A lot of people carry 4 wedges in their golf bag by replacing a 3 iron with a lob wedge and don’t think twice about it. Why not throw in an extra driver and take out that putter you can’t hit with? Or maybe leave the putter and take out that 5 wood you never use.
Think it’s crazy? Think again. Phil Mickleson devised a plan in the weeks leading up to the Master’s which would help him deal with the extra yardage chairman Hootie Johnson added to the course. Along with the yardage that everyone was talking about was longer sand traps, more trees (pine trees that of which most balls can’t find their way through), and what I am told was a lot more difficult cuts of rough. All that on an already ridiculously challenging course.
To give you a little background on club selection and why you would need two clubs we need to think about what a fade and a draw does to distance. For those of you who can’t control which one of those happens at any given moment (myself included) let’s think about what happens when that fade jumps into your shot. The ball, besides landing most likely in the rough or OB dives into the ground spinning almost sideways. On the other hand, the draw tends to lift the ball up, up and away, most often to the side of the fairway a little longer than that fade on the last hole.
This was the idea behind Mickleson’s two driver scheme. His idea was to use one driver to fade the ball with a maximum distance of about 290 yards and another club to draw the ball with a maximum distance of about 310 yards. He tested this bag of clubs, removing his sandwedge, at the BellSouth Classic where he shot 28 under par and won by 13 strokes. The week after that, winning the Master’s with the calm of Cool Hand Luke on the last day of the tournament.
Was it the two driver method that won him the tournament or the fact that he hit almost 70% of greens in regulation? Well he ended up having the longest driving average of just under 298 yards, which meant he was able to use a higher club selection for his approach shots, leaving him closer to the hole more often than the likes of his playing partners.
Who knows what it was. However, you may need to think twice about buying that Fusion or Sasquatch and actually give the thought of that goofy R7 with the movable weighting system a try. OK maybe not goofy, but you may annoy a few of your playing partners if you have to switch weights every other hole.
