Stroke Saver: Save The Gear Money For Lessons Instead

It’s the holidays and everyone on the planet is trying to sell you a club that will lower your score. If not a club, then a set of clubs. The ads are everywhere with splashy terms and high tech names that will deliver amazing performance and blow your current sticks out of the water. The big question, how much better can you shoot and how many stroke can you save with new clubs?

For me, I’ve played tour blade style clubs since the beginning of time. My very first set of Northwestern Concords were a blade design, though a very cheaply made one, and I shot plenty of scores in the low 80s with them before the faces wore off and an upgrade was needed. That upgrade was my first set of Wilson Staff Fluid Feel Blades. Those clubs remained in my bag for next 15 years and never left it. I then made a short swing into the Ping S59 tour blades before flipping back to my Staff blades when I came back. 20 years later, my clubs were still shooting the mid 70’s and looking great.

Since coming back this year, I’ve upgraded twice, once to a used set of FG49 tour blades (it was time to reshaft my beloved Fluid Feels, but the cost was a bit more than I wanted to spend) and then to the FG Tour 100’s when I found out that both sets I had would have to be sent to the USGA to have them approved for competition. The 100’s fixed all three issues very quickly – they were new, did not need work and were already approved for competition. It was a perfect match. Honestly though, the play almost identical to my original Fluid Feel irons from 1989. Still, over the years, I have tried just about every gimmick, technological break through and new style of club that has come onto the market and never found anything that I hit any better than these old style tour blades.

It’s not that the tech can’t help some people hit the ball better, but the honest truth is that most people USE their new clubs more to make their investment make sense to them. In other words, if you go drop $2000 on a new setup, you’re going to go to the range more and play more rounds with them to make that seem like a great price. Truth be told, you could probably get better scores from taking the $2000 and putting it into a season’s worth of lessons with your older gear. There are definitely some tech breakthroughs that can be seen from a set that is a few years older, but if you put your hard earned money into your swing, rather than the equipment your swinging, you’ll see much better results.