Golf Club Specs: Little Things that Count, Part Two

One day I would love to have an extended conversation with somebody who works in an equipment van on the PGA Tour. I’m betting the stories of the tiniest tweaks they are asked to make week in and week out could fill months of Bag Drops.

In the absence of such juicy fodder, however, I’ll continue where we left off last week with some of the things I’ve seen, heard, and read over many years playing the game. None of this may help you break 70 this year, but it may help you explain to your playing companions why you’ve suddenly been able to morph your standard 40 yard blocked banana into a sweet five-yard baby fade.

So here goes…

Grip Profiling
I don’t know if you’re like me, but I seem to feel a slightly different shape from one brand of grip to another.

Ping grips seem to have a little bulbous area around the butt that makes it easier to hold on with the little finger of your top hand. Tour Velvets and some other Golf Pride grips feel a little smaller under my right hand than do some similar Lamkin Crossline grips. Then, of course, there’s the radical Feel Golf grip we wrote about here that uses a reverse taper.

Understand these are just my peceptions… I haven’t yet bothered to measure precisely. But the point is a grip’s final profile is really entirely up to you. That’s because, just like many touring pros, you can tweak the shape with wraps of tape under the grip.

Here’s a recipe once espoused by Roger Maltby of GolfWorks. Measure four inches down from the end of the shaft and then wrap four pieces of 2″x2″ masking tape around the shaft. Put your double-faced tape over that and slide the grip on.

Building up under the right hand may slow your release down just a tad and prevent some of those left-of-left hooks that may plague you. Just a thought.

The point is you might have some fun experimenting with different grip profiles. You might even come to find you prefer this…

Round vs. Reminder Rib
Back in the day, most of the golf grips in play, and certainly on clubs bought off the rack, contained what’s called a “reminder rib”… a narrow rib directly on the underside of the grip that would fit into the creases of your fingers if you were holding the club correctly.

Interestingly, it’s a grip enhancement still completely legal according to the USGA. Alas, it seems to have fallen out of favor over the years. I don’t recall finding new clubs equipped with such grips in a long, long time.

The reason may be obvious. It certainly takes a lot more care to install a grip with a reminder rib than a symmetrically round one. And the fussiness required in installation may be the chief reason manufacturers aren’t using ribs these days.

I remember talking to Bill Britton, at the time still a PGA Tour player and tournament winner, and noticing his Victory grips with their distinctive green and black pattern were installed sideways, upside down… all over the place. When asked, he responded that he changed grips so often he used round ones so he didn’t have to care how they went on the club.

Still, despite the seeming lack of current favor, ribbed grips may be something you’d like to try. I don’t use them because I don’t like how they feel when I open up the clubface or close it down. The rib hits me in a different place in my hands and feels distracting.

On the other hand, my PGA pro friend Marty Strumpf once told me he liked the rib for exactly the same reason. He said he could feel how much he’d opened or shut the face by where the rib was in his hands.

Winn makes no grips with reminder ribs that I know of. Golf Pride and Lamkin make them available in many of their grip lines like the Tour Velvets and the Crosslines, among others. You can distinguish an uninstalled round grip from a ribbed one by looking just inside the lip. If it’s round there will be an “R” next to the “58” or “60” size designation. Ribbed grips don’t have the “R”.

Putter Shaft Flex
We all agonize over the flex in our driver and irons. We go on swing monitors. We try different bend points. We try different brands. So, tell me, have you ever given even one nanosecond of thought to the flex of your putter shaft?

I thought so. Granted, we’re not swinging our putters at a hundred miles an hour. Well, maybe Woody Austin when he takes a swipe at his own head. But the point is that shaft flex is a huge contributor to a putter’s feel.

Over the years it’s been my impression that players like Ben Crenshaw and Brad Faxon with longer, flowing strokes prefer a more flexible shaft. Shorter stroking “jabbier” putters like Tom Watson in his prime seem to lean toward stiffer shafts in their putters.

Here’s another way to think about it. A lighter, more flexible shaft is going to give you a higher swing weight and more head feel.

Now try a crude experiment: take your collection of putters out and one by one press down on the grip as you hold the putter soled on the floor. Feel the comparative flex in each one. How does that correlate to your favorites among them? I bet they aren’t all the poker-stiff shafts you thought they were.

While no magic cure (nothing we’ve talked about the last couple of weeks is), it does open another door to experimentation. Maybe some shaft swapping on your favorite putter head will spark a life-long love affair.

In the End…
Golf is fun for many reasons. Exploring and experimenting with your equipment is, for me, one of them. There’s a lot more to club fitting than making the best choice you can off the rack. Play around… you may be surprised at what you come up with.