HOT LIST EXTRA
Your Club for Those ‘Stretch’ Distances Is it a hybrid or a fairway wood? The answer depends on your swing BY MIKE STACHURA
necessarily mean that club will go further, particu- larly when you’re talking about shots that are going to be hit off the ground.
DECISION TIME Picking a
club for long shots is about how far you can hit it—and how well, too.
What’s the reason for the uncertainty? The differences in performance aren’t only about the clubs themselves. They also are tied to how you swing each kind of club and how consistently you hit the centre of the clubface, to say nothing of the differences in internal weight- ing (centre of gravity) and forgiveness (moment of inertia). For some perspective, let’s take a look at the typical specs for a 5-wood and a 3-hybrid. A 5-wood has 18 or 19 degrees of loft and a 42.5-inch shaft, and a 3-hybrid has 19 or 20 degrees of loft and a shaft that’s more like the length of an iron (about two inches shorter than a 5-wood). Compared to a hybrid, a fairway wood has a larger clubface area to provide a bit more forgiveness
W e all experience that uneasy feeling of standing in the fairway, seeing that little flag in the distance and not knowing if we can get there. What makes it worse is, we might not even know whether we should be hitting a hybrid or a fairway wood. Of course, the right answer de- pends more on the player than it does on the club. For instance, hybrid use on the PGA Tour is down about 80 percent from its heyday in 2010, when a typical event might have seen 140 hybrids in play.
But what happens on tour shouldn’t dictate what happens in your bag. With an increasing array of hybrid options, along with the influx of high-lofted fair- way woods, average golfers have more choices with their longer clubs than ever before. It actually might be caus- ing as much confusion as relief. Indeed, when a fairway wood and a hybrid have basically the same loft, which one is the better option? The first thing to consider is that just because two clubs have the same loft, it doesn’t mean they’ll go the same distance. If one has less loft, it doesn’t
92 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2026
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator