Equipment Recommendations: Golf Balls
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April 29, 2010 9:00 PM
Owen McClain, PGA Instructor
Moses Lake Golf Club/Colockum Ridge Golf Course
If you’re not playing ONE ball—the same brand and exactly the same model—for your golf games, and you’ve been told before to do this, you are an idiot, throwing away perhaps 3-4 shots per round for no reason. Let’s say you’ve got a nice Pro-V1 you found and play it for a couple holes. Then you make a bad number, and switch to an NXT Distance. You have a 10 foot putt. Reading it perfectly, it stops 1 foot short. You actually hit the putt perfectly, and had you played the Pro-V 1, it would have gone in. Why?
This happens because all brands will roll out differently off identical impacts. A major golf publication featured an article years ago highlighting an experiment with a mechanical putting machine. They found a 15% difference in roll out between different golf balls, when a standard putting “stroke” was used for an approximately 30 foot putt. To verify this, I did my own experiment, dropping balls above a smooth, concrete floor from an exact height of 36 inches to create identical “impacts” from the floor. Using five different models of golf balls from Bridgestone, Nike, and Titleist, the rebound heights ranged from 28” to 31”, roughly a ten percent difference. Surprisingly, the “NXT Distance” had the least rebound of the five balls tested.
This doesn’t just affect your distance; it affects your line, because on a breaking putt, speed affects line. Further, putting isn’t the only area affected. A 60 foot chip that might have stopped within three feet could end up nine or more feet away, costing you a save.
The golf balls in your local pro-shop are all good, but fit your situation (hard greens/soft greens, high launch/low launch) and your game. What the professionals play is not relevant to you, unless you hit 75% of the fairways with 280 yard drives, have a scoring average of 70, and play on lightning quick greens everyday.
Several equipment manufacturers have ball fitting programs, and if you take an on-line survey on their websites can make a general recommendation on a good ball for you. Two good ones are www.srixon.com and www.bridgestonegolf.com.