I’ve been playing golf for about two decades, and during that time I’ve become more interested in how to select the best golf club for me. Over the years I’ve talked to hundreds of golfers and seen many of their clubs. In this blog I’ll write about what I’ve learned, with as much objectivity as I can muster.
First things first: The best golf clubs for you and me are different. A beginner’s best clubs are very different from a professional’s best clubs. If you have any experience whatsoever (say, one round) you know that your own best clubs are just right for your current abilities; they’re great clubs, but not by any means the “best” of anything.
The second thing to understand is that all golfers benefit from learning what makes the best clubs great. There’s a lot of information to be had here, and it’s worth your while to find it.
I was working at an investment bank when I got my first computer. It was a good thing, because I used to make a lot of mistakes in golf.
I had just hit a small scramble on the par 3 17th at Pinecrest golf course in Palm Beach and ended up with a chip onto the green that carried down into the water. My three-iron shot came out long and I had to walk it across the green. The result was a very long putt, and after that I never made another positive stroke on the course.
I had been using the same three-iron for years but it wasn’t doing me any good; I never hit it where I wanted to, and my short game sucked. A few months later I bought myself a Mac and spent half an hour comparing shafts on the internet before making my decision. Then I went out to Pinecrest and played some more before buying a fairway wood from TaylorMade with graphite shafts from True Temper.
If you want to play well, you need to know what’s good for you, so here are some recommendations about clubs for you, based on what your handicap is.*
You are what you golf with. You can never be too good of a golfer to use the best clubs.
It is highly unlikely that any golfer is going to hit a driver and then a 5 wood on the same hole. But it is quite possible that you may be using some combination of drivers, 7 irons, 3 woods and hybrids which makes you a terrible golfer.
Golfers who hit their driver and 2 irons on the same hole are the worst offenders. They are just not picking their clubs correctly.
A good course will have several types of holes. Some holes will have low-hanging woods for the long hitters. Others will have short rough for the intermediate players with tricky approaches to get over and around. Many holes will have sand traps for the poor ball strikers who either don’t hit well from sand or are afraid to go in them because they don’t want to buy a new club if they blow it again. A good course will also have some longer holes with water hazards, or even water hazards themselves, to give an opportunity for people with long drives to show how good they are that day.
When you go out to play a round of golf, choose your clubs based on what kind of holes you play at your
The good news is, there are no right or wrong golf clubs. The bad news is, it’s not easy to know which ones will suit you. In the past several decades, with the advent of the PGA Tour and the great strides in club engineering, there’s been an explosion of choices in equipment. It’s like the early days of computers when you could get a cheap machine that was kind of okay or you could spend hundreds of dollars on one of those fancy models with a monitor that would fit into a suitcase.
Now it’s not so clear which computer model is best for you. And even if you get that down to a choice between two models, it might turn out that one of them isn’t for you after all.
I’m going to try to give you some help sorting through all these choices. I’m going to do this by making suggestions about the kinds of things that are important for golfers to think about when buying clubs. I’ll be focusing on those things we can control and offer some suggestions about how to choose among alternative solutions based on your goals and what you are willing to invest in achieving them.
In the early days of golf, players would make their own clubs. They would use whatever wood they had handy and whittle it down to the right shape. Then they would take some ironwood, or some silver maple or an elm or a hickory, and they’d whittle that down too. Then they took a piece of flint and struck sparks off it until it became sharp. This was the first iron, of which there were many varieties, but I’ll be talking about just one: the
If you want to be a good golfer, don’t start by buying the best club. Start by thinking about the things that are important to you, and buy those things.
In recent years there has been a lot of talk about “fitting” equipment to golfers. For example, people have written books called “How To Fit Golf Clubs.” How do you fit something? First you have to know what you want it to do, then you can find out how it will do it. In the case of golf clubs, that means finding out which of your goals is highest priority. If you play to have fun, then buy the best-looking club in the store. If you’re a scratch player (or amateur) trying to improve, then buy the cheapest club in the store. If your goal is to win tournaments, then buy one of those high-end clubs recommended in this book. Or if your goal is to get better at golfing generally, then buy a good set of irons and putters.
If your goal is something different from all that, such as hitting a ball farther than anyone else on your course or improving your short game around green complexes or bunkers, then think about which aspects of golf would change as a result of that
Pine Crest Golf Club is one of the finest clubs in the world. It was designed by the great Donald Ross, who also designed several other famous golf courses, including Pine Valley and the Masters Tournament course at Augusta National.
I first played Pine Crest twenty-five years ago, and I loved it. I thought it was one of the best golf courses in America. But since then I have played over a thousand courses, and after twenty-five years of playing them all, there are only three courses that can even come close to what I experienced when I first played Pine Crest. Two of those three courses are private clubs: Pine Valley, where Arnold Palmer won his Masters; and Cog Hill, where Nicklaus won his last two tournaments at age fifty-seven and sixty-two respectively. The third is Pine Crest Golf Club.