder that looks like the end of a miniature croquet mallet or, as one friend said derisively, like a roll of quarters. I like it because even if you hit the putt on the heel or toe of the leading edge it still creates the much-desired topspin and maintains a true roll. I also have experimented with a zero-loft putter after foolishly purchasing it at a trade show for a hundred bucks. Go figure.
A few more gathering dust in my garage: an Odyssey White Hot 2-ball putter, a Nike T-160, a Scotty Cameron-signature Titleist Futura putter, a Hydra putter with moveable weights, an Alien putter, a Never Compromise putter, a Mitsushiba putter and a handmade wood putter from St. Andrews, Scotland. I’ve tried them all. And I’m here to testify that every one knocked the ball in the cup – eventually. (Ba-da-bing!)
I’ve tried almost as many drivers over the years, with and without moveable weights, including TaylorMade’s R9, R11, Burner and Rocketballz models; Callaway’s ERC Fusion and FT-i models; a yellow Nike Sasquatch Sumo Squared driver; a bright blue Cobra Golf AMP Cell driver; a Bobby Jones driver with an oddly shaped head; and a ghastly green Tad Moore driver to match the set of ghastly green titanium fairway metals and irons that often generated sparks during practice swings. (Yes, all you skeptical fire marshals, titanium irons can ignite fires on the golf course.)
But only one driver stays in the bag – the oldest club in my bag and one of the oldest in my garage. It’s my trusty 2006 Callaway FT-i, with 11 degrees of loft and a draw bias – the first square driver to be manufactured. It doesn’t go as far as some of the others, but it hits the fairway most often, probably 80 percent of the time. (Honest.) Until another driver can beat that, the FT-i stays in the bag, regardless of the snide remarks it elicits from my golf buddies.
And there’s a new club in my bag that I believe will stay there even longer than my driver. It’s the much-hyped, XE1 65-degree sand wedge that you’ve probably seen in commercials, the one endorsed by PGA Tour player Arron Oberholser. The XE1 web site trumpets that its “auto glide sole banishes bad shots and gets you up and down from any lie – fairway, rough or sand.” And that it “virtually eliminates fat chips and pitches … and adds the flop shot to any golfer’s arsenal.”
I paid the $99 because of the money-back guarantee if not satisfied – and because I’m a sucker for new golf gimmicks – but it has saved me shots every round and is easy to hit from the sand, deep rough and off hardpan. It also takes the fear out of the short flop shot over a greenside bunker.
I love it so much I might get rid of a dozen other wedges in my golf museum of a garage. But I probably won’t. Sorry, Honey.
