Month: September 2017

TRUE Linkswear “Outsider” Shoe Review

TRUE Linkswear returns to their roots with the release of the Outsider and the Original. In this review, I take a look at the Outsider line and see just how full circle the company has come after hitting it into the tall grass for a few years.

TRUE OutsiderA few friends who have seen my garage will jokingly call me Imelda Marcos. You see, I’ve got about 30 pair of TRUE Linkswear shoes. Some date back to the original Tours (reviewed here in 2010), while others are of a newer vintage.

Thing is… the newer models are much newer looking than they should be, and the older models are much more well worn. You see, while I loved the original TRUE Tours, and adored the Sensei sneaker-style model, and thought the Stealths were a very good shoe, several of the models that followed lacked the characteristics of TRUE’s early releases. TRUE got away from what made their first shoes so great, and I didn’t wear those models as much.

But that’s all changed. The company has “returned to their roots,” in their words, and released two new shoes. The Original and the Outsider harken back to the early days of TRUE – with minimalist approaches to footwear design that earned them a significant and passionate following.

TRUE Outsider Sides

Has TRUE succeeded at this about face and return to the principles from the Tour and Sensei? Are the Original and Outsider true descendants of what made us “#EnjoyTheWalk” over seven years ago? Read on to find out.

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Ping G400 Driver Review

Ping’s latest offering promises to be their fastest, most forgiving driver ever. It was good enough to debut at the U.S. Open, but does it perform in the hands of the average golfer?

PING G400 Driver HeroWhen I first started playing golf, I was given a set of clubs (with bag) by the person who introduced me to the game. He found it at a garage sale and bought it for me so that I would have my own clubs to play and practice with. It was a set of irons, 4-PW, with a random SW and an old blade-style putter that rattled when I shook it. It was enough to get me going in golf, but I knew at some point that I would need a driver.

Fortunately I had some pretty good friends, as another friend of mine eventually found out I picked up the game and gave me his old PING G2 driver. I loved hitting that club. Granted I was still a very poor golfer, but it made a world of difference just to have a driver that happened to be easy to hit. I even drove my first par 4 with it (honestly I haven’t driven many since).

It’s been almost ten years since that first driver but I finally have another PING driver, the G400. I’ve gotten a little better over the years but still maintain a love/hate relationship with my driver. Will the PING G400 revolutionize my game like the G2 so many years ago? Read on and see.

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Mizuno JPX900 Driver Review

The Mizuno JPX900 driver delivers a ton of adjustability. Can it keep up with the top driver models this year? (You might be surprised.)

Mizuno JPX900 DriverThe Mizuno JPX900 is the brand?s performance counterpart to its game-improvement JPX-EZ (which I thought was a pretty decent game improvement driver). The 900 is lower spinning and more workable, and provides a wider range of adjustments to fit your swing. I mean a really wide range.

The 900 replaces the JPX850, a pretty solid, lower spinning driver that required a reasonably good swing to produce consistent results.

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CrocBox Back-Yard Hitting Net Review

The CrocBox is an easily foldable multi-sport hitting net that enables nearly instant practice sessions in your back yard. If it works… what could be better?

CrocBoxWhen we ask golfers why they aren’t better than they are, we’re told a few things. Number one on the list of common responses with a bullet and a healthy margin is “I just don’t have the time.”

I live about two miles from a practice range at a great course, I work at Golf Evolution, an indoor, year-round practice facility that’s about seven miles (by car, not as the crow flies) from my house, and even I find that a small desire to practice is often tempered by the time it will take to get my clubs in the car, load up my camera or tripod (or both), head out to the course or our facility, get balls, and film. The travel alone may take anywhere from 10-25 minutes, and in that time I could have completed a pretty good practice session if I just had a net in my backyard.

Backyard nets are nothing new. We have many, many topics on them on the forum. There are several solutions out there, too… from the homebrew models put together with PVC pipe and some netting to actual practice nets produced by some known companies, ranging in price from $80 to $1,000 and up. While the convenience of a backyard hitting net is unmatched, mowing around the net can be a pain, and they’re a bit of an eyesore.

I’ve recently been getting a lot more practice in lately – in bursts as short as five or ten minutes – because of the CrocBox. The CrocBox is a collapsing net system that folds into a weather-proof box that installs at ground level. CrocBox promises the convenience of a backyard hitting net without the negatives: mowing around it, having to stare at a net in your back yard, or traveling to a golf course or facility to get in a little practice.

Let’s take a deeper look at the CrocBox.

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