Vince Bove and Dan Strimple looked at the readouts on the Bushnell, wrote down numbers on a clipboard—distance, swing speed, ball speed–and handed me club after club. Adhesive stickers indicated where on the face I hit each shot, and were peeled off and pressed onto another sheet. Sharpie-ed marks on the ball also stuck to the stickers, and yielded another set of data, I don’t know what.
“Now try this,” the pros said.
For an hour or so, I did. “Sweet,” I said, for I was hitting, and being fit for, the new Hogan irons.
You’ve probably heard that Hogan clubs are being manufactured again—in Fort Worth, just like in the old days, when Himself was in charge of quality control, innovation, and corporate image. But as Ben Hogan aged, then died, so did his equipment company, which was bought and sold so many times that it completely lost its image, and its mojo.
In 2014, a club designer named Terry Koehler and his backers rescued the brand from the ashes. “What would Mr. Hogan build today?” is the question animating the enterprise. Note please that I said MISTER Hogan. With respect bordering on reverence, the people involved in the company always add the honorific.
I don’t. As his biographer—one of them–my regard for the man has a different flavor. Still, my experience with the greatest player of the middle of the 20th Century made it fitting that I get a Hogan fitting. But until this week, I didn’t.
Two reasons: first, I had grave doubts about the very concept. When I hit and mis-hit a golf ball, I blame the Indian, not the arrow. Golf clubs are static things and I am erratic as the stock market and as stable as a glass of nitroglycerine. Why measure me, when I change so much from day to day and from swing to swing?
Also, I did not want to know too specifically a lot of what the testing would tell me. Since I turned 39 what seems like a few weeks ago, I’ve noticed such a steep decline in every phase of my game that I just don’t want to know. Traversing 150 yards used to require an eight iron. Now it’s…more.
As for the depression I feel when the guy on TV says, “Spieth has 152 to the hole. Gap wedge”—and I know it might be seis or siete for me, depending on the wind—Strimple hit me with some tough love. “Get over IT, wimp,” he said.
And Bove showed me data proving that while my swing is no Swiss watch, it is easily consistent enough to benefit from having clubs that fit.
The testing over, I skipped out onto the greensward at Strimple’s driving range–that acreage you’ve seen a thousand times at the south entrance to DFW–to pitch and chip the balls I’d hit into little piles before picking them up. I came back to Bove with a question. Why had I just pitched and chipped so well? Why hadn’t I hit a single short shot fat?
Bove smiled a glad-you-asked smile. Turns out that the Hogan engineers have done something almost invisible with the leading edge and the design of the flange to mitigate that very problem.
I was glad I asked, because I had the feeling of having answered Koehler’s big question. What would (Mr.) Hogan build today? He would incorporate virtually any technical innovation to make his clubs work better but only within strict aesthetic confines. Traditional ratios and symmetry must be respected. The club’s gotta look good and it’s gotta look good behind the ball.
I think these new sticks are going to work for me. I’ll let you know.
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