Chapter Nine
Golf Clubs
The golf club has three parts: the head, the shaft, and the grip. All those parts are variable in their internal structure, material, size, and length, and shape. The rules allow you to carry 14 clubs in a bag, so that's a lot of variation. Fortunately for you, we are going to keep it all fairly simple. If you line up the clubs in a typical set, you will note the variation in length. There is also a sequence of loft variations, from least in the driver to the most in wedges. Loft is the angle of the club face. The bigger the angle, or loft, the higher the ball flight will be. Lower lofts result in the ball flying lower and further. Your driver will have the lowest loft.
Here is a brief description of each club type, from the longest in length and shot distance to the shortest:
Driver - This is the long, large-headed club you would typically use off the tee box, except on very short holes where it would be too much club, that is, the ball would go too far. Of all your clubs, the driver will hit the ball the farthest.
The lofts of drivers typically range from 8.5 to 13.5 degrees. In the set up for the drive, the golf ball is teed up off the ground a couple of inches with a golf tee (tees are discussed below), so the clubhead, as it swings through the impact zone, is actually hitting up on the ball. The faster the speed of the club, the longer the ball will generally fly and therefore the further up in the air the ball will eventually be at its height. Professional golfers swing with super-high club speeds, so they need and use low lofts on their driver, typically 8.5 or 9. A typical male amateur should be using a loft of 10.5 or higher. Some children, seniors and females-players with very slow swing speeds-can benefit from even higher lofts and may benefit from using a high-lofted fairway wood instead of a driver.
You should get a name brand driver of fairly recent vintage, if not new, say no more than three years old if buying a used club. If you want to go high end, check out the latest in the Taylormade M4 series, which has new slants to the face to ameliorate low hooks and high slices. A hook curves to the left; a slice curves to the right. The new Callaway Rogue with Jailbreak technology is also getting accolades. At the time of this writing, these clubs will run you upward to $500. A good used driver bought on eBay or at a garage sale will run you $50 - $150.
Fairway wood - After you have hit your drive, if the green is still a long way away, perhaps even out of your reach, you would normally hit the next shot with one of your fairway woods. The two most commonly carried in the bag of an amateur are the 3-wood and the 5-wood. Starting out, you may need the 5-wood to get the ball up in the air enough, so it doesn't just scoot along the ground (a shot called a "worm burner"). If you are going to use only a 5-wood, then as you start playing the game, you can forget about carrying a 3-wood. Never carry a club that you are not using. Instead, carry a new or used or borrowed club to try it out. Experienced golfers are always on the lookout for ways to improve their fourteen club selections.
Here are the degrees of loft common for the two most popular fairway woods:
14-15 degrees - 3-wood
18-19 degrees - 5-wood
As we said, we advise beginners against getting a 3 wood. Beginners need help getting the ball up into the air. A 17-degree lofted 4-wood would be a better choice, accompanied by a 19-degree 5 wood.
Hybrid iron - A hybrid iron-also called a "utility" or "rescue" club-resembles a fairway wood in the shape of its head, though the hybrid's head is small by comparison. The first hybrids were invented to replace the longest irons by providing a flat bottom that wouldn't dig into the ground, but instead would slide through the shot, the same way a fairway wood does. They are also good at getting out of tall grass in the rough because their heads are so small. Even the pros have started using long-iron hybrids. The hybrid has become so popular that some club manufacturers have begun making middle length and even short irons with the hybrid design.
Irons - The irons are numbered 1-9, with the 9-iron having the most loft, thereby hitting the ball highest in the air and covering the shortest distance. In practical terms, the 1 and 2 irons have disappeared from use, and neither will appear in any set of clubs designed for beginners. The old pro Lee Trevino once joked: "Even God can't hit a 1-iron." A few pros still do carry a 1-iron to replace the driver off the tee as a safe alternative in high-wind weather or dangerous fairways.
Typically, you will use a hybrid 3-iron for the longest iron shot, then a 4-iron, then a 5-iron and so on as you get closer to the green. Once you develop a consistent game, you will know how far you can hit each club, and thereby make your club selection based on how far you need to hit the ball to reach the green. Later in Part 1 we discuss how to accurately determine distances to the green.
Regular Irons - These fall into two categories: blade (aka muscle back) and cavity back. Blade irons are preferred by many professional golfers because of their superior feel. But they are unforgiving on off-center hits, so most amateurs wisely avoid them. Cavity back irons have an indentation in the back of the club and a distribution of the weight around the edges of the club that creates a strong MOI (moment of inertia), a technical characteristic that makes the clubs more solid on off-center hits. The extra weight in the toe and sole also help make the irons stable. (The beneficial effect of high MOI shows up on drivers and putters as well.)
Game Improvement Irons - These clubs are shaped like hybrids. They are constructed with wide bottoms, to prevent chunking (digging into the ground behind the ball instead of hitting the ball first). If used, they would replace regular irons. You may lose a small amount of distance if you switch from cavity back to game improvement irons, but for some players that's a good trade off for a more reliable hit.
Photo #1 below shows the three types of irons, from L to R: Game improvement, cavity back, and muscle back.
Photo #1
Wedges - Most full sets of golf clubs come with two wedges, a pitching wedge and a sand wedge. The pitching wedge is designed for short, high shots from 40 to 120 yards away from the green. Shots approaching the green from inside 40 yards are often chipped-hit low so as to run along the ground-rather than pitched. The sand wedge is designed for hitting out of sand bunkers, though it is often used for very short pitches off grass, say thirty yards over a green-side bunker onto the green. Because of their high loft, wedges tend to hit balls that land softly and hold well on the green. If hit correctly, the ball won't run far past the pin or bounce over the green.
The sand wedge has a second lip and a broad base under the front lip of the club. This prevents the club from sinking too deeply into the sand as you try to slide the club's open face through the sand and under the ball. That tendency to resist sinking is called "bounce." The club tends to bounce off the sand instead of digging deeply into it.
If you like pitch shots and have a good feel for them, then you might ultimately get a gap wedge (aka an A-wedge) for shots that are too close for a pitching wedge and too far for a sand wedge. A gap wedge fills the gap, so to speak, between the other two wedges. The A in A-wedge stands for "Approach." The ultimate short high-shot wedge is the lob wedge, which requires a strong swing to launch the ball almost straight up in the air-not a shot for beginners. To illustrate the relationship between each wedge, below is a listing of their lofts. The variance comes from the difference in manufacturers.
46-48 degrees-pitching wedge
51-53 degrees-gap wedge / A-wedge
54-58 degrees-sand wedge
60-64 degrees-lob wedge
You definitely need a pitching wedge and a sand wedge. You may never need a lob wedge, which is used for difficult specialty shots (almost trick shots), unless you are Tour player Phil Mickelson, who carries a 64 degree wedge-because he knows how to hit it effectively. You are not Phil Mickelson. Not yet anyway. Well, probably never.
Chipper - A short club, the length of a putter, used for chipping. Chippers have a flat bottom like a rescue club. Beginners get good use out of them because they don't chunk so easily. If the club unintentionally hits the ground behind the ball on your stroke, the chipper will tend to slide into the ball and the shot will be less affected than if you were using an iron that cuts into the sod. The chip shot is a delicate shot, one of the most difficult to execute well, but it is also one of the most important in terms of score. As a beginner, you will hit at least one chip shot on almost every hole. How well the chip shot goes will determine whether, next, you will need 1, 2, or 3 putts to get the ball into the hole. Pay attention to everything this book says about chipping.
Even though pros and very good amateur players use various irons for the...
