PING G10 Hybrids

The Ping 17-4 stainless steel G10 hybrid is engineered with a sloped crown to create a high-launching, solid feeling, versatile alternative to mid and long irons. Six lofts provide replacement options from the 1-iron through 6-iron in addition to fairway woods. Variable face thickness design is machined and plasma welded for higher ball velocity and consistent response across the hitt G10 hybrid is engineered with a sloped crown to create a high-launching, solid feeling to replace long irons Stock Shaft: Ping TFC 129H Graphite Shaft PING G10 Hybrids user reviews ping G10 hybrid 32 degree 11/26/2007 Handicap 10 – 15 Today I hit the ping G10 hybrid, 32 degree graphite TFC shaft, after hitting the frist ball I knew I must have this club , so I bought it, Its just incrediable in all aspects of swinging and hitting , unbelieveable distance and straight as a laser beam , now I have my club for those long par 3s Philip (Monticello, WI) Frequently asked questions about PING G10 Hybrids Question: If you hit this fairway wood good,do you think you would get more height or distance out of it?thanks. Answer: Great Question. The answer is both! They go hand in hand together. That’s why so many companies taught High Launch clubs or balls. More carry, etc…..More height should translate into more distance. I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions. Play Well, Johnny

Tags: ping g10

Ping G5 3Wood

Tags: ping g5, reviews

So I was at Golfsmith yesterday looking at clubs (hello, my name is Dave and I’m a club-ho) I tried a Ping G5 with a steel shaft and it felt great. However, it was a steel shaft. I’ve gone graphite because when I’ve tried other steel shaft clubs, I’ve felt the “Zing” up the shaft into my arm. With the G5, I felt no “Zing”.

My question is two parts.

a. how much of it is due to the “Custom Tuning Port” circular thermoplastic insert behind the face and

b. how much of it could be attributed to the “Cushin” vibration damping inside the shaft…which the salesperson didn’t know if it was on the club.

It seems that Tuning Port is on almost all of their clubs.
‘ve got tennis elbow and when I hit a golf ball with a steel shaft, the vibrations would travel up my arm and really bother me into the next day. Again, when I hit the Ping demos with a steel shaft, I don’t feel the vibes as much.

I’m trying to figure out how much of it is due to the Cushin inserts in the steel shaft and how much is due to the “Tuned Port” behind the head.

Dave Bean

ANSWER:

‘m a certified ping fitter and it’s actually a little bit of both. Ping actually doesn’t push the “cushin” insert nearly as much as they used to. With the port you mentioned, that softens the feel quite a bit.

Whether the cushin insert was in the shaft or not I can’t tell you. Outside of the factor that the shaft band will have it written all over it, it’s hard to miss.

The cushin insert does make a steel shaft feel more like a graphite shaft, but it’s obviously still steel and you can get the zingers, just not as frequently.

Tags: cushin, ping g5

Ping G10

Ping G10 Vs Ping G5

Since launching in 2005 the Ping G5 has gone on to become one of the most popular golf club ranges in history, so the Ping G10 has a lot to live up to.

Click on the links below to bring up the review pages from Today’s Golfer’s October 2005 edition and to see what our very first opinion is on the Ping G10.

Today’s Golfer has the best contacts in the golf equipment industry and we aim to bring you all the new kit before anyone else and in more detail than ever before, so keep an eye on the site for more exciting new equipment launches very soon!!!

Read the Today’s Golfer review of the G5 here:

And to see even more on the Ping G10….

To read the Ping G10 review click here

To download free wallpapers of the Ping G10 click here

To read about the official launch of the Ping G10 click here

To check out Ping’s G10 rivals click here

To see how the Ping G10 compares to the Ping G5 click here

To see the G10 range in 3D click here soon!

To check out our behind the scenes footage of the Ping G10 factory click here

Tags: ping g10, ping g5

Game-improvement technology finds a home in forged irons.

Spice up forged irons with a bit of technology, and what do you have? A new breed of irons made for traditionalists preferring the classic look of blades but no longer owning the game to match.

In the past, manufacturers relied on the casting process to manufacture clubs with optimum forgiveness. Casting involves pouring liquid metals into molds to create irons with large cavities, a key to game improvement. Forging, on the other hand, requires the shaping of an already solid block of metal into the desired form, which makes creating deep cavities difficult.

Despite the challenges, designers have found ways to add forgiveness to forgings. MACGREGOR’s MacTec forged M685 ($700, macgregorgolf.com), TITLEIST’s 775.CB ($750, titleist.com) and BEN HGOGAN’s new Apex Edge iron ($800, benhogan.com) infuse game improvement by forging pieces of the clubhead separately.

Hogan’s Apex Edge iron is forged from 1020 carbon steel, and its 180-degree undercut channel allows designers to push the center of gravity (CG) low and deep. The back wall of the cavity is parallel to the face and is laser welded to the face.

Titleist adds game-improvement features to its new 775.CB irons where golfers need help: in the long irons. The oversize clubhead combines a stainless-steel body with a thin face insert, which the company says allows 20 grams to be moved to the perimeter and sole, creating a low and deep CG. To combat the harsh feel of the thin face, designers added an aluminum dampener bar to reduce vibration and improve feel.

MacGregor builds its M685 molds with the input of Don White, the legendary club grinder from Albany, Ga. White produces the final shape before shipping the clubhead to the company’s Asian factory. The one-piece short irons are forged from a softer carbon steel than the two-piece long irons (3-iron to 6-iron).

“The face and hosel are forged as one unit to improve feel,” says Jim Bode, MacGregor’s vice president of research and development. “The center of the face is 10 points harder than its perimeter, which means the face will give as much for a shot hit off-center as one hit off the sweet spot.”

Most golfers miss that sweet spot, but the consequences lessen as designers continue to package forgiveness in new ways.

Sneak Peek
A first look at what the insiders are showing off CLEVELAND is using a geometric departure (a scooped-out crown design) in its new HiBore driver to help push the center of gravity more in line with the center of the clubface. The prototype has been in the hands of Vijay Singh, Jerry Kelly and David Toms (This is Toms’, by the way.), and the finished product should be in stores this spring.

Tags: forged irons

IRONS
If you’re really looking for game improvement, focus on sole width. A wide sole makes it harder to hit fat shots. It lowers the center of gravity to increase 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 Big 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 idea 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 standard and a high bounce angle. …CALLAWAY’s new X-Tour iron ($1,000, steel, callawaygolf.com) is its first forged model and is unusual in another regard. The forgiving iron for better players features the company’s trademark 360-degree undercut channel around 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-piece core instead of the two-piece core seen in previous Strata models and a dimple pattern that includes different shapes ($30 a dozen, topflite.com).

WOODS
Those of you who bad-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.

Tags: ping

CEO John Solheim and Ping execs faced a challenge: Change or become irrelevant. Oh, how they’ve changed

Ping is hot again, but it’s hard to tell from talking with John Solheim. The chairman and CEO of Karsten Manufacturing, the equipment maker’s parent, is a phlegmatic 59-year-old who is as inscrutable as his golf clubs are distinctive. Whether the topic is his collection of fast and powerful vehicles – which includes a ’69 Corvette, ’96 Dodge Viper, a couple of Harleys and a new Mercedes E55 – or the innovative and quirky company created in the 1950s by his father, Karsten, Solheim rarely shows much emotion.

But Solheim has plenty to be happy about. Personally, he is well down the road to recovery following a kidney transplant last June. Professionally, he is presiding over a resurgence that has Ping flying high after a decade of slow decline. The company’s 2004 sales were in the neighborhood of $200 million, making it the largest family-owned golf equipment company, and its products are – as they once were – some of the most popular and playable in the industry. (As points of comparison The Acushnet Co., parent of Cobra, FootJoy, Pinnacle and Titleist, just reported 2004 revenue of $1.2 billion, while Cleveland Golf had fiscal year 2004 revenue of $126.8 million.) Nine Ping products made Golf Digest‘s 2005 equipment “Hot List,” including top honors for the G2 irons.

To gets its groove back, Ping blended the type of technological skill that first made its equipment stand out with marketing tactics both original and conventional. The result is a far cry from the wilting atmosphere of a decade ago, when internal strife in the corporation contributed to slowed decision-making and stalled growth. “I got fired a few times,” John Solheim says of his working relationship with his father, who died in 2000 at 88 after years of declining health. “And I left for a couple of days on my own one time, too.”

While Ping’s patriarch aged, its engineering-focused leaders lost touch with consumers and retailers and were watching market share slip away. “At the tail end of being a really hot brand, they were a really smug company,” says Carl Rose Jr., of Carl’s Golfland, the Detroit area’s largest golf retailer. Today’s lineup of Ping irons showcases the company’s longstanding engineering prowess, but more importantly demonstrates how the company has come to understand the evolving marketplace and what is necessary to succeed. In the early 1980s golfers would contentedly cool their heels waiting three to four months for a set of custom-fit Ping Eye2s, the most commercially successful iron ever made. Today Ping irons are customarily shipped within 48 hours. Moreover, the company currently manufactures three iron models (until 1996, it never had more than one design current in the market), the S59, the i3+ and the G2. Of the three, the S59 best illustrates Ping’s transformation.

In a 1986 interview Karsten Solheim said he saw no reason to make a blade iron. But, by the turn of the century, John Solheim knew differently. Tiger Woods was playing blades, and young golfers – whom Ping long had courted through active junior and college programs because they became key influencers as adults – wanted to play what Tiger played.

Ping G10 Range

The switch away from Ping’s more forgiving cavity backs was hard for the company to make, but the result was the S59, introduced in 2003. An investment-cast club (like all Ping irons), the S59 had the distinctive Ping blasted finish and no ferrule. It was a hit, as much as any blade can be given the market’s size. And last year the company came out with the S59 Tour, the same design but with a polished finish and a ferrule. In design the club was still a Ping, but in look fit squarely in the mainstream. Until a few years ago, no one in the industry would have imagined a Ping club could look like this, but then Ping always has charted its own course.

“We want to set the trend,” Solheim says. “You will never be the leader if you are just chasing.”

For many years, it was other manufacturers who were trying to catch up to Ping. When Karsten sold his first production putter in 1959, he wasn’t far removed from tinkering in his garage with Popsicle sticks and sugar cubes in an attempt to build a more forgiving club. The lack of computer-aided design software, however, didn’t prevent him from applying the scientific method. “Karsten revolutionized club design,” says veteran club designer John Hoeflich. “He looked at golf as pure engineering.”

Karsten eventually turned his attention from perimeter-weighted putters to irons, but his first attempts at milling forged blocks of steel into his cavity-back designs proved unsatisfactory. In 1969, outsourcing the casting of his designs, Solheim created his first production iron, the Karsten 1. When the opportunity arose to purchase a Phoenix foundry in 1972, Solheim took the plunge. It took two more years for the facility, called Dolphin, to be fitted to make clubs, as the company honored the foundry’s existing contracts. Even today, Dolphin still performs work for two of those original clients, Karsten Manufacturing’s only non-golf endeavors.

Word of mouth began to build through the ’70s for Ping irons (six Karsten models and the Eye), reaching a peak with the Eye2 in 1982. Combined with the already powerful putter franchise, Ping commanded more than 30 percent market share in each category by the late 1980s. The science for the Eye2, which placed the center of gravity in the optimal position, was indisputable. The clubs were in such demand people waited patiently, or otherwise, to get them – the time-consuming task of casting and finishing, plus company-imposed restrictions on shop allocations, limiting supply.

Yet instead of creating frustrated consumers, the effort required to obtain Pings actually increased buzz for the clubs, creating a cult-like feel. “I remember in the late-’70s a musician needed some odd specs on a set of irons,” says Leigh Bader, co-owner of Pine Oaks GC in South Easton, Mass., and 3balls.com, a large online golf store. “He waited 21 months for his clubs. If you owned Pings, you felt like you belonged to something.”

But customer loyalty wasn’t enough to halt Ping’s slide, which began at the company’s peak in 1987 with two unrelated occurrences. The launch of the Tommy Armour 845 iron, designed by Hoeflich, signaled that competitors were catching up, even though, as Hoeflich admits, the rest of the industry “is just imitating what Karsten did.” Simultaneously Karsten’s square-grooves disagreement with the USGA and PGA Tour over the measurement of clubface grooves burst into the public arena, adding to the distractions.

Karsten launched a failed attempt to make a golf ball, burning resources for 19 years before giving up in 1996. When Phoenix’ Moon Valley CC (former site of the city’s Ping-sponsored LPGA event and the course where Annika Sorenstam shot her 59) floundered, Karsten stepped in to buy it. The company invested in real estate, eventually owning a shopping center. Ping founded an apparel division in the mid-’80s and ran it until 1996. In 1999 Perry Ellis licensed the Ping name and still is making Ping Collection apparel, but John Solheim has succeeded in selling or shuttering all the projects but the two foundry clients, allowing the company to concentrate on equipment.

Greater than the energy diverted to ancillary areas was the challenge presented by Callaway. Just as the Eye2 transformed the iron market in the ’80s, the 1991 introduction of the Big Bertha driver shook the wood market. As Ely Callaway was bringing a mass-market marketing mentality to golf, Ping finally was coming out with an iron to replace the Eye2. Rose recalls Karsten, who also was slow to embrace metal woods, coming to Michigan to talk about the new club, the 1992 Zing. “I remember looking at him and asking what was different about this club,” says Rose. “He just looked at me and said, ‘It’s a new golf club, and it’s been 10 years since we had one. They’ll all buy it.’ ”

While the Zing did tremendous business in its first year – the company says that it was its biggest introduction ever – sales quickly dried up. The reason was simple, says John Solheim. Despite having a highly functional iron, “What we missed was optics. You need the proper look.”

The public face of Ping in the early ’90s was a company out of touch but still firing on its engineering cylinders. What was not as apparent at the time was conflict within the company. “The groove issue was extremely tough on [Karsten],” says John Solheim. And while the settlement John brokered with the USGA in 1990 was approved by Karsten, “he wouldn’t forgive me,” says John. “It made our relationship very drawn for quite a while.”

John, the youngest of Karsten and Louise Solheim’s three sons, began helping his father make putters when he was 14 but wasn’t getting paid. When he became a junior in high school, he applied for a job at a grocery store. “My dad wasn’t very happy about it,” says John, “so I started to get paid, $2.50 for every putter I built. And if I wanted to hire help, it came out of my salary.” John was making Scottsdale Ansers, now highly sought as collectibles.

Toward the end of Karsten’s stewardship, father and son had their difficulties. “If I had an idea and brought it up to my dad, that guaranteed it wouldn’t happen,” says John. “So I had other people bring my ideas to him. And that worked very well.”

According to Solheim and Doug Hawken, Ping’s 55-year-old president and chief operating officer, the company’s low point occurred in 1994. Hawken had just left production to run the company’s marketing efforts. He met immediately with key retailers. “I wanted to find out where we were,” Hawken says. “And we were out of touch.” It was the dose of humility that started Ping’s recovery.

In 1995, when Karsten’s failing health – eventually diagnosed as Parkinson’s Disease – forced him to cede control to John, changes began. Most notably, John started to trust people outside the family to help make decisions. “It was ‘Karsten’s way’ ” before John took over, says Hawken, the highest-ranking officer at Ping who is not a Solheim family member. “Now, it’s a team. It took a different management style to remain competitive.”

After years of resisting change, a new, more activist direction was charted. It certainly wasn’t an overnight transformation, nor has it yielded an unbroken string of market successes. But 10 years later, the results are noteworthy. Among the prominent developments:

Tags: ping, ping history

Ping G5 Irons

May 18, 2006 PING G5 Men’s Iron Set-Steel ShaftsPing sort of seems to be the forgotten man among the major manufacturers these days. I don’t see their advertisements on televison. I can’t tell you who’s on their pro staff. They aren’t making the golf news sites and blogs with their equipment. I don’t know anyone who has their newer clubs (although plenty are still playing with 10-year-old models). And they certainly are not being pushed in any of the local pro shops.

It could be just a local thing—maybe they get more traction in other areas—but I get the feeling that they’re kind of sliding backwards.

Still, they continue to focus on producing very player-friendly clubs, such as the new G5 irons, which made Golf Digest’s 2006 Hot List.

The G5s are a refinement of last year’s G2 series, with a wider sole and more perimeter weighting. The weight port on the back of the clubs is larger, too, reducing vibrations and stabilizing the face.

The wider sole was created through Ping’s redesign of the undercut cavity. The pull direction is parallel to the ground, rather than perpendicular to the face. This lets Ping move more mass to the the back of the clubhead.

They’re still not particularly attractive, with their tumbled finish and blunt lines. But with Ping, its all about playability.

Tags: Add new tag, g5, ping g5 irons

The greatest driver ever? Ping G5? TaylorMade? Callaway? Try Speed Racer. Animated racing’s hero was fast, true and handsome. Precisely what we want from the drivers in our bags. So if you’re looking for more speed off the tee, here are a few late-model entries with more oomph than Speed’s powerful Mach 5 (clockwise from top).

PING G5. 460 cubic centimeters. The redesigned G2 redistributes eight grams to the sole of the club to lower the center of gravity ($300, pinggolf.com).

YONEX Cyberstar CT. 460cc. A graphite crown allows weight to be saved and repositioned low and deep, including a tungsten weight chip in the sole ($360, yonex.com).

CLEVELAND Launcher 460. The titanium crown allows saved weight to be reallocated around the perimeter. The clubface is made of SP700 beta titanium ($200, clevelandgolf.com).

SRIXON W-506. 450cc. The club’s face, sole and backwall are all designed to give slightly at impact, keeping the ball on the face longer and reducing spin ($300, srixon.com).

MIZUNO MX-500. 460cc. The graphite crown and toe permit 30 grams to be moved low and toward the heel. The face has six thickness zones ($300, mizunousa.com).

Tags: Drivers, ping

Attention, choppers: Technology has banished the banana ball forever

You can blame a lot of things for that weak, wildly fluttering, despicably uncontrollable, girly-man slice of yours. What you can’t do is blame technology. Fact is, technology–properly implemented–can end your slice. Immediately.

That’s right, Banana Man. If you can’t find the fairway, the fault is yours. Sure, the root cause might be a swing flaw, but that kind of fix could take months or even years of diligent practice, video analysis and perhaps the repeated use of some torturous swing-training device that if used improperly might get you arrested in nine states. Who wants to do that? Save the hassle and just get yourself a new driver. Golf Digest has the data to show that slice-correction technology isn’t a marketing gimmick. It works.

“We can definitely say the slice is contained, and there’s certainly enough technology out there to kill it,” says Bob Thurman, director of research for Wilson Golf. “In terms of things like head size, face angle and draw bias, the average golfer has every opportunity to get that face to close at impact.”

Recent robot and player testing confirms as much. In research conducted for Golf Digest by Golf Laboratories Inc. of San Diego, a swing robot hit balls with six drivers, two with a neutral setup (TaylorMade r5 dual Type N, Adams Redline RPM Neutral), two with a draw setup (TaylorMade r5 dual Type D and Adams Redline RPM Draw) and two with adjustable weight screws (TaylorMade r7 quad and r7 quad TP). The robot’s launch setup was designed to mimic a slice at an average golfer’s swing speed of 95 miles per hour. Of the drivers tested, those built with a draw bias or a draw-enhancing weight configuration hit tee shots with an average of 13.4 yards less rightward movement than those with a neutral setup.

Neutral-driver tee shots missed the center line by an average of 22 yards to the right, and draw-bias drivers missed the center line by an average of 8.6 yards to the right. Given that fairways on typical courses tend to be 35 to 40 yards wide, that’s the difference between a lie in the cabbage and one in the short grass.

Golf Laboratories player testing revealed much the same effect. Each of the 10 players in the test hit the ball more left with a draw-bias driver versus drivers with a neutral setup. On average, draw-driver shots were 15.1 yards left of those hit with a neutral club. In addition, seven of the 10 testers hit the draw version farther than the neutral clubs because they were able to launch the ball higher or with less spin.

“In 15 years of doing this, I very rarely get impressed,” said Gene Parente, president of Golf Laboratories and a member of the Golf Digest Technical Advisory Panel. “It was amazing to watch all the jaws dropping. It was a very compelling example of what technology can do.”

First things first. Big-headed drivers are great even without ball-flight designs. Bigger means a club potentially has a high moment of inertia (resistance to twisting), and therefore is more stable on hits away from the sweet spot. “Extra size means less curvature because of a higher moment of inertia,” says Callaway Golf’s Alan Hocknell, vice president of innovation and advanced design. “That lets you tighten up the envelope in your shot pattern.”

But big heads can also be dangerous if you’ve already got the “rights.” The bigger a clubhead gets, the more the center of gravity tends to move away from the shaft. The farther it is from the shaft, the more difficult it is to square the face. That’s why most big drivers already have some degree of draw bias built into them. MacGregor’s MacTec is built with 14 grams of tungsten weights in the heel, and Cleveland’s Launcher Comp 460 features a graphite crown that allows weight to be redistributed in the heel. But a chronic slicer should look at drivers that take ball-flight correction a step further. Specifically, focus on these characteristics:

1. Closed face angle. “The biggest factor by far in helping the golfer who slices is to close the face angle,” says designer Ralph Maltby, president and founder of The GolfWorks, a golf club component company in Newark, Ohio. The trouble is, most golfers are a little uncomfortable with the way a hooked face looks at address. Worse, a hooked face can alter some swings, potentially defeating the purpose. “What happens a lot of times is that players set them up open so they don’t look so closed,” says Thurman of Wilson Golf. Still, it is undeniable that it should work. Tom Wishon, president of Tom Wishon Golf Technology, a golf club component firm in Durango, Colo., says his research shows a six- to seven-yard correction for each degree a driver’s face is closed.

2. Extra heel bias. Most drivers have some degree of heel bias, but there are some head-shape modifications that further weight the heel (look for a head shape that flattens and extends toward the heel side). Heel-weighting through offset or other means is good because the club’s center of gravity lines up with the shaft at impact. That action means the face closes coming into the ball. Also, pushing mass toward the heel with weight chips or adjustable screws will increase the toe area and induce draw spin on the ball because of the gear effect–the tendency of the ball to hook when hit toward the club’s toe.

3. Offset. Offset is when the face is set back from the shaft. ”When you offset it, it really backweights the head,” says Clay Long, who crafted Nicklaus Golf’s AirMax ML 440. “It moves the center of gravity farther behind the shaft, and the centrifugal force of the head at impact bends the shaft forward and closes the face.”

4. Flexible shaft. In most cases, a shaft that’s too stiff will produce shots to the right (for right-handers) because the face never gets back to square. A softer shaft is an underrated, easy slice fix. Says Maltby: “I would put the correct shaft ahead of weight-biasing. If a slicer had a tip-flexible shaft, which causes the face to close more coming into impact, he would be much farther along with this kind of change.” He says a shorter shaft can increase sweet-spot hits for golfers who struggle with their swings.

Don’t overlook the ball, either. Many balls, even those that spin around the greens, are designed to spin less off the driver. Less spin means less curve. (Caution: Less spin makes it hard for low-speed/low-launch swingers to maximize distance.)

With all these suggestions there is the fear that too much medicine can kill the patient. If a driver is designed to go left and the slice-swinger starts swinging better, he could find his shots flying left of out-of-bounds. Perhaps. In the player testing, one golfer whose neutral-driver shots were missing the center line by only six yards found that when he switched to a slice-correction club, his tee shots flew 15 yards left of center, though that still would have kept him in most fairways.

“You will never see a golfer with a legitimate slice who changes to a driver with a more closed face angle begin to hook the ball. Never,” says Wishon, who has fit thousands of golfers during the last 32 years.

So if you want to snuff the life out of an unrelenting slice, taking advantage of the options of modern technology is not a suggestion. It’s a mandate.

Embarrassed? Tell your ego to shove it. Demo a closed-face, offset or draw-bias driver, and come talk to us. If you’re worried about aesthetics, install some window boxes. We assure you that after hitting more fairways in a week than you used to hit in a month, how a club looks will concern you about as much as whether the guys are paying you in new 20s or old ones.

Of course, like Long says, “The slice is an ugly shot that takes an ugly cure. And every now and then you’ve got to use a little castor oil.”

Tags: slice