When New is Only New

From time to time a new or casual player asks me for advice about golf clubs. My first reaction is to think it's rather like asking someone if their girlfriend is hot. They're simply asking for the wrong person's opinion. Still, even though choosing golf clubs is a very personal decision (almost as personal as choosing a girlfriend) I am able to offer some help.

My first rule is that sometimes new is better but sometime's new is only new.

So, when is new better?

New is better when it comes to drivers.

I think having a driver that's more than a year or so old is a big mistake. Even though driver manufacturers are pushing up against the USGA's limit on COR and displacement, there is still a lot of tweaking going on when it comes to driver design and construction. Driver manufacturers are also getting better at mating driver shafts to heads to optimize launch and spin rates. Even if I didn't believe that drivers were getting at least a tad better each year I would still advise players to replace their drivers every year or so (depending on how much they play and how many range balls they hit). The reason is because 460cc drivers are relatively fragile. The precise bulge and roll that's built into their faces are easily, if subtly, flattened with impact after impact. The result is a driver with dead and live spots which results in off the tee inconsistency that none of us want.

New isn't usually better when it comes to fairway woods.

Why is that, you ask? Fairway wood heads are close to the same weight as a driver head but they're far smaller. So, there's less for the club companies to do when it comes to the performance of the face (COR) or distribution of weight. That's why a lot of tour pros have old fairway woods in their bags. They know they're not losing anything compared to new designs so they tend to stick with what they've got. If you've got a favorite 5 or 3 wood and want to infuse it with new life, get it re-shafted and re-gripped. You'll probably fall in love all over again.

New is way better when it comes to hybrid clubs.

Well, let me clarify that: If you already have hybrids in your bag you can simply apply what I've already said about fairway woods to hybrids. If you're still lugging your 3, 4 and possibly even your 5 iron around you need to hit some hybrids and let your ball flight tell which club design is more suited to your game. Better yet, don't waste your time. You will hit every hybrid of a given loft better than the corresponding long iron. I guarantee it. The good news is that it's perfectly fine to buy used hybrids and save a few bucks while you save a few strokes.

New is only new when it comes to irons and wedges.

Sorry, but it's true. Since Ping started making the Eye2 back in the 80s there's nothing really new under the sun when it comes to irons and wedges. In design terms, they are what we call finished art. This should feel like good news to you. You don't have to spend money on new irons unless buying new irons is fun for you. As with all clubs, shafts and grips matter a lot so make sure they're well suited to your game and in good condition.

New isn't even really new when it comes to putters.

Pretty much everything you see at your local golf shop has been done before and folks have made and missed putts with every design ever made. Putters and putting are more about optics, preference and technique than they are about any supposed qualities of design and manufacture. That's why the old guy you played with on Sunday out putted you with his garage sale bullseye with electrician's tape for a grip. All yu have to do is make sure your comfortable with your putter. You have to be comfortable with how it looks, how it feels, how long it is and how much it weighs. After that you just have to learn how to putt. Best of luck with that...

New is better when it comes to golf balls, but you have to be honest about your game.

Contemporary golf balls are miracles of materials science. Simply put, the golf ball gurus have found a way to make a ball perform one way when it's struck with a high swing speed like a driver, another when it's struck with a medium swing speed as might be created by an iron and yet another way when it's struck by a putter or a sand wedge. How did they do it? Do you really care? They did it by creating multilayer balls. Each layer has different rebound characteristics and each is energized by impacts of different speeds. What you need to do is ask yourself whether you really want more spin or less spin. You also need to know where spin is your friend and where it could work against you. The good news is that you really can't lose: The worst ball on the market today is better for the average player than the best ball in the days of yore.

So, sometimes new is better and sometimes it's just new.

A Look at a Tour Issue T.P. Mills

Anyone who's read any of my putter articles knows of my admiration for Ping's late founder, Karsten Solheim. Pretty much the entire contemporary golf club business owes a significant debt to Solheim for his lasting contributions. Both the cavity back iron and the heel and toe weighted putter came from his mind and no other and both are as relevant today as they were when he first conceived of them.

The Anser style head is always the design I turn to when I want the best chance of making putts. To my eye, the most pleasing Anser design was Ping's own Scottsdale version. It is sad to report that Ping has seemingly abandoned that shape and done so for reasons that elude me. Ping has even begun to forsake their long tradition of casting their own putter and iron heads. When you consider Solheim's reason for choosing his factory's location in Phoenix was the presence of the abandoned foundry that stood there, it is ironic Ping is now turning their back on their long tradition of design and manufacture.

So, as uninspiring as the Made in China sticker is on current Ping putters, what really turns me off about them is their shape. Things started to go to hell with Ping's Anser design with the machined JAS series. Those marvels of machining looked like nothing so much as a vaccuum cleaner attachments, with squared lines where smooth curves should have been.

That kind of squarish look is a common problem with Anser wannabes. What is sometimes forgotten is the fact that the Anser's softish shape came from the simple casting molds Solheim created when he and his wife Louise were casting putters in their garage. Round and smooth is easy with a casting. Sharp and square a bit more tricky.

So it is that many of today's CNC milled Anser-style heads are possessed of a look that is too mechanical, for lack of a better word. Scotty Cameron gets this classic shape more right than anyone else these days though in the past he accomplished this the old fashioned way...he copied the original.

Nowadays Scotty's Anser style heads blend the original shape with some of Scotty's own contours which finally have a truly original appearance to them. I like the look so well that an off the rack Cameron is in my bag right now.

All of this brings me to the subject of T.P. Mills. Like most players, I owned a couple Spalding / Mills putter back in the day, but they never did much for me. Later, I owned a forged Mizuno / Mills (TPM 2). This was a fantastically soft putter, let down only by its relative light weight at my preferred 34" playing length.

Even so, the Mill's name always stayed in my mind. Mills was a contemporary of Solheim and created some fine designs that still have a great look today. His work with Spalding made him a household name in the golf world. His longstanding tradition of requiring tour pros to actually pay for their Mills putters set him apart from pretty much everyone else. The quality of his putters made him able to march to the beat of his own drummer. After a nearly 40 year run making putters, T.P. Mills died in 2006 at the age of 85.

Happily, T.P. Mills putters live on through the work of the elder Mills' son, David. David worked alongside his father for many years and continues to eschew the use of CNC milling. All work on T.P. Mills putters is done by hand.

I've owned dozens of off the rack Camerons and two Cameron tour putters. The Cameron Circle T putters are the holy grail to some aficiannados but they can leave me a bit cold. In far too many cases a Circle T putter is nothing more than an off the rack putter with some hand stamping.

By making all of their putters by hand, T.P. Mills brings genuine uniqueness to what has become the expected shape of putters. I am showing the Tour Issue Mills next to my Cameron Studio Select Newport to give those of you who haven't seen a Mills up close and personal a convenient point of reference.

For me, its look at address is make or break for a putter. If the putter looks too square, or if its dimensions are disproportional or in any way awkward, it's not going to work for me. The Mills Tour Issue is right on the line of being too squared off at the heel and toe to be a great Anser head. That said, the smooth hand-crowning of the top line makes up for this and helps give the putter an understated and purposeful look. The Newport's top line looks a bit flattish in comparison, The snow on the Mills doesn't hurt or help the putter, to my eye. However, I like how it looks in pictures and when I'm just admiring it. I never notice it when I'm rolling the ball, which is a good thing.

It's surprising (and a little disappointing to me that the Mills' two sets of heel and toe bumpers were quite sharp. The Cameron is significantly softer in this area and more in touch with the classic Anser head shape. The Mills does square up a little better (optically) than the Cameron thanks to the shape of the bumpers.

One significant area of superiority for the Mills over the Cameron is the way the Mills soles when it's placed at address. Cameron putters, even with their sole angles, tend to toe in a bit. It's not severe like with some putters and it's easy to correct but the Mills sits perfectly at address making it very easy to align. This is really interesting since the sole is seemingly plain. It speaks to how well the Mills is balanced in ways both visible and invisible.

From the cavity, you can see both putters make use of alternating rounded and squared surfaces. The Mills putter looks and feels like the more green hugging of the two with its trimmer and less rounded heel and toe bumpers. The Studio Select is one of Cameron's cleaner designs but even with the hand stampings the Mills keeps most of its all business look.

I'm not much for colored grips so the red and white Mills grip is a bit much for me. Those of you with an eye for details will notice that the Studio Select Newport is wearing the standard grip for Cameron's California series. Why? Because the standard grip on the Studio Select is, you guessed it, red.

The faces of both putters are very nicely milled. The Cameron has plenty of mill chatter and it's shaped like all Cameron face milling back to the time of the late 1990s Oil Cans. The mill chatter on the face of the Mills is softer looking in comparison and I especially like the classic T.P. Mills aim point. What's a T.P. Mills putter without 'em?

How do they roll the ball?

Quite surprisingly, the Cameron is the softer of the two putters. The Mills is very solid with a slightly more poppy sound and feel. This is in contrast to the very soft feel of the previous Mills design I've used, the Mizuno TPM 2. Though difficult to confirm, I would say the Mills rolls the ball a little more tightly than the Cameron which is good if you want your putts to hold their line (assuming you've rolled the ball on the right line).

Though both these putters owe much of their design and functionality to the legendary Ping Anser, each is very different in look, feel and use. The Mills has the organic quality of a creation we might make for ourselves, if we had the time and ability, while the Cameron exudes the presence of a highly executed product.

I can make putts with either but am very glad I own both.

The Heel: Who Ended The Lift?

During last week's coverage of the WGC at Firestone, Peter Kostis asked Nick Faldo about the issue of heel lift. Kostis wanted to know why a common practice of nearly a century went away. For some reason, Sir Nick either didn't know the answer, or didn't find the question compelling, because even though Kostis asked him twice Faldo didn't answer him.

Now I am quite certain Johnny Miller would have talked about the subject for the next 30 minutes, but that's another story.

The question and Faldo's non-answer got me to thinking:

When did the heel lift leave the building and who made it go away?

By the mid-50s Ben Hogan still lifted his heel, if only a little.

Like many, I see the Hogan of the 50s as a harbinger of the modern swing, even down to the heel lift. He still had one, but it was almost an anachronism. It wasn't as if he needed it to get a full turn or that he lacked flexibility. It seemed more like an old habit than anything else.

Jack Nicklaus lifted plenty, as did Johnny Miller. It would seem both took more influence from Jones than from Hogan at least in that way. Tom Weiskopf still lifts, but as with Hogan's over a half century, it appears more habitual than functional.

I believe that it was Fred Couples more than anyone who made keeping the left heel on the ground at first fashionable and later fundamental. Couples really bridged the end of the Johnny Miller (A notorious heel lifter and arm rotator) Era to our contemporary game.

Watching Couples swing today it's all too easy to forget that he's over 50. Back in the early 80's Boom-Boom days he was like hot spaghetti. He swing was unimaginably wide and upright...all the while his heel stayed bolted to the turf.

Remember, too, that the television era really got going in the 80s and Fred Couples was the man. Of course, there are plenty of other reasons the heel lift faded away. Golf went from being a game that relied on a gradual gathering of centrifugal energy (the old school small muscle swing) to one that augmented centrifugal energy with leverage (the big muscle, one piece takeaway swing).

I wonder if the heel lift is gone for reasons that truly benefit the average golfer? I'm not sure. So much of golf's progress seems to benefit the very people who don't need help. High COR drivers, multi-piece balls make the game easier, in the main, for better players. The heel lift may have gone the way of the dinosaur because better players didn't need it but I'm not at all sure it's vanished from our local munys for the same good reason.

It takes more than a 400 yard carry to make a golf story.

A while back, I read a breathless article on the Golf Digest website. The subject was one of wonderment: Was it possible that Tim Tebow has a swing speed of 141 MPH?

If it really matters, it turns out that he doesn't...not even close.

But, the real point of the article was that we all better be ready for real athleticism to come to golf. Apparently, there are a bunch of elite athletes with swing speeds that make J.B. Holmes' swing look downright languid.

The author wonders if this news is scary, but I think he has mistaken fear for boredom. When was the last time any of you really watched any of the long drive competitions?

Quick: Name the current RE/MAX Long Drive Champion.

The reason you can't is because hitting it further is interesting only within the context of something interesting like actually playing golf. Hitting it far, for the sake of far, just isn't compelling.

That's why the guys who make a living cracking the club faces on their drivers and smashing the ball over 0.25568182 of a mile are largely anonymous. Let's face it: You could take all the long drive guys together and put them up against a lowly, out of shape, 40 something tour pro like Billy Mayfair (no rap on Billy) and Mayfair would take all their money.

I have no doubt the raw athleticism of the average professional golfer will do nothing but increase. And, while I don't view that athleticism with fear, I do have a concern that too much in golf has become aligned in favor of stronger and more athletic players. The USGA has decided to let the ball get away from them more and more while attempting to distract us with relatively meaningless regulations on grooves. As Jack Nicklaus said long ago, "It's the ball!"

The fact is that swing speeds are only numbers. What makes golf and some players compelling are the stories only great golf can produce.

It takes more than a 400 yard carry to make a golf story.

Is Aaron Baddeley Back?

I was understandably surprised to see Aaron Baddeley at the top of Sunday's leader board at the Northern Trust Open. He'd fallen out of the top 200 (shocking in itself, for player with his early record) and I hadn't heard any rumblings about him playing well of late.

No, it wasn't the major that I predicted for Baddeley back in 2008, but it's a tour win on a storied course with some reasonably tough competition. In other words, it's a good start.

Baddeley, like so many good, young players had fallen to the siren song of getting better. I cannot say for certain that he was yet another victim of Stack & Tilt, but there didn't seem to be any stacking or tilting in his swing I could see. What a relief.

I think young tour players need to be logical when it comes to their game. Baddeley recently went back to Dale Lynch, his first coach back in his native Australia. Now, that's logical: Lynch helped Baddeley build his original swing, the same swing that won him those Australian Opens and his tour wins.

The Stack & Tilt boys and David Leadbetter took what Baddeley already had and changed it. And, as I have pointed out so many times change and improvement are two very different things.

No further comment here. It's simply good to see Aaron Baddeley playing well again.

Dear Golf Channel: Please say goodbye to Jim Gray

Jim Gray has always been the kind of sports reporter who, in his heart, wants to be the story. I never liked Pete Rose until Gray appointed himself his grand inquisitor. I winced when it was announced that Gray would be working for the Golf Channel. Say what you will about the Golf Channel but the network has done a good job getting the tone right when it comes to reporting about golf...at least until they hitched their wagon to Gray's falling star.

Actually, I'd argue the slide started with that slightly less loose cannon Alex Miceli and has continued with the addition of golf writers Jeff Rude and John Hawkins. My guess is that the Golf Channel is looking to be edgy by including these veteran shouters. The problem is that shouting and golf don't mix.

Last night, the Golf Channel's shouting golf pro, Michael Breed (one shouter I actually like, by the way), said that with over a million people giving up golf last year we all have an obligation to grow the game.

Grow the game:

I have loathed that phrase since the first time I heard it back in the early days of the Tiger era. The theory was that golf is just going to grow and grow until it's as big as soccer. That's not only impossible, it's not desirable.

Golf has always been and will always be a relatively minor sport. The early years of the Tiger era, like the Dot Com era, weren't a glimpse of the future but a look at something truly exceptional. We won't see the likes of either any time soon for those once in a generation events are just that.

What all this means is that the Golf Channel would be wise to cool its jets. It needs on air personalities who know the game and can speak about it intelligently. The good news is that it already has a lot of them.

Jim Gray's departure from the Golf Channel makes room for someone who can do the job without trying to be a bigger story than golf.

And, that's a good thing.

World Ranking Follies: Lee Westwood, Martin Kaymer & Graeme McDowell

I've been very busy ignoring Martin Kaymer, Lee Westwood & Graeme McDowell.

The geniuses over at the world rankings would like us to believe they're number 1, 2 and 5 in the world, but you'll have to call me a non-believer.

Let's look at Westwood's record in the majors:

Pretty impressive, eh? It is if you like a guy who has proven his ability come close to winning a major, but not quite be able pull it off when the chips are down.

Then there's Kaymer:

I'm not sure if this is impressive or not. Quite frankly, Kaymer has not played well enough for long enough for him to be number 2 in the world. He may prove to be a fantastic player, but he's not there yet. The word is that he's working on learning to hit the ball left to right for The Masters.

That's a little scary for the number 2 player on the planet. There's no such thing as a minor swing tweak when it comes to world class players. If Kaymer is really tinkering with his swing a couple months before the first major I won't be surprised if he ends up having the long term impact of Shaun Micheel who won the 2003 PGA and then vanished.

Understand that I am not predicting doom for either Westwood or Kaymer. Both or either could end up being the real deal. Still, even though the world ranking system was out of whack when it managed to keep Tiger Woods on top as long as it did and it's similarly out of whack with Westwood and Kaymer at the top of the pyramid.

Don't even get me started with Graeme McDowell...

Sorry, I couldn't help it. I'm just not impressed. My guess is that we'll now watch Graeme McDowell's putter, and his overall game, cool off substantially.

There's nothing more for me to do than to go out on a limb and predict that none of these three fine Euros win a major in 2011.

Golf's Technogurus & Losing the Elegance of Self Discovery

When Jon Fitzgerald reached the age of 40 he embarked on an all-too common quest; to make his golf game as good as possible. His film, The Back Nine, chronicles his project. The story starts with a brief personal history of Fitzgerald, his life with his father and stepfather, and a look back at his youthful athleticism.

Like most of us, Fitzgerald has to keep a lot of plates spinning in his life. He has a wife, a job and, at the start of the film, one child. I was interested to see what Fitzgerlad's effort at the age of 40 would look like compared to mine at nearly 50.

It was quite impressive if at the same time more than a little dismaying.

Fitzgerald started out, as do so many golfers (myself included) by seeking the help of a professional. Now, seeing a golf teacher is far from odd, but what Fitzgerald did went far beyond working with a pro. Rather than just a golf teacher, Fitzgerald started out with a visit to a Yoga/Golf guru in Arizona. She then referred him to a strength coach, who referred him to a swing coach, who referred him to a guy who uses a battery of imaging devices, including a vest with embedded sensors, that would allow Fitzgerald to have his progress monitored via the internet.

There is a part of me who envies the resources Fitzgerald employed, but there's a bigger part of me who finds it all rather sad. Every player thinks he should be better. They think they should hit it further, straighter, and they should make more putts than they do. There's something about the attempted blending of golf and technology that suggests to average players that they really can be better if they have all of the information they need. Of course, this is nothing new. Ben Hogan started a good deal of the madness with his now ubiquitous references to pronation and supination in his classic, Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf.

I can't prove it but my guess is that Hogan, with his undeniably modest education, didn't know what either word meant until his co-writer, Herbert Warren Wind, told Hogan what they meant. I also can't prove that Hogan's use of those two words caused far more confusion than they did understanding over the last few decades. But, they surely have caused a lot of confusion.

Wrapped up in nearly every technological breakthrough in golf instruction is a basic fallacy; that knowing will always make you better. Knowing begs the question of knowing what? In Fitzgerald's case (and mine, too) the most profound if sobering knowledge is that we'll never be all that good. We lack the basic ability to be very much better than we are. Fitzgerald's swing at the end of the films looks pretty much like his swing at the start. He has rather a notchy backswing and can't quite clear his hips coming through impact. I have the same problems and lots of others.

Do I seem pessimistic? Or, do I seem envious?

No matter what I am I will admit some players get better, I'll even allow they get better because of solid instruction. But it seems to me there's a difference between one on one instruction and the technological phalanx Fitzgerald subjected himself to. Players who get better in golf usually do it through a series of hard-won self discoveries. The purveyors of technogolf would have us believe that they know what we might never discover on our own. Fitzgerald discovers he needs orthotics since his left foot pronates (there's that word again).

Really?

I'm glad some great players with somewhat unusual swings didn't live in an era when the technogurus could have screwed them up. Honestly, what would these guys have done with Lee Trevino's self-discovered practice of aiming left while swinging right? If he were young enough, he would have probably listened to them, adjusted his stance so that it looked and measured parallel to his intended line of flight. They would have also shown him that his head dropped 6" from address to impact and they would have fixed that, too.

And, Lee Trevino would have vanished into golf's abyss, never to be seen again.

For already accomplished players technogurus may not do too much harm, then again maybe they do. At age 35, Tiger Woods is rebuilding his swing for the third time. I am certain that each time a technoguro convinced him, arguably the best player ever to play golf, that technology proved that his swing needed a substantive change.

Of course, no swing stays the same, and even golf's old timers sought help in formal and some not so formal ways. But, it's my contention that one of the reasons contemporary players can fall so fast and so far is from their growing reliance on the certitude technogurus offer. Think of the declines of Chris Riley, Ty Tryon and David Gossett to name only three. Did their games really decline or were they let down by the relentless analysis of technogurus?

At UCLA's Royce Hall there is a quote from Plato that goes something like this: Education is learning to use the tools which the race has found to be indispensable. The tools championed by the technogurus are genuinely impressive but whether they are indispensable, or even truly helpful, to players is far from certain.

I'm busy writing an golf book for women. In it, I use this phrase: You will also never master this game. You will, however, go from discovery to discovery for the rest of your life.

Golf is a solitary game of self discovery. The congregation of golf's technogurus may honestly believe in what they do. But, that's not really what matters here. What matters is that the elegance of self discovery remains at the heart of golf.