HOT LIST EXTRA
Easy-to-Hit Irons: Are They for You? The pros and cons of clubs designed to forgive your mis-hits BY MIKE STACHURA
of the seven pairs) when compared to the same company’s corresponding SGI iron model. The over- all averages among the 12 players who hit
GROUND FOR DEBATE Testers liked the results of forgiving irons but not the looks.
both irons showed GI models flew 2.02 percent further than the correspond- ing SGI model. In practical terms, that’s three metres on a 150-metre shot. Things changed when we looked at shot dispersion. Taking the data from the Rapsodo devices and analysis by Tom Mase, PhD, retired professor of mechanical engineering at Cal Poly and a longtime member of the Golf Digest Technical Advisory Panel, SGI irons delivered a significantly tighter area of dispersion than GI irons. In some cases, the dispersion was nearly 50 per- cent tighter compared to a company’s corresponding GI iron. Overall, shots from our testers who hit SGI irons fit into a space about 25 percent smaller than those same players achieved when
Y ou might find the look of super-game-improvement (SGI) irons to be a bit clunky, even downright gargantuan, but their allure is as clear as the mythical fountain of youth. They can restore lost distance that time or eroding skills have taken away or provide a tangible boost for developing players. However, data from our Hot List test- ing shows that the players who likely need SGI irons the most might not get more distance from them. What they get is more important than that. During equipment-testing sessions,
we use Rapsodo’s MLM2 Pro launch monitor to track every shot from our group of 32 player-testers. The testers are divided by skill level into three hand- icap groups, and only the higher handi- caps hit SGI irons. To gauge how much of an advantage these clubs might offer, we compared how players hit SGI irons versus irons in the game-improvement (GI) category – clubs with a more tradi- tional appearance but fewer forgiveness features. Digging into the data, we saw that the average carry distances for the GI mod- els were longer in nearly every case (six
PHOTOGRAPH BY J D CUBAN
110 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2025
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator