How Good ARE We?

From time to time when I am doing club fitting for golfers, I have experiences where I am simply amazed. These experiences continue to reinforce my belief that there are golf clubs that are JUST RIGHT for specific golfers. And when this happens I get inspired all over again about being a clubfitter.

One of the first of these experiences happened this past summer. I was doing a fitting for a golfer who had not played golf in a few years, about 70 years old. I put a 6 iron test club in his hands, very soft flex, and he IMMEDIATELY hit beautiful shots and said the feel of the club was amazing. I could tell that the connection between him and this test club was right. He continues to enjoy the irons that I built for him. There is no way that he would ever have been able to buy clubs with the specs I made for him at a golf shop.

I had a bit of a different but equally pleasant experience this past weekend. I was working with a client who wants me to build him a new set of irons, and we were discussing some of the iron head options that we will be testing soon. Near the end of our meeting, he said that sometime he also wants to have me look at his putter and putting setup, and I said why not now. He set up over the ball, and was in a great putting position…..his eyes just behind where he set the putter on the ground.

BUT I also noticed that he was toeing the putter slightly upright when he set up. I held the putter for him in this position and let him see what he was doing. We both agreed that once I bend his putter about a degree more flat he should have a perfect putting setup with the putter sitting flat on the ground at address and his eyes just behind the ball.

All well and good. But the NEXT part was the payoff. He said that he has a tendency to PUSH his putts and has some fear of three putting – he would almost prefer to miss greens and hit chips close to the hole for easy up and downs than have long putts. We agreed that the REASON he was pushing his putts was almost certainly that he was ADJUSTING for the fact that he presently putts with a putter that starts with the toe slightly up!

So what you say? Well, what this experience says to me is how much we can actually sense when our clubs do not fit us – so we adjust for the lack of correct fit, and sometimes overcompensate for say putters that are too upright, or in other cases shafts that are too stiff or too short.

One of the things that clubfitters are trained to do, as another example, is to limit the number of shots that we have players hit when we are doing things like length fitting. We do not typically allow a player to hit more than 3 shots with a given length club – and look at where the impact on the club is using impact labels. Why 3 shots – because all players will START ADJUSTING for a club does not fit them after a few shots, and so you will not get good length-fitting results if you allow more than 3 shots.

We as golfers do everything we can to try to compensate for clubs that do not work for us. Sometimes this adjusting works pretty well, and we never realize that if we had clubs that really fit us, we would get a lot more of those “a ha!” feelings on the golf course that result from playing with clubs that are a good match for our personal swings.

Once I bend this putter for my friend and he has some on the course putting results with the new setup, I will report the results back to you in this blog!

Tony