February 20, 2025 • 26 mins
Dr. Paul Wood, PING VP of Engineering, joins Shane and Marty at the PING Proving Grounds to discuss the design and development of the G440 irons. They dive into the importance of the PurFlex cavity badge, the EYE2-inspired sand wedge, and the benefits of AFS 3D fitting to dial in spin rates.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The guys from paying.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
They've kind of showed me how much the equipment matters.
I just love that I can hit any shot.
Speaker 3 (00:05):
I kind of want we're gonna be able to tell
some fun stories about what goes on here to help
golfers play better golf.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Ping proven Grounds podcast.
I'm Shane Bacon, joined as always by Marty Jerts, and
we've got doctor Paul Wood with us to go over
the new G four forty irons. Paul and I want
to start here because beauty matters a lot in terms
of golf clubs, and these irons are beautiful. Are these
some of the most aesthetically pleasing irons you've made?
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I would say so. I would say so. I know
Marty's been designing irons for longer than I have, Particularly
in a game improvement iron, it's a lot harder to
make a bigger iron look sexy, and I feel like
we've done a really good job with it and packed
it on in there.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Yeah, Marty's showing it off over there. Marty, I mean,
you talk about game improven irons, and of course you
know you can look at a blueprint iron and it
looks very clean. Yeah, these look clean and normally, as
Paul said, that that doesn't fit in a category all
the time.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Yeah. I mean one thing Shane we've talked about a
lot is you know, you know, to make an iron
look like this, so it looks like it doesn't have
much of a cavity look to it. The cavity's kind
of covered a lot of times. What would happen if
you put a cover on it or structure there, geometry there,
it would inhibit something that we're trying to do with it,
which is to get the face to flex. So Paul,
(01:21):
I think we should start there. Tell us a little
bit about the face flexing, how we've kind of infused
some distance into this iron category.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Yeah, great place to start. And like you said, a
lot of the things we do for performance, there's a
trade off with the looks and sound and feel. So
a lot of the we want to get the face
to flex. If we want this iron to go far
and to go high, the more we can get the
face to flex the better. So a bigger cavity, a
thinner face. But all those things make it want to
look like a big cavity back iron, and they make
(01:50):
it want to sound like a cowbell. So what's great
with the pure flex badge is it's got I mean,
you can see on here. It's a nice thick badge.
It's got some depth to it. It fills the cavity.
It looks amazing. But what we're trying to do is
avoid it inhibiting the face flexing. So that's what the
pure flex refers to. This one has four different little
facets that can all flex independently. It allows the face
(02:12):
to do its job and flex. And then it's those
vibrations after the impact. Those are the ones that cause
the sound. Those are the ones we're trying to damp down.
So that initial big vibration that is impact, we want
to let that go. The ones after impact are the
ones we want to damp out.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Paul, you talk a little bit about flex, you and
you said, you say four. There's there's basically four parts
of that that flex. Is that what you're saying exactly?
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Yeah, So each part can kind of move independently, and
so it just allows the whole face to bend and
flex and this thing stays out of the way.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Is the point of that When you're talking about a
game improvement? Iron is that for somebody that's maybe not
hitting in the center of the golf club every time.
It allows the club to still, you know, react or
in a way where the ball might go in at
least in the area they're hoping it goes.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah. And you know, just like a metal would you know,
the waste to increase bull speed and get the face moving.
The more the face is bending and the less the
ball is squishing, the more energy stays in the collision,
and the more speeds you get, So the more we
can get face moving, the better.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Shane, I like to think about our iron designs to
simplify it for our fitters and our consumers, is we
have the irons where you the player brings the speed right,
this is blueprint T blueprint as I two thirty. I
two thirty has a little flex in the face get
the ball up in the air. Then we have an iron,
our irons where we're gonna supplement the speed with the
club design. And that's right where the four to forty stands.
(03:33):
This kind of fun little demo. If you if you
push your thumb in the middle there, do you see
how much that badge is flexing up? Paul tell the
story of how we kind of discovered what the badge
was doing. Right a few years ago, we ran that
test on the ping Man.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Yeah, so we've you know, so we've known for a
while we if we make the facest thin as we
can will maximize ball speed. So we tried, let's just
take the badge out completely and you know, put our
fingers in our ears because the thing sound super loud.
But then you can start to really quantify like what
happens on ping Man when the badge is there, and
then you just pop it out, keep exactly the same swing,
(04:11):
see what's changing where things are moving, and then you
start adding things back in and go what can we
add back in to damp out the sound to make
it look better. That doesn't touch performance. That's the trick.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
When you look at G four forty, who are you
looking at in terms of a player. What's the player
that's going to look at these irons and put them
in the bag.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
It's a pretty wide group. I mean, I think you know,
it's game improvement for a reason, Like most of these
customers are people looking to get better at the game.
Most of these players, like Marty said, don't have a
ton of speed. I think that would be a big
distinguishing factor. If you're hitting your seven nine two hundred yards,
you probably don't need this set of ions. But for
the other ninety nine point nine percent of golfers out there,
(04:49):
it's a pretty good spot. But I mean the range
of handicaps anything from total beginners to certainly single figure
handicap golfers. And we've had some tour players play the
gis I work for a lot of people, they're not
too big.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Yeah, I mean that's kind of a little bit of
what we talked about in terms of look is you know,
they look great. So if a player was gonna maybe
throw up maybe a big four iron in the back
or something like that. I mean, Marty, you were telling
me you were testing these irons out and your seven
irons are going two ten. I mean you can get
some major distance. Probably not something you're really looking for
in terms of what you might play, but when you
think about what these irons are capable of doing, I mean,
you can hit them a pretty long ways. The one
(05:25):
thing I wonder about is spin. You know, when you
think about a game im proven iron, something like the
G four forty, how do you you know if you
get to hit the ball kind of low, and you're
not hitting the ball super far, how do you still
make those iron spin?
Speaker 3 (05:37):
So when I was I was hitting them earlier today, Shane,
and I was still it flew like yeah, two five,
two ten with the seven iron, which I don't need
that much distance per se with my seven iron, but
my spin rate was still like sixty five hundred, which
is only a few hundred rpm down from where I
normally am with my blueprint irons. So I think that's
a very big component of the four forty iron design
(05:58):
right now. There's a lot of irons in the market
for the high handicapped golfer where there's kind of this
low spin epidemic a little bit where golfers are you know,
kind of might look good in the indoor fitting bay
that your iron's going a little bit further on your simulator,
but they go play golf and their spin rate with
the seven irons forty five hundred or something. We've definitely
(06:20):
seen that. I've seen that when I've played in pro ams.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
So when you when you're saying that, I mean that's
an iron that let's say you're hitting a six iron
into a green that's laying on the front of the
green and rolling off the back of the green like yeah,
getting no, No, there's no capability of actually stopping that
on the grounds.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
We like to call it stopping power, right, which which
is we can quantify this a bunch of different ways.
It's kind of your peak height, your land angle, combination
of those things. We have a lot of great fitting
tools for this. But that was a big priority in
the four forty is Hey, yeah, we want this thing
to compete from a distance standpoint. It is actually really
good to help somebody hit a seven iron instead of
in you know, instead of a six iron from that spot.
(06:55):
But let's still have that ball be able to stop
the ball on the green. So Paul tell us a
little bit about like kind of the engineering meat and
potatoes that allows that to happen in the four to
forty iron.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Yeah, So you know, one of those things is being
able to go really thin in the face, and obviously
by doing that we get more bull speed. More ball
speed is more distance. The other major thing we've done
in this iron, said, is to bring the center of
mass down, and that's a theme with the whole g
four to forty line. And there's a trade off. As
you move the center of mass down, you're getting that
center of mass more in line with where impact is,
(07:30):
you're getting a better energy transfer and again more distance.
Like you go a little higher, the trade off often
is with forgiveness, and so as you're moving mass down,
it's going slightly counter to moving mass out sometimes and
it all depends where you're starting from. So we've spent
the last sixty five years engineering forgiveness into the irons.
We can afford to make a little bit of a
(07:50):
trade off, go down in center of mass and still
have the most forgiving iron out there, but relative to
the G four to thirty, this goes just that little
bit higher, which, as you know, we can get stopping
by from spin or we can get it from height
or both, and we're doing a little bit of both with.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
The sign YEP.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
I mean, is this feedback you guys get from people
that play paying I'd love for the ball to spin
a little bit more with the game improvement level iron.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Yeah, I think it depends who you talk to. I
think the average consumer doesn't frame it like that. They
want they say, I want to I want to be
able to hit it further, but still have the ball
stop on the go, and they're not necessarily articulating it
in terms of Yeah, so we do as much interpreting
what that means to us in terms of launching spin.
(08:35):
But yeah, exactly. I think that's something we've heard that
when they're buying the irons, they want them to be competitive,
and like Marty said, our goal here is not to
make the longest seven iron, but we want to make
a long seven iron that is the most functional on
the course and helps you stop in it all.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
So, Paul brings up a very good point. If you
increase ball speed alone and keep the same initial launch
in same spin rate, you're going to achieve a higher
peak height in more stopping power. It's one of the benefits.
It's like hybrids. Generally, if you tested a hybrid versus
a long iron, it will launch the initial launch will
be slightly lower, quite often interesting, but it will end
(09:10):
up going way higher. So people perceive that it launches higher,
but it's really more about the peak height in the
stopping power, right, Paul.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Yeah, what you see is when you look up, how
high is the ball in the sky, You're not seeing
the launch angle as much.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
How about the new length progression with the g irons.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yeah, so we have. We've basically squeezed slightly longer gaps
between from starting at the seven iron, seven and six,
six and five, five and four and the whole goal
there was you know, we know that talking of feedback
from this customer, most of these players struggle to get
the distance out of a five iron or a four
iron that they would like or maybe they used to get.
So doing everything we can to help that customer get
(09:50):
a little more functional gaps. So what we've done is
you've gone from five eighths inch length and comments to
three quarters. It's not a huge change, but it adds
up once you get to like the six sign the
five to four, and that's just enough. A little bit
of extra length is giving you just a little more speed,
a little more height, a little more distance. And now
if we gave that length progression to Marty, you'd start
(10:11):
to get gaps that are too big, yeah, because you
have so much speed to start with. But in the
hands of someone who's the core audience for this, that
just helps go from not enough gap to functional.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
So we've got a half inch increment in length from
seven iron and up. Then now three quorders, and we've
also seen Shane We've talked about on the pod a lot.
Even with the tour players playing a lot of high
lofted fairway woods and things of this nature, that length
progression helps blend also a little bit with either hybrids
or high lofted fairy woods.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Yeah, exactly, a hybrid's a little bit of a jump
from where the irons are, and then the ferry woods
quite a bit more. Again, so this just helps bridge
that gap a little more.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
I mean, Marty, I was wondering about blended sets. I mean,
it feels like this could play into some of the
players out there that are leaning towards a blended set.
I mean, I know that's been extremely popular for the
last few years with ping in particular, is not just
sticking to one iron in your bag, but potentially going
two and three different irons in your bag.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Yeah, definitely. I think we really design our two thirty
blueprints to kind of be super easy to do with that.
But the four forty, like a four or five iron,
would be an awesome kind of blended set because the launch,
the height, and now the look and feel. I mean,
every year we launch a g iron, I think they
get better looking, and this is gonna be the best
(11:27):
looking yet obviously.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
I mean in the summer, and by the way, when
it gets kind of hot here in Arizona, I'm gonna
imagine you throwing like the three iron in there that
goes about two eighty five and never even have to
head driver. I could see that right up your alley.
But I mean that is one of the benefits of
having so many options. I mean, when you think about
the options, and you stated earlier, I mean kind of
going through some of the irons that Ping has, is
you could lean into something like that even if you
(11:49):
were a great player in Paul, I know you mentioned earlier.
I mean it's not exactly specific to a certain golfer
out there, but multiple golfers could play multiple irons, but
potentially lean into the four forty.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Like, like we said, they're not that big, they don't
look they don't have a huge bulky top rail. They
looked apart. So I think there's a lot of golfers
who could try them and find they work really well.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
Paul, Let's talk a little bit about some of the
things we've learned about this customer from our Arcos data.
In our Arcost partnership. You know, what are some of
the insights we've seen that have helped informed decisions we've made,
whether it's groove design or finish or where are they
on the are they in the rough from a certain
spot or the fairway? From our ARCOS data, can you
give it? Tell us a few examples here?
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Yeah, no, now you're speak in my language. This is.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
For those all.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
I'm a mathematician, so this is my kind of thing.
So in our Arcost data set, you've got this wonderful
experiment of thousands of players playing these kind of irondsets,
and we just look at where are they going on
the course, what are they doing? And like you said,
some simple things we can do or look at. Okay,
for everyone paying playing G four to thirty irons, what
are their average gaps? You know, where are they short?
(12:59):
You know, where they starting to fall off in terms
of they don't hit the four iron anywhere near as
far as they think they do. Are we seeing miss
tennancies left and right? A big one, like you mentioned,
is where are they hitting from? So we can look
at how often are they in the fairway, how often
are they in the rough? How often are they are
for tea. I mean, one thing that we talked about,
which is when you think about it, it makes sense,
(13:21):
but we'd never really thought about it, was like, with
a seven iron in hand, you're almost equally likely to
be in the fairway, in the rough or hitting off
of tea because there's a bunch of path threes out
there that you may well be hitting a seven iron
you're not. You know, nobody hits every fairway and the
average golfer hits maybe half of fairways. So it makes
(13:42):
a ton of sense that we need that iron to
be functional, not just from the fairway where we do
a lot of testing, but out of the rough, which
then brings in well, you know, that makes it really
important to have the best groove profile we possibly can
off of tea. We need to know how it performs,
like high on the face as well as in the
middle of the face, all that kind of stuff. So
has been great for that, and when you're aggregating over
(14:02):
one hundred million shots in the database, some really interesting
stuff pops out.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
Paul, we talk a lot about sound in terms of
golf clubs, and I feel like most of the time
we focus that the conversation around woods and drivers. How
important is sound when you're designing a new iron.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Yeah, I'd argue it's every bit is important, if not
more important in some ways. It just like with mental woods.
Everyone has their tastes, what sounds good, what doesn't. But
you're it's not just what's pleasing, right. If it was
just about making a pleasing sound, we'd make it, make
a perfect a note or something right. It's more about
matching up the expectations of what you think is going
(14:38):
to happen and what happened to inform the next shot. Right.
So we're using that feedback when we're making the next
golf shot. Right. You want to know, like do I
get some information about where I hit that on the face?
Do I does the sound match up with my expectation
of what just happens. So it's not just a like dislike,
it's actually helping you play about a golf interesting.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
I mean, it's a part of feel, right, like sound
is a part of your feel.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Sound and feel pretty much interchangeable, and often when people
say feel they mean sound right and vice versus. So
it's the fascinating topic and totally different wing of engineering,
but a lot of it's psychology but a lot of
it's what you describe a sound isn't necessarily matching the
physics of the sound. When you say it's loud, that
doesn't necessarily mean decimals. That might mean frequency, or it
(15:25):
might mean you know how much the sound is ringing out.
And that's odd job to figure out. When you say
I don't like it it's loud, what does that actually
mean in the physics?
Speaker 2 (15:33):
What are you trying to actually tell me? I mean, already,
this is a big thing you've talked about in terms
of practice. You know, you're practicing without stuff in your
ears because sound is such an important part of when
you're actually playing golf, Like you play play golf against
your buddies. You don't have air pods in right, And
I mean when you're practicing, if you're not listening to
the golf shot, you might not be getting exactly what
you're trying to get out of it.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Yeah, it's a good home experiment if you want to
see if you can feel the difference between two clubs
or two putters, put noise canceling headphones on and try
to discern a field difference and you'll find out for
yourself that. Yeah, it's probably mostly sound that you just
driving your field.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Marty. I'm excited for your family to to to send
us notes about how they come to you. And you've
got the air canceling things in the SIEM trying to
hit different.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
Show and research over here.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
I promise you you have done it. If anybody's done,
it's been you. Paul.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
Let's talk a little bit about the shafts. So it's
part of going longer in the long irons. You know,
some that we've had a few versions of was a
shaft technology called AWT, which stands for a sending weight technology.
A lot of the shafts out there are actually heavier
in the long irons and then get lighter in the
short irons. AWT kind of does the opposite tell us
(16:42):
about the genesis of that chef family in the in
the new AWT three point zero.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Yeah, this has been fun. Like you mentioned, you know,
typically when you're designing a set of sea steel shafts, right,
the longest shaft, which would be the longest iron, would
be the heaviest, and as you start chopping that shaft down,
it would be the lightest. So it makes sense that
in the early days all iron shafts were descending weight.
As you went from the three iron to the wedge,
they got lighter, But actually, when you look at the
(17:08):
whole rest of the set, the lighter shaft in the
bag is the driver yep, where we're trying to squeeze
as much speed out of it as possible and get
the ball up in the air. The heaviest shaft in
the bag is your wedg shaft, where we're trying to
be all about control, we're not trying to squeeze out
more speed. So just intuitively, and I think ascending weight
was your idea in the first place.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
Right, Descending weight didn't make sense.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Exactly, and then we had that conversation in whatever two
thousand and nine or something. It just makes sense to
try to blend the weight of the shaft for what
you're trying to do, which is in the long iron
you want to get more speed and get the ball
up in the air. A lighter shaft helps with that,
and in the wedge you're trying to get more control,
more precision, and the heaviest shaft helps her that. The
challenge is it's not easy to make steel shafts in
(17:52):
this ascending weight fashion. I think we did a good
job with our first AWT, but it's really hard to
make them all feel similar. In AT two, we did
a great job making them making them feel great, and
so that's been hard to beat for a long time.
This is the year we finally feel like we have
a new shaft that's new and improved over AWT two.
So we've just extended that ascending weight technology. Now it's
(18:17):
on average about a three gram difference from shaft to shafts,
so like going from the six to the seven is
a three gram difference, whereas in the a ET two
it's about two grams. So we kept it simple there
and just what that means is we've been out to
blend that even better. So particularly in the long irons there,
they still have the stiffness that you need, but they're
(18:38):
lighter than they are in the previous year in the
previous irons, so they're easier to get the ball up
in the air. Our testing shows more ball speed, higher
launch just helps with more distance in the long irons.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Paul, it's twenty twenty five and yet we can't get
away from the I to the wedge. You think about
it continuing to be a part of the family. I
know it's a part of the four to forty as well.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
Yes, yes, So one of the bits of research, in fact,
partly inspired by our Arcos research, partly inspired by consumer research,
is this customer in general is telling us they really
want more help in bunkers with their sandwidg Well, what
better club as they've been out there than the itwo soundwarch. Yeah,
and so there's a lot of aspects of the Sandwidge
(19:20):
in this set that are inspired by I wouldn't say
it's a complete recreation of the ITO, but as you
look down at it, you'll see some of those features
that made it so good. In the bunker, we've incorporated
some of the shaping of the head. That's the necking
of the hozzle, you know, that has a distinct look,
but it's there for a reason. It goes through the
sand better than a traditional hozzle. So we've incorporated those
(19:42):
to maximize how easy it is to get these shots
out of the bunker.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Marty, It's always crazy to me as we go in
the new technology new clubs at Ping, how you guys
and everybody kind of behind the scenes will touch history.
We'll go back twenty thirty years and find, you know,
little nods that work in today's technology, in today's golf
club's manufacturing, and you kind of think about the history.
(20:07):
It never really goes away.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
Yeah, even even get into the length progressions. I mean
Carston built that into the original itos was non linear lengths, right,
It didn't make sense to him. He was he was
charting things out. He was charting lofts versus length instead
of club number versus length. So some of these ideas
are you know, just kind of old ideas applied to
modern Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Yeah, old ideas, but you could use all the technology
now atay and make them sing.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
You know what.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
One of the big ones, Shane I'm excited about is
bringing our kind of trajectory tuning lobe system to our
fitting environment. So now with the AFS we call it
ANFS three D and three D stands for three dimensional fitting.
We can fit multiple color codes, are ligle, and do
power spec in one fitting head. So customers are going
(20:56):
to be able to play around with color code and
it looks a lot better with the sleeve on it
and be able to experience a power spec And actually
with the four to forty we also have retro spec
fitting heads in our AFS fitting cart. So Paul tell
us a little bit about, you know, fitting for spin rates.
Who might be a good candidate for retro, Who might
(21:17):
be a good candidate for power Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
No, it's a great question. I mean we've seen this.
You know. We build the standard specs of the gions
to the middle of the bell curve, right, that's kind
of the whole point. There's a population out there. We
fit the middle of that bell curve. But then there's
plenty of people on the two ends of that bell curve,
and interestingly enough, like myself and my dad would be
(21:39):
good examples off two ends of that spectrum. I hit
the ball really high. I have a decent amount of speed,
but I'm not like you guys. But I'm a good
candidate for power spec because I'm hitting the ball high.
I'm getting a lot of spin, and so actually i
can increase distance quite a bit without losing stopping power
because I'm at the high stopping power end of the spectrum.
So power spec for me. He just brings it down
(22:00):
a little, brings the spin down from high to medium,
and everything's good. My dad's the opposite. He's very hands forward.
He doesn't have a lot of speed, but the ball
doesn't go high, and so for him, he actually like
going up and loft actually helps him game distance even
in a seven nine. Interesting, Yeah, because he's low low spin,
low spin, like low enough launch angle that actually going
(22:23):
up in loft is helping him gain distance. Now that's
not always the case. Sometimes it's it's really a stopping
PIW versus distance trade off. But there's plenty of people
out there. When you talk a lot to coaches and
you say how many players need to launch the ball
a bunch higher, there'll be a lot of hands raised fall.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
I mean, you're you're screaming what we scream a lot
on this podcast Get Fit. I mean it seems like,
I mean, it's a big part of this. I mean,
you're you're explaining it as well, Marty. I mean it
seems like there's no iron maybe that ping produces that's
more important to get Fit than the four forty.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Yeah, And I just love that we're not just fitting
for langle, right, We're not just fitting for left right,
we're fitting for spin because yeah, all these Paul's shallow.
You rarely take a divot right with your irons right,
So he just doesn't have as much shaffling in his dynamics.
My father in law is very similar to your dad.
It sounds like like like a decent amount of shaffleing.
(23:13):
And so you're not going to change those swings. You
got to fit the club to those And because we
custom build all of these here, we we loft and
lie themall so it's it's no extra cost to get
to get your iron styled in and fit your spin window.
And we have a lot of great fitting tools and
co pilot and charts and things of that nature to
help guide our fitters.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Marty, I love that you guys all know each other's
golf swings. It's very it's like kind of cute, you know.
You're like, I know how you swing, and I don't
know how far Marty hits it. And it feels like
it's across the board. Everybody kind of knows everybody's golf game.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
I mean, why we're right here where we do the
play testing, and quite often you'll be out and I'll
be doing my playtest and Marty stood next to me
doing his, and then suddenly I feel a little more
self conscious about my swing. But it's it's kind of fun.
You do you know you might have three tests going
at the same time and you'll you'll watch each other
doing the tests and hitting good shots, hitting bad shots.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
How does player testing work for game improvement Irons? Because
obviously if you think about something with the blueprint, you'd
go to tour players. I mean you go to Victor
Hoven and say, how does this look? How does this feel?
Things like that. Who are you approaching in terms of
testing out a game improven iron?
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Yeah, it's a great question. So we still will utilize
people like Marty, but but obviously he's not the target market,
but will utilize the fact that he has a super
consistent swing and we can look at differences. You know,
we're testing out two shafts and we want to know
what's the true difference between those shafts. We get more
repeatable data from a tour player or someone like a Marty,
(24:36):
but we do as much of our like final testing
as possible with the target audience, So people of the
swing speed range, the handicapp range, and you you more data.
It's it's often a little bit noisier data, but you
need to test with the real people.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
They are going to use that right so well, So exactly.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
We'll do both, but we end up testing a wider
pool of players with game improvement because the swings are
less repeatable.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
The G four forty Iron, as we mentioned off the top,
it looks awesome obviously. It seems like it's got a
lot of opportunity for a widespread group of players. And
I mean it's not just as you mentioned, not just
the player that hits it short. It could be for
any player out there that might be looking for something.
And as you said, there're spectrums as well for different
types of players.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Yeah, one and every every year, Like we we're very
proud of all the clubs we do, but there's always
a bit of a favorite in there. Of which one
do we think we really nailed it this year? You know,
I think you could argue with the four thirty line
the Driver was that with the four forty. I think
a lot of us feel like the Iron is the superstar.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Here, Marty, you feel that way.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
It's hard to hell, man, it's always hard to pick
a favorite.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
I was gonna say, you're always gonna lean driver. I
see you over there.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
I'm gonna go around a limb. I think the hybrid
actually okay, because interesting they're I mean, you can't pick
a favorite kid, Yeah, but the Hybrid launches a little higher,
goes a little bit higher. I think we're gonna We're
Hybrid is gonna be the little mini sleeper of the
line in my personal opinion.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Yeah, I mean that is for months to come to
really figure out which which clubs everybody's favorite, But for
now we have some really really good ones. Uh, Paul,
We always appreciate the time the irons look great, and
we always appreciate the insight.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
This is the Pink proven Grounds Podcast.
The guys from paying.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
They've kind of showed me how much the equipment matters.
I just love that I can hit any shot.
Speaker 3 (00:05):
I kind of want we're gonna be able to tell
some fun stories about what goes on here to help
golfers play better golf.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Ping proven Grounds podcast.
I'm Shane Bacon, joined as always by Marty Jerts, and
we've got doctor Paul Wood with us to go over
the new G four forty irons. Paul and I want
to start here because beauty matters a lot in terms
of golf clubs, and these irons are beautiful. Are these
some of the most aesthetically pleasing irons you've made?
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I would say so. I would say so. I know
Marty's been designing irons for longer than I have, Particularly
in a game improvement iron, it's a lot harder to
make a bigger iron look sexy, and I feel like
we've done a really good job with it and packed
it on in there.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Yeah, Marty's showing it off over there. Marty, I mean,
you talk about game improven irons, and of course you
know you can look at a blueprint iron and it
looks very clean. Yeah, these look clean and normally, as
Paul said, that that doesn't fit in a category all
the time.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Yeah. I mean one thing Shane we've talked about a
lot is you know, you know, to make an iron
look like this, so it looks like it doesn't have
much of a cavity look to it. The cavity's kind
of covered a lot of times. What would happen if
you put a cover on it or structure there, geometry there,
it would inhibit something that we're trying to do with it,
which is to get the face to flex. So Paul,
(01:21):
I think we should start there. Tell us a little
bit about the face flexing, how we've kind of infused
some distance into this iron category.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Yeah, great place to start. And like you said, a
lot of the things we do for performance, there's a
trade off with the looks and sound and feel. So
a lot of the we want to get the face
to flex. If we want this iron to go far
and to go high, the more we can get the
face to flex the better. So a bigger cavity, a
thinner face. But all those things make it want to
look like a big cavity back iron, and they make
(01:50):
it want to sound like a cowbell. So what's great
with the pure flex badge is it's got I mean,
you can see on here. It's a nice thick badge.
It's got some depth to it. It fills the cavity.
It looks amazing. But what we're trying to do is
avoid it inhibiting the face flexing. So that's what the
pure flex refers to. This one has four different little
facets that can all flex independently. It allows the face
(02:12):
to do its job and flex. And then it's those
vibrations after the impact. Those are the ones that cause
the sound. Those are the ones we're trying to damp down.
So that initial big vibration that is impact, we want
to let that go. The ones after impact are the
ones we want to damp out.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Paul, you talk a little bit about flex, you and
you said, you say four. There's there's basically four parts
of that that flex. Is that what you're saying exactly?
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Yeah, So each part can kind of move independently, and
so it just allows the whole face to bend and
flex and this thing stays out of the way.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Is the point of that When you're talking about a
game improvement? Iron is that for somebody that's maybe not
hitting in the center of the golf club every time.
It allows the club to still, you know, react or
in a way where the ball might go in at
least in the area they're hoping it goes.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah. And you know, just like a metal would you know,
the waste to increase bull speed and get the face moving.
The more the face is bending and the less the
ball is squishing, the more energy stays in the collision,
and the more speeds you get, So the more we
can get face moving, the better.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Shane, I like to think about our iron designs to
simplify it for our fitters and our consumers, is we
have the irons where you the player brings the speed right,
this is blueprint T blueprint as I two thirty. I
two thirty has a little flex in the face get
the ball up in the air. Then we have an iron,
our irons where we're gonna supplement the speed with the
club design. And that's right where the four to forty stands.
(03:33):
This kind of fun little demo. If you if you
push your thumb in the middle there, do you see
how much that badge is flexing up? Paul tell the
story of how we kind of discovered what the badge
was doing. Right a few years ago, we ran that
test on the ping Man.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Yeah, so we've you know, so we've known for a
while we if we make the facest thin as we
can will maximize ball speed. So we tried, let's just
take the badge out completely and you know, put our
fingers in our ears because the thing sound super loud.
But then you can start to really quantify like what
happens on ping Man when the badge is there, and
then you just pop it out, keep exactly the same swing,
(04:11):
see what's changing where things are moving, and then you
start adding things back in and go what can we
add back in to damp out the sound to make
it look better. That doesn't touch performance. That's the trick.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
When you look at G four forty, who are you
looking at in terms of a player. What's the player
that's going to look at these irons and put them
in the bag.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
It's a pretty wide group. I mean, I think you know,
it's game improvement for a reason, Like most of these
customers are people looking to get better at the game.
Most of these players, like Marty said, don't have a
ton of speed. I think that would be a big
distinguishing factor. If you're hitting your seven nine two hundred yards,
you probably don't need this set of ions. But for
the other ninety nine point nine percent of golfers out there,
(04:49):
it's a pretty good spot. But I mean the range
of handicaps anything from total beginners to certainly single figure
handicap golfers. And we've had some tour players play the
gis I work for a lot of people, they're not
too big.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Yeah, I mean that's kind of a little bit of
what we talked about in terms of look is you know,
they look great. So if a player was gonna maybe
throw up maybe a big four iron in the back
or something like that. I mean, Marty, you were telling
me you were testing these irons out and your seven
irons are going two ten. I mean you can get
some major distance. Probably not something you're really looking for
in terms of what you might play, but when you
think about what these irons are capable of doing, I mean,
you can hit them a pretty long ways. The one
(05:25):
thing I wonder about is spin. You know, when you
think about a game im proven iron, something like the
G four forty, how do you you know if you
get to hit the ball kind of low, and you're
not hitting the ball super far, how do you still
make those iron spin?
Speaker 3 (05:37):
So when I was I was hitting them earlier today, Shane,
and I was still it flew like yeah, two five,
two ten with the seven iron, which I don't need
that much distance per se with my seven iron, but
my spin rate was still like sixty five hundred, which
is only a few hundred rpm down from where I
normally am with my blueprint irons. So I think that's
a very big component of the four forty iron design
(05:58):
right now. There's a lot of irons in the market
for the high handicapped golfer where there's kind of this
low spin epidemic a little bit where golfers are you know,
kind of might look good in the indoor fitting bay
that your iron's going a little bit further on your simulator,
but they go play golf and their spin rate with
the seven irons forty five hundred or something. We've definitely
(06:20):
seen that. I've seen that when I've played in pro ams.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
So when you when you're saying that, I mean that's
an iron that let's say you're hitting a six iron
into a green that's laying on the front of the
green and rolling off the back of the green like yeah,
getting no, No, there's no capability of actually stopping that
on the grounds.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
We like to call it stopping power, right, which which
is we can quantify this a bunch of different ways.
It's kind of your peak height, your land angle, combination
of those things. We have a lot of great fitting
tools for this. But that was a big priority in
the four forty is Hey, yeah, we want this thing
to compete from a distance standpoint. It is actually really
good to help somebody hit a seven iron instead of
in you know, instead of a six iron from that spot.
(06:55):
But let's still have that ball be able to stop
the ball on the green. So Paul tell us a
little bit about like kind of the engineering meat and
potatoes that allows that to happen in the four to
forty iron.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Yeah, So you know, one of those things is being
able to go really thin in the face, and obviously
by doing that we get more bull speed. More ball
speed is more distance. The other major thing we've done
in this iron, said, is to bring the center of
mass down, and that's a theme with the whole g
four to forty line. And there's a trade off. As
you move the center of mass down, you're getting that
center of mass more in line with where impact is,
(07:30):
you're getting a better energy transfer and again more distance.
Like you go a little higher, the trade off often
is with forgiveness, and so as you're moving mass down,
it's going slightly counter to moving mass out sometimes and
it all depends where you're starting from. So we've spent
the last sixty five years engineering forgiveness into the irons.
We can afford to make a little bit of a
(07:50):
trade off, go down in center of mass and still
have the most forgiving iron out there, but relative to
the G four to thirty, this goes just that little
bit higher, which, as you know, we can get stopping
by from spin or we can get it from height
or both, and we're doing a little bit of both with.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
The sign YEP.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
I mean, is this feedback you guys get from people
that play paying I'd love for the ball to spin
a little bit more with the game improvement level iron.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Yeah, I think it depends who you talk to. I
think the average consumer doesn't frame it like that. They
want they say, I want to I want to be
able to hit it further, but still have the ball
stop on the go, and they're not necessarily articulating it
in terms of Yeah, so we do as much interpreting
what that means to us in terms of launching spin.
(08:35):
But yeah, exactly. I think that's something we've heard that
when they're buying the irons, they want them to be competitive,
and like Marty said, our goal here is not to
make the longest seven iron, but we want to make
a long seven iron that is the most functional on
the course and helps you stop in it all.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
So, Paul brings up a very good point. If you
increase ball speed alone and keep the same initial launch
in same spin rate, you're going to achieve a higher
peak height in more stopping power. It's one of the benefits.
It's like hybrids. Generally, if you tested a hybrid versus
a long iron, it will launch the initial launch will
be slightly lower, quite often interesting, but it will end
(09:10):
up going way higher. So people perceive that it launches higher,
but it's really more about the peak height in the
stopping power, right, Paul.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Yeah, what you see is when you look up, how
high is the ball in the sky, You're not seeing
the launch angle as much.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
How about the new length progression with the g irons.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yeah, so we have. We've basically squeezed slightly longer gaps
between from starting at the seven iron, seven and six,
six and five, five and four and the whole goal
there was you know, we know that talking of feedback
from this customer, most of these players struggle to get
the distance out of a five iron or a four
iron that they would like or maybe they used to get.
So doing everything we can to help that customer get
(09:50):
a little more functional gaps. So what we've done is
you've gone from five eighths inch length and comments to
three quarters. It's not a huge change, but it adds
up once you get to like the six sign the
five to four, and that's just enough. A little bit
of extra length is giving you just a little more speed,
a little more height, a little more distance. And now
if we gave that length progression to Marty, you'd start
(10:11):
to get gaps that are too big, yeah, because you
have so much speed to start with. But in the
hands of someone who's the core audience for this, that
just helps go from not enough gap to functional.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
So we've got a half inch increment in length from
seven iron and up. Then now three quorders, and we've
also seen Shane We've talked about on the pod a lot.
Even with the tour players playing a lot of high
lofted fairway woods and things of this nature, that length
progression helps blend also a little bit with either hybrids
or high lofted fairy woods.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Yeah, exactly, a hybrid's a little bit of a jump
from where the irons are, and then the ferry woods
quite a bit more. Again, so this just helps bridge
that gap a little more.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
I mean, Marty, I was wondering about blended sets. I mean,
it feels like this could play into some of the
players out there that are leaning towards a blended set.
I mean, I know that's been extremely popular for the
last few years with ping in particular, is not just
sticking to one iron in your bag, but potentially going
two and three different irons in your bag.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Yeah, definitely. I think we really design our two thirty
blueprints to kind of be super easy to do with that.
But the four forty, like a four or five iron,
would be an awesome kind of blended set because the launch,
the height, and now the look and feel. I mean,
every year we launch a g iron, I think they
get better looking, and this is gonna be the best
(11:27):
looking yet obviously.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
I mean in the summer, and by the way, when
it gets kind of hot here in Arizona, I'm gonna
imagine you throwing like the three iron in there that
goes about two eighty five and never even have to
head driver. I could see that right up your alley.
But I mean that is one of the benefits of
having so many options. I mean, when you think about
the options, and you stated earlier, I mean kind of
going through some of the irons that Ping has, is
you could lean into something like that even if you
(11:49):
were a great player in Paul, I know you mentioned earlier.
I mean it's not exactly specific to a certain golfer
out there, but multiple golfers could play multiple irons, but
potentially lean into the four forty.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Like, like we said, they're not that big, they don't
look they don't have a huge bulky top rail. They
looked apart. So I think there's a lot of golfers
who could try them and find they work really well.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
Paul, Let's talk a little bit about some of the
things we've learned about this customer from our Arcos data.
In our Arcost partnership. You know, what are some of
the insights we've seen that have helped informed decisions we've made,
whether it's groove design or finish or where are they
on the are they in the rough from a certain
spot or the fairway? From our ARCOS data, can you
give it? Tell us a few examples here?
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Yeah, no, now you're speak in my language. This is.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
For those all.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
I'm a mathematician, so this is my kind of thing.
So in our Arcost data set, you've got this wonderful
experiment of thousands of players playing these kind of irondsets,
and we just look at where are they going on
the course, what are they doing? And like you said,
some simple things we can do or look at. Okay,
for everyone paying playing G four to thirty irons, what
are their average gaps? You know, where are they short?
(12:59):
You know, where they starting to fall off in terms
of they don't hit the four iron anywhere near as
far as they think they do. Are we seeing miss
tennancies left and right? A big one, like you mentioned,
is where are they hitting from? So we can look
at how often are they in the fairway, how often
are they in the rough? How often are they are
for tea. I mean, one thing that we talked about,
which is when you think about it, it makes sense,
(13:21):
but we'd never really thought about it, was like, with
a seven iron in hand, you're almost equally likely to
be in the fairway, in the rough or hitting off
of tea because there's a bunch of path threes out
there that you may well be hitting a seven iron
you're not. You know, nobody hits every fairway and the
average golfer hits maybe half of fairways. So it makes
(13:42):
a ton of sense that we need that iron to
be functional, not just from the fairway where we do
a lot of testing, but out of the rough, which
then brings in well, you know, that makes it really
important to have the best groove profile we possibly can
off of tea. We need to know how it performs,
like high on the face as well as in the
middle of the face, all that kind of stuff. So
has been great for that, and when you're aggregating over
(14:02):
one hundred million shots in the database, some really interesting
stuff pops out.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
Paul, we talk a lot about sound in terms of
golf clubs, and I feel like most of the time
we focus that the conversation around woods and drivers. How
important is sound when you're designing a new iron.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Yeah, I'd argue it's every bit is important, if not
more important in some ways. It just like with mental woods.
Everyone has their tastes, what sounds good, what doesn't. But
you're it's not just what's pleasing, right. If it was
just about making a pleasing sound, we'd make it, make
a perfect a note or something right. It's more about
matching up the expectations of what you think is going
(14:38):
to happen and what happened to inform the next shot. Right.
So we're using that feedback when we're making the next
golf shot. Right. You want to know, like do I
get some information about where I hit that on the face?
Do I does the sound match up with my expectation
of what just happens. So it's not just a like dislike,
it's actually helping you play about a golf interesting.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
I mean, it's a part of feel, right, like sound
is a part of your feel.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Sound and feel pretty much interchangeable, and often when people
say feel they mean sound right and vice versus. So
it's the fascinating topic and totally different wing of engineering,
but a lot of it's psychology but a lot of
it's what you describe a sound isn't necessarily matching the
physics of the sound. When you say it's loud, that
doesn't necessarily mean decimals. That might mean frequency, or it
(15:25):
might mean you know how much the sound is ringing out.
And that's odd job to figure out. When you say
I don't like it it's loud, what does that actually
mean in the physics?
Speaker 2 (15:33):
What are you trying to actually tell me? I mean, already,
this is a big thing you've talked about in terms
of practice. You know, you're practicing without stuff in your
ears because sound is such an important part of when
you're actually playing golf, Like you play play golf against
your buddies. You don't have air pods in right, And
I mean when you're practicing, if you're not listening to
the golf shot, you might not be getting exactly what
you're trying to get out of it.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Yeah, it's a good home experiment if you want to
see if you can feel the difference between two clubs
or two putters, put noise canceling headphones on and try
to discern a field difference and you'll find out for
yourself that. Yeah, it's probably mostly sound that you just
driving your field.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Marty. I'm excited for your family to to to send
us notes about how they come to you. And you've
got the air canceling things in the SIEM trying to
hit different.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
Show and research over here.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
I promise you you have done it. If anybody's done,
it's been you. Paul.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
Let's talk a little bit about the shafts. So it's
part of going longer in the long irons. You know,
some that we've had a few versions of was a
shaft technology called AWT, which stands for a sending weight technology.
A lot of the shafts out there are actually heavier
in the long irons and then get lighter in the
short irons. AWT kind of does the opposite tell us
(16:42):
about the genesis of that chef family in the in
the new AWT three point zero.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Yeah, this has been fun. Like you mentioned, you know,
typically when you're designing a set of sea steel shafts, right,
the longest shaft, which would be the longest iron, would
be the heaviest, and as you start chopping that shaft down,
it would be the lightest. So it makes sense that
in the early days all iron shafts were descending weight.
As you went from the three iron to the wedge,
they got lighter, But actually, when you look at the
(17:08):
whole rest of the set, the lighter shaft in the
bag is the driver yep, where we're trying to squeeze
as much speed out of it as possible and get
the ball up in the air. The heaviest shaft in
the bag is your wedg shaft, where we're trying to
be all about control, we're not trying to squeeze out
more speed. So just intuitively, and I think ascending weight
was your idea in the first place.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
Right, Descending weight didn't make sense.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Exactly, and then we had that conversation in whatever two
thousand and nine or something. It just makes sense to
try to blend the weight of the shaft for what
you're trying to do, which is in the long iron
you want to get more speed and get the ball
up in the air. A lighter shaft helps with that,
and in the wedge you're trying to get more control,
more precision, and the heaviest shaft helps her that. The
challenge is it's not easy to make steel shafts in
(17:52):
this ascending weight fashion. I think we did a good
job with our first AWT, but it's really hard to
make them all feel similar. In AT two, we did
a great job making them making them feel great, and
so that's been hard to beat for a long time.
This is the year we finally feel like we have
a new shaft that's new and improved over AWT two.
So we've just extended that ascending weight technology. Now it's
(18:17):
on average about a three gram difference from shaft to shafts,
so like going from the six to the seven is
a three gram difference, whereas in the a ET two
it's about two grams. So we kept it simple there
and just what that means is we've been out to
blend that even better. So particularly in the long irons there,
they still have the stiffness that you need, but they're
(18:38):
lighter than they are in the previous year in the
previous irons, so they're easier to get the ball up
in the air. Our testing shows more ball speed, higher
launch just helps with more distance in the long irons.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Paul, it's twenty twenty five and yet we can't get
away from the I to the wedge. You think about
it continuing to be a part of the family. I
know it's a part of the four to forty as well.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
Yes, yes, So one of the bits of research, in fact,
partly inspired by our Arcos research, partly inspired by consumer research,
is this customer in general is telling us they really
want more help in bunkers with their sandwidg Well, what
better club as they've been out there than the itwo soundwarch. Yeah,
and so there's a lot of aspects of the Sandwidge
(19:20):
in this set that are inspired by I wouldn't say
it's a complete recreation of the ITO, but as you
look down at it, you'll see some of those features
that made it so good. In the bunker, we've incorporated
some of the shaping of the head. That's the necking
of the hozzle, you know, that has a distinct look,
but it's there for a reason. It goes through the
sand better than a traditional hozzle. So we've incorporated those
(19:42):
to maximize how easy it is to get these shots
out of the bunker.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Marty, It's always crazy to me as we go in
the new technology new clubs at Ping, how you guys
and everybody kind of behind the scenes will touch history.
We'll go back twenty thirty years and find, you know,
little nods that work in today's technology, in today's golf
club's manufacturing, and you kind of think about the history.
(20:07):
It never really goes away.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
Yeah, even even get into the length progressions. I mean
Carston built that into the original itos was non linear lengths, right,
It didn't make sense to him. He was he was
charting things out. He was charting lofts versus length instead
of club number versus length. So some of these ideas
are you know, just kind of old ideas applied to
modern Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Yeah, old ideas, but you could use all the technology
now atay and make them sing.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
You know what.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
One of the big ones, Shane I'm excited about is
bringing our kind of trajectory tuning lobe system to our
fitting environment. So now with the AFS we call it
ANFS three D and three D stands for three dimensional fitting.
We can fit multiple color codes, are ligle, and do
power spec in one fitting head. So customers are going
(20:56):
to be able to play around with color code and
it looks a lot better with the sleeve on it
and be able to experience a power spec And actually
with the four to forty we also have retro spec
fitting heads in our AFS fitting cart. So Paul tell
us a little bit about, you know, fitting for spin rates.
Who might be a good candidate for retro, Who might
(21:17):
be a good candidate for power Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
No, it's a great question. I mean we've seen this.
You know. We build the standard specs of the gions
to the middle of the bell curve, right, that's kind
of the whole point. There's a population out there. We
fit the middle of that bell curve. But then there's
plenty of people on the two ends of that bell curve,
and interestingly enough, like myself and my dad would be
(21:39):
good examples off two ends of that spectrum. I hit
the ball really high. I have a decent amount of speed,
but I'm not like you guys. But I'm a good
candidate for power spec because I'm hitting the ball high.
I'm getting a lot of spin, and so actually i
can increase distance quite a bit without losing stopping power
because I'm at the high stopping power end of the spectrum.
So power spec for me. He just brings it down
(22:00):
a little, brings the spin down from high to medium,
and everything's good. My dad's the opposite. He's very hands forward.
He doesn't have a lot of speed, but the ball
doesn't go high, and so for him, he actually like
going up and loft actually helps him game distance even
in a seven nine. Interesting, Yeah, because he's low low spin,
low spin, like low enough launch angle that actually going
(22:23):
up in loft is helping him gain distance. Now that's
not always the case. Sometimes it's it's really a stopping
PIW versus distance trade off. But there's plenty of people
out there. When you talk a lot to coaches and
you say how many players need to launch the ball
a bunch higher, there'll be a lot of hands raised fall.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
I mean, you're you're screaming what we scream a lot
on this podcast Get Fit. I mean it seems like,
I mean, it's a big part of this. I mean,
you're you're explaining it as well, Marty. I mean it
seems like there's no iron maybe that ping produces that's
more important to get Fit than the four forty.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Yeah, And I just love that we're not just fitting
for langle, right, We're not just fitting for left right,
we're fitting for spin because yeah, all these Paul's shallow.
You rarely take a divot right with your irons right,
So he just doesn't have as much shaffling in his dynamics.
My father in law is very similar to your dad.
It sounds like like like a decent amount of shaffleing.
(23:13):
And so you're not going to change those swings. You
got to fit the club to those And because we
custom build all of these here, we we loft and
lie themall so it's it's no extra cost to get
to get your iron styled in and fit your spin window.
And we have a lot of great fitting tools and
co pilot and charts and things of that nature to
help guide our fitters.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
Marty, I love that you guys all know each other's
golf swings. It's very it's like kind of cute, you know.
You're like, I know how you swing, and I don't
know how far Marty hits it. And it feels like
it's across the board. Everybody kind of knows everybody's golf game.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
I mean, why we're right here where we do the
play testing, and quite often you'll be out and I'll
be doing my playtest and Marty stood next to me
doing his, and then suddenly I feel a little more
self conscious about my swing. But it's it's kind of fun.
You do you know you might have three tests going
at the same time and you'll you'll watch each other
doing the tests and hitting good shots, hitting bad shots.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
How does player testing work for game improvement Irons? Because
obviously if you think about something with the blueprint, you'd
go to tour players. I mean you go to Victor
Hoven and say, how does this look? How does this feel?
Things like that. Who are you approaching in terms of
testing out a game improven iron?
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Yeah, it's a great question. So we still will utilize
people like Marty, but but obviously he's not the target market,
but will utilize the fact that he has a super
consistent swing and we can look at differences. You know,
we're testing out two shafts and we want to know
what's the true difference between those shafts. We get more
repeatable data from a tour player or someone like a Marty,
(24:36):
but we do as much of our like final testing
as possible with the target audience, So people of the
swing speed range, the handicapp range, and you you more data.
It's it's often a little bit noisier data, but you
need to test with the real people.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
They are going to use that right so well, So exactly.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
We'll do both, but we end up testing a wider
pool of players with game improvement because the swings are
less repeatable.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
The G four forty Iron, as we mentioned off the top,
it looks awesome obviously. It seems like it's got a
lot of opportunity for a widespread group of players. And
I mean it's not just as you mentioned, not just
the player that hits it short. It could be for
any player out there that might be looking for something.
And as you said, there're spectrums as well for different
types of players.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Yeah, one and every every year, Like we we're very
proud of all the clubs we do, but there's always
a bit of a favorite in there. Of which one
do we think we really nailed it this year? You know,
I think you could argue with the four thirty line
the Driver was that with the four forty. I think
a lot of us feel like the Iron is the superstar.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Here, Marty, you feel that way.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
It's hard to hell, man, it's always hard to pick
a favorite.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
I was gonna say, you're always gonna lean driver. I
see you over there.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
I'm gonna go around a limb. I think the hybrid
actually okay, because interesting they're I mean, you can't pick
a favorite kid, Yeah, but the Hybrid launches a little higher,
goes a little bit higher. I think we're gonna We're
Hybrid is gonna be the little mini sleeper of the
line in my personal opinion.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Yeah, I mean that is for months to come to
really figure out which which clubs everybody's favorite, But for
now we have some really really good ones. Uh, Paul,
We always appreciate the time the irons look great, and
we always appreciate the insight.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
This is the Pink proven Grounds Podcast.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!