IRONS
If you’re really looking for game improvement, focus on sole width. A wide sole makes it harder to hit stout shots. It lowers the center of gravity to boost your chances of getting the ball in the air. And the wide base might even help square your aim at setup. There is a bit of a rush in the wide-sole game (as illustrated by TOUR EDGE‘s success with its eight-hybrid Bazooka J-Max set), but two notable examples are VULCAN GOLF‘s Backfire irons ($600, vulcangolf.com) and the Glider X irons from GOLFWORKS ($105, unassembled set of eight, golfworks.com). The faces on the Glider X irons are just one-tenth of an inch thick, and those on the Backfire are made from maraging steel. In both cases, the sole width is more than 1 1/2 inches, or nearly 50 percent greater than classic game-improvement clubs such as the Callaway Huge Bertha and the Nike Slingshot. The downside? Better players might not be able to work the ball with these types of clubs the way they like. Meanwhile, COBRA has taken the thought of extreme sole width and applied it to wedges. Its new C Series (WS) wedges ($80, cobragolf.com) have a sole width about 25 percent greater than ordinary and a high bounce angle. …CALLAWAY’s new X-Tour iron ($1,000, steel, callawaygolf.com) is its first forged model and is scarce in another regard. The forgiving iron for better players features the company’s trademark 360-degree undercut channel nearly the perimeter, which generally cannot be forged. Instead, designers laser-welded two pieces of 1020 carbon steel. The iron’s center of gravity is toward the heel and higher than in the company’s more forgiving irons. Because there were no left-handed templates made on the X-Tour, Phil Mickelson’s were custom-machined at a cost of about $5,000 for the set.

BALLS
Remember TOP-FLITE? It’s back on tour with a new ball now in stores. The Top-Flite Strata TL Tour, a multilayer ball with a urethane cover, features a one-cut core instead of the two-cut core seen in previous Strata models and a dimple pattern that includes different shapes ($30 a dozen, topflite.com).

WOODS
Those of you who terrible-mouthed graphite-titanium drivers last year (like CALLAWAY’s ERC Fusion), take notice: In the first nine PGA Tour events of 2005, four were won by carbon composite-titanium drivers (two for the new Callaway Fusion prototype and two for the CLEVELAND Launcher Comp 460). That’s three more wins than in all of 2004.

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