What it’s really like when tour players hit new clubs for the first time
I call them “OMG” golf commercials.
A tour player is on the range hitting a new golf club and he can’t believe how far and straight it’s going.
“Is this legal?” he might ask. “It’s amazing. It’s going in the bag today!”
Watch enough of these commercials and you’ll probably be convinced, at least once, that your clubs have been your problem all along… Or that every golf equipment company is full of it… Or you’ll fall somewhere in the middle.
But how do tour players really react the first time they test new golf clubs? That’s what I always wondered, and for that answer I attended TaylorMade’s 2015 ad shoot.
The shoot took place in September at Reynolds Planation in Lake Oconee, Ga., where Sergio Garcia, Justin Rose, Jason Day, Camilo Villegas, Ryan Palmer, Boo Weekly, Brendon Todd and Sebastian Cappelen tested the company’s new RSi, R15 and AeroBurner product lines for the first time.
You’re reading about this now because TaylorMade has just lifted the media embargo on its R15 and AeroBurner drivers, fairway woods and hybrids. They’ll be in stores on January 9, but at the time of the ad shoot there were only a handful of hittable R15 and AeroBurner products in the world
I use the word “hittable” loosely. TaylorMade engineers were still dialing in the look and feel of the metal woods. At any moment, one of the drivers, fairway woods or hybrids might break, the product team explained to me — it was the nature of any first prototype. The clubs stayed intact, but it was surprising to learn that a breakage was a possibility.
I spoke with Jason Day, who was taking a break from golf to rehab the thumb and back injuries he’d suffered during the 2014 season. He’d hit a few shots for the cameras, but that was it, so we talked about the process he goes through before he puts new clubs in the bag.
“I test everything on the range on a launch monitor, and the numbers have to be better for me to make the switch,” Day said. “If it’s going straighter and longer, I’ll change right away, but they have to be better.”
Day told me that he expected to make the change to TaylorMade’s new RSi TP irons in 2015, but what was really excited about was switching iron shafts. For years he’s used Rifle 7.0 iron shafts, but he’d heard great things about Nippon’s N.S. Pro Modus3 Tour 130X iron shafts from other tour players.
“Apparently, that shaft is off the charts,” Day said.
Like us, professional golfers like to try what their friends are playing
I spoke to Brendon Todd, who won his first PGA Tour event in May, the HP Byron Nelson Championship. Brian Bazzel, TaylorMade’s senior director of product creation for metal woods, guessed before Todd’s fitting that he would likely be a fit for the company’s new R15 driver. He turned out to be a better fit for TaylorMade’s AeroBurner driver.
“He’s definitely an AeroBurner guy,” Bazzel said afterward. “That’s why you never going into a fitting with a closed mind.”
Todd was also a fit for the AeroBurner 3 wood, which he was hitting almost as far as the driver. He was so impressed with the AeroBurner line that he wanted to try an AeroBurner hybrid, which TaylorMade’s product team hadn’t expected. I then watched what I was sure never happened with a tour player. Todd proceeded to test an AeroBurner hybrid with a (gasp) stiff-flex stock shaft, which was entirely too bendy and light for him, but he didn’t seem to mind
“Those were some really good clubs,” Todd told me after the fitting. “Once you find something you like, you stick with it. I think [the AeroBurner] 3 wood might be the one.”
Ryan Palmer was the most interesting player to watch get fit for metal woods. He’d held onto TaylorMade’s Burner SuperFast 2.0 driver from 2011 and it hadn’t hurt his game — he had his best year on Tour in 2014, earning nearly $3 million and finished 14th in the FedEx Cup Playoffs.
With the Burner SuperFast 2.0, Palmer was averaging a launch angle of 11.5 degrees with a spin rate of 2200 rpm. His ball speed was a brisk 172 mph. With the R15 460, his launch jumped to 13 degrees and his spin rate fell to 2000 rpms. His ball speed also went up, to about 173.5 miles per hour. That gave him 9 yards more carry distance and 6 yards more total distance, but you wouldn’t have known it from his reaction.
When PGA Tour players use a driver that’s several years old, it’s because they really like it. A few extra yards isn’t always enough to get them to change; it often takes better performance and an increased sense of confidence from the new club, and the two things aren’t always synonymous.
I learned from Keith Sbabaro, TaylorMade’s PGA Tour rep, that Palmer doesn’t like to switch clubs. Sbabaro went on to say that Palmer’s 5 wood – a TaylorMade R9 from 2009 – would be the hardest club in his bag to replace.
Sbabaro said those words just as Palmer was testing TaylorMade’s new R15 five wood, which he was carrying about 10 yards farther than his R9 five wood. I saw Palmer uncork a big smile, which got bigger as he found he could replicate all his shots with the new club. The high draw, the low fade, the high fade, the knockdown… he rotated through his repertoire of shots looking for something he didn’t like, but he didn’t find anything.
Palmer was ready to make the switch, but the problem was that the TaylorMade team wasn’t ready to give him the club. Bazzel explained to Palmer that the sole design still needed minor tweaks, and besides, he couldn’t even test the club in public. The R15 line wouldn’t be made public until much later.
“If we make him wait, Ryan won’t trust us,” Sbarbaro said. “Everything about this club: the lie angle, the loft … everything is perfect.”
At one point, Sbarbaro suggested that Palmer sign an impromptu contract that would allow him to take the club home and keep it there until he was cleared to take it to the range.
“I, Ryan, will not take the club out of the house,” Sbarbaro rehearsed with him.
Bazzel pointed out that the 5 wood had an open hot melt port that gave it a higher-pitched sound than wasn’t ideal, but none of that mattered to Palmer.
“This one is just better,” he said “I don’t care.”
I was watching an “OMG” golf commercial, but it happening in real time in front of me.
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I watched several other fittings — Justin Rose, Boo Weekley and Sergio Garcia — and looked for similarities in the way the players approached their clubs. The one common theme? They had very little in common
Rose, like Jason Day, was mostly concerned with getting better launch monitor numbers with the new clubs, and he seemed to want to know everything about their design. Boo Weekley was the opposite. He didn’t even notice the slots on the faces of TaylorMade’s RSi irons until they were pointed out to him. He judged new clubs by their feel and ball flight, and showed an uncanny ability to predict what shots with the new clubs were flying slightly farther or spinning more – which the launch monitor always seemed to confirm.
My favorite part of the event came courtesy of Garcia when he was testing R15 drivers. Garcia said he would have played TaylorMade’s SLDR 430 driver last year, but there was something about the way it looked at address that he didn’t like. The SLDR 460, which is larger, looked better to him, so he played that driver in 2014
During the fitting, Garcia quickly decided that the R15 430 would be his driver for 2015. I watched him use it to hit drive after drive with similar trajectories. The launch monitor confirmed that each shot was flying about 290 yards in the air and rolling out to 315 yards.
Garcia then took a break to chat with Bazzel, and Rory McIlroy’s name came up.
“Every time, he tees it as high as he can and swings as hard as he can,” Garcia said. “If I hit every drive like [Rory], I’d be scared I’d hit it out of bounds.”
Garcia proceeded to “hit one like Rory,” teeing the ball as high as the tee allowed and swinging a little harder. The result was a higher launch angle, less spin and about 20 yards more distance, which he replicated with several more drives.
That was my “OMG” moment. If Garcia could do that, what else could he do? What else hadn’t I seen?
Thank goodness the PGA Tour is the testing ground for new golf equipment, and thank goodness for the unreasonable standards these players demand from their clubs. It makes the final product that much more precise
