Look at modern driver faces – the grooves are often downplayed because clean contact is assumed with the ball on a peg. Look at some of Bobby Jones’ historic clubs, and you will see dots on some of the club faces. Many early clubs did not have grooves at all. You want there to be as much contact happening as possible in that brief moment of violence, and that is the job of grooves. All the good things that happen when a golf ball is struck, like spin for distance and control, occur in the 450 millionths of a second that the ball is in contact with the club. It is the same principle with grooves on a club face. A rubber tire could grip the road just fine on dry roads, but treads are necessary to channel away water and keep the tire in contact with the road in bad weather. If you play your golf in the desert and rarely encounter wet grass, you could very well use clubs with no grooves at all. The most obvious feature of the club face are grooves, perhaps the least understood aspect of these ill-designed weapons. Titleist Cavity Back and Muscle Back Irons The Club Face Golfers can select clubs that are heavy enough to resist twisting (always the main objective) but light enough to swing fast and generate distance. Modern materials, especially with drivers, also allow clubmakers to fiddle with club weights. The result: shots struck on the toe (the part of the club face furthest from the shaft) or the heel (closest to the shaft) will still produce acceptable results. These traditional clubs were known as “muscle-back” irons.Īn improvement in materials and technologies led to the ability to spread the weight around the perimeter of the club, creating “cavity-back” irons. Churchill’s, that is not struck here, causes the club face to twist at impact and produces unwanted, if not disastrous results. The weight is concentrated in the center and low to produce an exaggerated result when the ball was struck exactly in front of this weight – the sweet spot. The Back of the Club Headįor decades, clubmakers did not think much about the back of the clubhead. The popularity of hybrids comes from their long iron lofts but wider-soled heads to replace the small, ornery soles that proved so troublesome. You might not know that a properly designed sole on an iron club is designed to slice smoothly through the turf and minimize the twisting of the club, especially on poor hits. Most golfers don’t think much about the sole, or bottom of the club, except to find the desired iron number stamped on it when pulling a club from the golf bag. Winston Churchill once said that, “Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose.” Let’s take a look at those weapons, otherwise known as golf clubs, and see if there is a method to the madness of their design and perhaps find a way to help your game.
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