Golf Digest SIP 2022 - Hot List

You had to be paying attention, but 2021 was The Year of the Long Putter. The U.S. Mid-Amateur Champion (Stewart Hagestad), U.S. Senior Amateur Champion (Gene Elliott) and most dominant senior pro (Bernhard Langer, age 64, bless him) all brandished the big broom. By small degrees the golf these men play is closer to the recreational game, though chances are the only scuttlebutt you bothered to hear came from the Big Tour. Like when Xander Schauffele said in June he thought armlock putting should be banned after trying it himself. Debates over unconventional putting styles have raged at least since Leo Diegel started Diegeling in 1924, and Sam Snead switched from croquet-style to side-saddle in 1968. After Keegan Bradley, Ernie Els and Adam Scott reeled off a string of majors pressing…

Golf, we’ve heard, is booming. The problem with a boom isn’t that it goes bust. It’s that it gets going so fast you can’t keep up. Golf clubs are like that. From an innovation standpoint, clubs have been booming since the 1980s and haven’t let up. Today, the right clubs for the game you want not only exist but are more accessible than ever. We’re not talking about some collective “you” but you and you alone right there in your living room wondering where you can find another 15 yards off the tee, or four more greens a round, or, Lord, please, the end of three-putting. After our extensive review and testing process, including player evaluations at the CasaBlanca Resort in Mesquite, Nev., there are more clubs on the Hot List…

CRITERIA OUR JUDGES, listed at right, cast the only votes in the Hot List, but they gather insight from three independent panels. The Scientists advise us on Innovation. Retailers assess Demand. Players evaluate Performance and Look/Sound/Feel. Those criteria are not equally weighted, as indicated below. A product’s final score is based on its weighted average in these four criteria. Performance, Innovation and Look/Sound/Feel largely determine the total score. All scoring is based on a 100-point scale for each of the four criteria, relative to the entries in a category. PERFORMANCE 45% Based on interviews with our player panelists, the judges assess the utility of each product. In other words, this is a grade of what happens to the ball when a player hits it. (Note: Both Foresight Sports GCQuad and Rapsodo MLM launch monitors…

Jennifer Herold is one of the many new golfers who improved significantly during the pandemic. But, as her friends reminded her, the old ill-fitting clubs in her bag stunk. A 25-handicapper, she was thrilled with a birthday present for a club-fitting with one of the best in Connecticut, Angela Aulenti at Sterling Farms Golf Course. Herold found her bag rebuilt with a new Callaway driver, Titleist hybrid and wedge and Mizuno irons—none of which could be labeled “women’s.” It was a revelation. “I was struck by how the smallest details made a big difference in my shots,” says Herold, whose realization is no different than what any player experiences after a quality fitting. It highlights the problem with gendering the Hot List. The fitting options available have more to do with…

We are gear heads. It’s a passion that has its own lexicon, and you’ll see plenty of this vocabulary scattered across the issue. But we recognize it’s a vocabulary not known to all. The reason we publish the Hot List is to make the club-buying process easier for the consumer, but that process falls apart if we’re speaking a foreign language. What follows is a glossary of terms that you will encounter in the 2022 Hot List. We’ve tried to simplify it as much as possible while still making sure you’re informed for your potential purchase. Face ▶ The forward-facing surface of the head that strikes the ball—often to mixed results. Toe ▶ The outward part of the clubhead. If you hit it here, it feels like, well, you stubbed your toe. Heel ▶ The part…

▶ Call it Dan Sueltz’s Lexus Theory. As the founder of D’Lance Golf, a clubfitting company started in 1997, Sueltz is heavily invested in the business of matching golfers with their sticks. What began in the early 1980s with Ping founder Karsten Solheim’s revolutionary use of colored dots on irons has evolved into an arms race of technological advances that just keep coming. We’ve moved from mere video capture to Hollywood production-level body sensors to swing analyzers we can buy online and use in our basement, all of which ignores one important element. The Lexus Theory. “If you want to buy a Lexus, you still want to go to the Lexus showroom,” Sueltz says. You want to be wowed. You want to be wooed. You want to run your palm over the finely…