Flight Club

by Victor Williams

Hang out in any pro shop in America, flip through the flashy magazine ads, watch the pros whale away on TV, cruise the myriad golf equipment websites, and one thing becomes abundantly clear: It’s a jungle out there, riddled with the quicksand of alphabetical overload.

This year the catch abbreviation is MOI, which stands for Moment of Inertia — something about the twisting of the clubhead through impact. A few years back it was COR, Coefficient of Restitution — that USGA bugaboo otherwise known as the “trampoline effect.” There’s that golden oldie, CCs — a clubhead’s volume, currently and for the foreseeable future legally maxed out at 460 for drivers. And let’s not forget CG, or Center of Gravity, apparently the key to every errant or weak shot we’ve ever hit.

Just what the heck is perimeter weighting anyway? What about kick point? These phrases mean something to somebody, and Lord knows they’re the techno-geek linchpin of many a marketing campaign, but they send most rank-and-file golfers mentally OB. Yeah, we love the fact that a big swing off the tee, relatively on plane, will send one of today’s supercharged orbs into orbit, and perhaps even in the fairway, especially if you’ve latched onto one of this season’s ubiquitous square-headed drivers.

But do we really care about the technological wizardry behind it all? Do we care that an army of eggheads in Carlsbad or Japan or wherever obsess over literal millimeters of design specifications and combinations of space-age materials to come up with the Next Best Stick? Yeah, well, when that price tag reads $400 or $500, your damn right we care. And just as when we blow the bankroll on an epic meal or hotel room, that VW-sized driver or machine-balanced putter had better do the job, fill our gullets up with glee and our scorecards with pars and birds. Anything less just ain’t acceptable.

Today’s golf club manufacturers, large and small, know this. They also know they’ve set the bar so high, they’ve got to find ways to keep clearing it — not only to keep customers happy, but entice them to come back and scorch the plastic One More Time in the never-ending search for techno-hack nirvana.

So, we finally arrive at the salient question: Where do we go from here? Or more specifically, what will fill our bags ten years from now?

Don’t think the Callaways, Titleists, TaylorMades and Cobras of the world — or, rather, the members of their R&D departments — aren’t mulling that question over every day. So are the smaller, hot West Coast-based companies like Nickent and KZG. If they can’t make the alphabet soup tasty, even sexy, they haven’t done their job. It’s all about performance, and the stakes are ever-higher to get longtime and neophyte players coming through the doors to check out the latest and greatest.

“Ten years out, golf clubs are going to be longer, straighter, more forgiving, better feeling, easier to get the ball in the air. I have no doubts about that,” says John Hoeflich, chief designer for Nickent — a SoCal company that’s made major inroads into the hybrid market. “In reality, if you take Titleist, Callaway, TaylorMade, Nike, Cleveland, Adams and Nickent, you’re talking about a couple hundred very bright, talented engineers, who do nothing but study golf clubs and balls and try to figure out how to make them work better. So I have to think clubs are going to get better.”
Hoeflich’s 4DX line of drivers, fairway metals, utility metals, hybrids and wedges (see review) take the mantle of playability and popularity handed down from the 3DX, and inject the latest multi-material technology into the mix — titanium brazed onto steel, tungsten polymer injected into hybrids and wedges. That’s the direction virtually every manufacturer is headed, and has been for a while, to make their clubs more palatable (as in playable) to the widest possible audience, including Tour stars.

“We’re trying to come up with the best combination of feel, playability and looks, Hoeflich says. “Anytime you get a new technology, it’s a two- or three-year process to perfect that. When you think of when metal woods first came out, they were pretty nasty. Or you go back to the early 1970s when investment cast cavity back irons first came out, they were pretty nasty looking, and they didn’t feel very good. It took a couple years to master the casting, get the shapes right, and even the tour players accepted that.”

Those early clubs came from the heavy hitters in the industry, such as Callaway and TaylorMade. The Big Bertha was the first driver to really set the mass market on a new technological path, and as one of golf’s “big three,” Callaway is still doing its best to push the envelope on the material and design fronts, though its goal is really no different from Nickent’s: To come up with the right stick for every game.

“What we’ve recently established is a product line that reaches all the way through the ranges of player types in the world,” says Alan Hocknell, Callaway’s vice president of innovation and advanced design. “We can say now we make a club for everybody, from the elite player to entry level beginner. And we can guide people into the right equipment for them. Maybe that means fitting is a bigger deal than it has been — to navigate through that selection process, find the right clubs. We see trends where people are trying clubs before they buy them. If that continues, we hope to help guide people into the right equipment.”

That’s a familiar refrain in a segment of the golf industry that, at this moment, feels fairly hamstrung by USGA guidelines on clubhead size, COR and MOI: While not much can be done in the short-term on the material side, dialing in every single club to an individual swing, stance, body type all the variable that go with them is the growth path for manufacturers and retailers. In fact, if you ask a guy like Bill Bales of About Golf — a company that develops simulators and launch monitors, if clubfitting is important, he’ll bend your ear with reasons why it’s the only way to go. “My view is that what’s gonna really change the club industry more than anything, is in getting the right equipment in the hands of individuals — real clubfitting. I don’t mean a cart on the range, I mean somebody that knows the golf swing, that knows how to fit clubs and goes to great length in every way to fit the club to the player. Maybe make some small swing adjustments, out of the bad habits. That’s where the major OEMs will have to go, they’re just struggling with how to it and maintain their off-the-rack volume distribution. It’s essential.”

There’s just one problem. While a small, agile, fitting-specific company like Henry Griffitts can put a player into a “perfectly matched” set in a couple of days, the big boys aren’t yet set up to deliver the goods that way. They do business in the well-established mass retail realm — put ’em on the shelf, sell ’em quickly and get ’em out the door.

“We’re still a generation away, if ever, from a process where people come in, get properly fit, the clubs are built to their specs and sent to them in a day or two,” Bales says. “The OEMs are spending millions to Tour players to play their clubs. They have a different model, and I’d like to help them figure out how to change it. With proper fitting you can get a player hitting the ball on the center of the clubface, and you’re going to hit more shots that satisfy you. That’s really what golfers are looking for. It’s not about score. It’s about hitting good shots.”

If proper fitting is the answer, why do catch-all technoterms like MOI continue to dominate the marketing landscape? Because technology is incremental in nature, and now that golf club design has hit a wall of sorts, guys like Hoeflich and Hocknell have to give their companies’ marketers something to chew on. Right now, that means giving every golfer the opportunity to swing as hard as they can and still find the short grass.

“If you look at today’s tour player — Adam Scott, Tiger — the move they make at the ball compared to even ten years ago is amazing,” Hoeflich says. “If we could make a 550 or 600 cc driver, which is possible, those guys could swing even harder and not worry the ball wasn’t gonna go straight. But we can’t do that because of the cc and MOI restriction, so we have to live where we are.”

So, we’re in for more MOI.

“I think the high MOI phenomenon is here to stay. The jury is out on what shape that’s gonna take. It may be square, triangle shaped or conventional shaped. We have all three. TaylorMade has their Burner, Nike has their square club, Titleist has their diamond shaped club. Callaway’s square, we’re square, Cleveland is round with the HiBore. The dust will settle on that in a couple of years. We just put our square driver out, thought it would be fun, and it’s turned out to be a runaway truck. The problem with the square club is that some of the early entries are not that attractive, they sound too loud or whatever. It’ll take a while to make them look and sound good.”

Hocknell agrees. “There are tangible benefits to be had from larger MOI. Looking at the last 10 years to predict the next 10, all increases in driver head size have been with the sole purpose of increasing MOI. Now that we’ve gotten somewhere close to the USGA’s limit, we’ve shown there’s a benefit of higher MOI for golfers. I think shapes of the type we’re seeing now will stay around.”
So, big heads and fitted clubs aside, where will the Next Big Thing in golf clubs come from? What materials will give that future stick its fire? Bales thinks there’s lots of room to improve shafts, make them lighter so older players can regain lost clubhead speed. Hocknell says new metals and combinations will come from one of two industries — aerospace or defense. Or both. “If you look at the more exotic things in Planet Earth, they’re in the defense laboratories. We can’t yet use them cost effectively. They might be in our future. We’re borrowers of other technology, apply things first dreamt up for one application to another application, which is golf. So we have to get creative.

“Occasionally we develop our own materials,” he continues. “Our Fusion Irons, for example, were developed by a third party with a brand new alloy that had all the right density requirements for that kind of iron. That is something we’ll see more of in the next 10 years. Stainless steel or titanium by itself is limiting, but using more than one material, and the technology to do that, will be more prevalent.”

Hence Hoeflich’s 4DXs — and whatever clubs he and his colleagues build next.

“I don’t think we’ve exhausted the possibilities,” he says. “The consumer is much more accepting of multiple materials, innovative designs. The foundries have not run out of materials, they just have not had the technology to combine them. We can make the 4DX driver today because we have brazing technology to weld titanium and steel together. There’s some aluminum out there, and the foundries are working on ways to use it. As soon as they perfect them they’ll help us make better golf clubs.”

Until then, get your fill of alphabet soup — and all the ball-busting nourishment it gives your golf game. FG