Gorillas in our midst

The story is told of Sam Snead hitting practice shots on the range with his 3-iron.

With each sweet swing the ball would soar for more than 200 metres and then plop down and stop within a metre; or sometimes even suck back.

This so impressed a spectator that he asked “Slammin Sam,” considered by Gary Player to have possessed the best swing ever, “how do you manage to hit a 3-iron 200 metres and get it to stop like that?”

And Snead replied: “How far do you hit a 3-iron?” To which the spectator replied: “Oh, about 150 metres.”

“In that case,” said Snead, “why do you want the ball to stop!?”

It was a nice inversion of golfers’ enduring obsession with length on Snead’s part, for if there is one thing that will never change for anyone who has ever taken a swing at a ball it is the desire to hit it further.

As Dale Hayes is fond of teasing Denis Hutchinson. “The problem with Hutchie’s swing is that he is standing to close to the ball after he has hit it.”

How true. The golfer does not exist who is happy with how far he drives the ball. A little more and he could clear the bunker that guards the dog-leg, get up to a par five or hit it passed the drive of a good friend.

This fascination has led to the introduction of long driving contests and it was while watching the South African leg of the Remax world long drive championships that I noticed a trend that could be significant to the rest of us pea shooters.

Two trends actually. For one thing the ball always used at long driving championships is a Pinnacle. Most good players tend to look down their noses at those rock-hard Pinnacles, preferring a softer, high-spinning ball, but it must say something that it is the ball of choice for players out to earn some money by hitting it far.

Then I noticed something else. Six of the eight South African finalists were using Ping drivers while the other two were hitting TaylorMades. Interestingly only one player was going with the Callaway ERC driver that has caused such a stir around the world.

This trend was borne out by the Remax world championship held in Mesquite, Nevada where four of the top five competitors used a Ping TiSI Tec driver.

Sean Fister of Little Rock, Arkansas, ironically John Daly’s home state, drove the ball 376 yards, 2 inches (342.21 meters) to win the championship and a prize of $80 000.

Fister is believed to have used a driver made by Dunlop while the next four competitors were all hitting Pings. Ping TiSI and Ping TiSI Tec drivers were used by 23 of the long drive specialists in the competition, or 24 percent of the field.

Makes you think doesn’t it. There must be something to a combination of a Pinnacle ball and a Ping driver; that rather unattractive dome-shaped club that moved a Cape caddie to remark that “die ou slaat sommer die bal met sy Weber!”

If the TaylorMade 300 Series drivers and Callaway ERC’s were the vogue of last year’s summer season it seems the TiSI Tec is going to be all the rage this year.

Ping have tweaked the weight distribution of their original TiSI club to give the ball a lower, more compelling trajectory and changed the colour from jet black to gun metal. The club was introduced at the Siemens Golf Faire and word is that local golfers are eagerly anticipating the first shipment from America… along with some Christmas stock of Titleist Pro V1s!