Oops……..But Thank You MOI!!

Tonight I was finishing a golf club for a client who will be going on a golf trip in Thursday. I went to a local golf store and bought the grip he wanted…………well, not quite…… Bought a Golf Pride Tour Velvet Cord……….but did not realize that this grip came in “0.580 core” and “0.600” core. The larger one is the one I wanted, and I did not think to check if there was a different one. And the weight of the 0.580 core grip is slightly higher than the weight of the 0.600 grip – by 1.5 grams.

In the “old” days I would have been pretty fussy about this (well I was not pleased to tell the truth, being a prefectionist….) but I quickly realized that I could make this grip work just as well for the player. I do all of my fitting now to MOI (Moment of Interia) rather than Swingweight – MOI is more of a dynamic measure of how a player swings a club, and Swingweight is a static measurement. When I did the fitting for this player we found that the best MOI for him was 2,833 (in metric units).

1.5 grams of weight in the grip makes a difference of about 1/3 swingweight points. But since MOI is related to location of mass relative to the distance of that mass from the butt end of the club, the small extra weight of the grip should have essentially no affect on the final club MOI. And so no real effect on how the club feels when the player is swinging it.

So I put the slightly oversized grip on, stretched it just a little (to get it back to Men’s standard size), and measured the club MOI at 2,836…………………3 points off from 2,833 target which is essentially nothing.

So the player will get his driver back tomorrow, 44 inch length (more than an inch less than he was playing), butt flex about a flex softer (fitting his swing), and the MOI that we tested. And if, after his golf trip, he wants me to put the other grip on I will – but the club will swing the same. Pretty cool!

Tony