Why You Need This: Today's video is about "My New PING Clubs | Why I Finally Did What I Said I Wouldn't"

Today I come to you very humbled, as I was recently bestowed and incredible honor by PING

You see, PING has made me their 10th (worldwide) Brand Ambassador!

Other PING Ambassadors include:

• Chris Como - Former swing coach of Tiger Woods
• Chuck Cook - #3 on the Golf Digest list of the nation's top instructors.  He has coached players that have won 9 Majors and 70+ tournaments on the PGA & LPGA tours.
• Chris DiMarco - Former PGA Tour player known for his runner-up finish to Tiger Woods in a playoff in one of the best Masters ever in 2005.
• Stan Utley - Former PGA tour player and the record holder for lowest putts in a 9 hole round with 6! (Not a misprint, he had 3 chip ins and 6 one putts!)

As part of this process, PING flew me out to their headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona to meet with the engineering team for 2 full days.  I was able to tour the facility and meet a ton of awesome people!

In today's video, I'm going to tell you about this experience and I'm going to show un-box the clubs PING just sent me from my fitting.

The video is packed full of information, including:

• A crazy story about what happened during my PING driver fitting,
• I'll let you know what PING and Fort Knox have in common,
• Why PING and Top Speed Golf are a perfect marriage, and
• So much more!!!

Let's get started.....

Golf Pros Featured:

Instructors Featured: Clay Ballard    

Video Duration: 32:44

Video Transcription:

All right, so I just did something that I said I was never going to do. I joined on staff with PING Golf as one of their brand ambassadors. Really cool stuff we’re going to go over.

I’m going to do an unboxing today, talking about all of the cool clubs and golf bags that I got. We’ll go over each one and some of the kind of neat things that you’re not going to hear about PING Golf and about each one of these clubs, the engineering that goes into those.

Why would I not want to be on staff with a club company? Well, here at Top Speed Golf, what I’m about is helping you with your golf game, and doing what’s absolutely best for you.

If I get on staff with a company, and maybe they release a club that isn’t that good, or they do something I don’t really agree with, a lot of the companies are just churning out club, after club, after club, well they’re going to want me to do reviews of those, and speak highly of those.

I don’t ever want to do a review on a club that I don’t think is the absolute best club possible, and that’s why I’m really excited to get on staff with PING.

I always knew that they made a really high-quality club, but after learning a lot more, and visiting PING for a couple days, talking with some of their lead engineers, I was really amazed to see just how much goes into that.

We’re going to talk about some of the unique things that PING does that none of the other manufacturers are going to do, or none of the other manufacturers currently do, that makes their club so great and why I’m so lucky to be on staff with them.

So it’s pretty cool, got to be one of their brand ambassadors. About 10 of us, Tour players like Chris DiMarco, short-game specialist Stan Utley, Chris Como who’s Tiger Wood’s coach, former coach.

It’s just a handful of people. They sent me all kinds of cool clubs. Let’s jump right in, I’m going to unbox them one at a time, and talk about some of the cool features of each of the clubs.

Now I’m not going to be hitting a lot of shots in this video, I’m just going to be talking about the clubs. I know not everybody is into that, but if you’re into golf clubs you’re really going to get a lot out of this.

I’ve got some really neat stories for you. Let’s go ahead and get started.

All right, so let’s start with the golf bag here. One thing that people don’t know is PING has one of the largest companies for custom golf bags.

I know in college when I played golf, we always had a PING Golf bag with our college logo on it. You can get the same thing for your business, or just get your name on your bag. Really easy to do.

Some companies charge an absolute fortune to get anything custom on your golf bag, they want to keep it all just off the rack, it makes it easier to produce.

There’s not a huge amount of money to make off custom golf bags and stuff like that. So that’s one thing you’ll see a theme in this with PING, they always just go the extra mile to kind of do what’s right for you, for the person that’s buying the equipment.

They really stand out, even from when they first started, just really doing what’s right for the customer.

So really cool staff bag here, actually haven’t seen any of this stuff yet, I’m just now unboxing it. So we’ll see what it looks like.

We’ve got my PING logo, then like I was mentioning they can do whether you have a staff bag or just a stand bag, I think they sent me one of each, but you’ll see on the front they can put your name on there and your company logo if you’re on a team or something like that, they can put a team logo.

It’s pretty cool, and like I said, they’re not going to charge just an absolute fortune to do something like that like some of the other companies will.

So really nice bag, let’s go ahead and put some clubs in it.

Let’s start out with the woods. I spent a couple days out at PING making a trip out there to Phoenix, and learned a ton when I was there, big shout out to Paul Wood, Eric Hendrickson, all the guys over at PING.

I learned an absolute ton when I was there, about how clubs were made. Some of the stuff that goes in behind the scenes that I wasn’t aware of, and I felt like I already knew quite a bit before going in. Let’s take a look at some of the woods that they have and some really cool stories with these.

I’ll take about kind of the PING difference. So here we have the brand-new PING 410 Plus driver, and this thing’s pretty sweet.

When you get fitted there, if you get a custom fitting, you’ll go out to the range and you’ve probably seen this from some of the commercials, but they have a big probably 50-foot tall net.

From the day we were there, the tees were a little bit up, so it’s only about 275 to the bottom of the net, and then they got this big, big, tall net.

So started to hit some of the woods, I’d been fit for some other clubs there, I was getting to the wood section of the fitting, and I hit the first one and I kind of mis-hit it a little bit, and I was like, “Dang, that felt pretty good.” This club was pretty hot it felt like, whatever I hit the first one.

Well it hit about three-quarters of the way up the net, and I was like wow, that was pretty far for a mis-hit. The next one I hit, I absolutely crushed it, and it flew over the net into like a Greyhound bus parking lot behind the PING driving range.

I had to stop my driver fitting, but I’ll tell you what, it was amazing how good this thing felt.

So really, really hot driver, I’m excited to take this out on the course, because I feel like this is finally going to make a replacement – for those of you, if you’ve been following me you know I’ve had my PING i15 driver forever, this one’s definitely going to take over.

But I want to talk about a few things with this driver, the difference the PING has. The level of engineering that goes into all of these clubs is kind of crazy. Even the head cover.

You can say OK, this is like a normal head cover, it’s a little bit like the custom kind of leather head covers that you have, the really expensive ones that you’ll see in private golf shops.

They wanted to make one that was like that, and they didn’t just want to make any old head cover, so they actually did a test where they made the head covers different weights.

They had people test out and see which one felt the best to them, as far as just the weight of the head cover. Then they designed different shapes so they’d be more aerodynamic.

So if you have your head cover on the ground and it’s windy that day, let’s say it gets up to a 25 mile an hour wind is what they wanted to have this hold up to, but it will not blow off the tee up to a 25 mile an hour wind.

They actually had a guy and a leaf blower, one of their interns, go out and blow head covers in the different shapes and test those out there.

That’s kind of how nuts they are on their engineering, and that’s the level of quality that goes into everything. Even just a head cover that looks like nothing, they’ve put a lot of thought into all the clubs.

Now one of the other things that PING does is they never put out a golf club with what they say is compromises. So they want it to perform its best, but not compromise some other area.

One of the things that PING gets knocked on a little bit, is it’s almost like people say well PING is a little bit behind on the technology curve.

They’re actually not, they’re way ahead on the technology curve, but they’re not going to put something into a club if it’s going to decrease performance at all.

One of the things that’s really tough when you’re making a golf club, because of the manufacturing processes and just how paper-thin this metal has to be, is that whenever you’re making a driver, we’d all love to have those moveable weights in the driver head.

Put one in the toe, put one in the heel, it’ll help you to hit a fade, hit a draw, whatever your shot shape, your shot bias is.

Now companies have been doing that for a long time, and forever PING wouldn’t do that to their drivers.

The reason is, whenever you have adjustable weights, and you put them in different areas, it’s really difficult because of the manufacturing processes, you just can’t make the screw that the weight goes into weigh nothing, it has to weigh something.

That moves the center of mass of this club to an area that’s less desirable. One of the clubs, their last clubs is the G400 Max. The Max stands for the highest moment of inertia that they’ve ever had.

Meaning whenever you hit it off the toe, or you hit it off the heel, the club is not going to twist as much. Now if I start putting moveable weights in the sole of the club, but that reduces my moment of inertia, then I’m not going to have as consistent of a driver.

They’ve had the ability to do moveable weights for years and years, but this is the first time that they’ve ever had a moveable weight driver that didn’t decrease or the ability to put that in there and not decrease the moment of inertia.

This is the first driver with the removeable weight, you can put it toward the toe or the heel to give you a little bit more fade or draw, but they didn’t compromise at all on the MOI.

Still the most forgiving driver on the market, the highest MOI, plus it has that nice moveable weight. So you think well, that couldn’t be that much.

Putting a little piece of metal screw that would go in different areas of the club shouldn’t be all that much, but this one weight, I think the stock is a 14 gram, but I have to check the little moveable weight on the back, but that’s probably like seven or eight percent of the total weight of the club.

If you start putting these moveable weights all over, on some drivers you’ll see a big channel or a slot that goes in the middle of the driver face, all that metal that makes up that channel is putting weight in an area of the club that’s less than ideal.

So having that metal channel can decrease performance. Same thing if you have all these different channels in different spots.

We want that center of gravity to be as far back away from the face and as low as possible. That’s exactly what they were able to do with this particular weight configuration.

Same thing with the removable shaft. Forever, PING didn’t have a removable shaft where you could change the loft.

Again, it’s very difficult to design a material and a hosel configuration that allows you to adjust without pulling a bunch of weight toward the hosel of the club and decreasing performance.

You don’t want the weight over here by the hosel. I can talk a little bit poorly about – as I’m wearing Nike clothes – Nike Golf used to make their drivers, and you’ll notice that Tiger Woods always said, “Well I always play the fixed-shaft driver.”

Well Nike’s not making any clubs anymore, so I can kind of talk a little bit about them. They always made a fixed hosel in the driver for Tiger Woods.

He didn’t have a removable, adjustable hosel. You kind of wonder why is that? Is Tiger just old school?

Well, the fact is, Nike just made a big, clunky hosel adjustable weight there, it had way too much mass in it, and now it’s bringing all this weight over toward the hosel, the club isn’t going to perform as well with that type of technology.

Now it’s great for the company to sell a lot of drivers, because now they can fit them more easily, you can try out different shafts, you can do all kinds of cool stuff with a removable or adjustable hosel, but it decreased performance.

PING isn’t willing to do things like that. If it can’t be the best quality club with any feature that it has, then they’re not going to do it.

This club is really cool, they also did a lot of things with acoustics. One thing that people don’t know is whenever you’re making a driver, it’s very easy to make a good performing driver that sounds terrible.

A lot of the best performing drivers sound like a tin can, like a baseball bat, really high pitch, just not really pleasing to the ear.

So they do a lot of things on the internal parts of this club to make the sound waves and the acoustics sound really nice to your ear. I think this is the best sounding driver that I’ve heard in a while, it came out from PING, so really nice.

The top of these, those little turbulators, actually reduces a little bit of friction with the air and helps it to go a little bit faster.

Probably not a big, huge deal, but it’s probably one mile an hour, two miles an hour faster. If you can get it for free, free miles per hour, nothing wrong with that.

With the shaft itself, so this is an interesting story. With their PING tour shaft here, this is a really low-spin shaft, and it’s actually a pretty stiff shaft.

I got this one tipped an inch to make it even stiffer at the tip, this is going to reduce spin. But one thing I didn’t realize is when they design these, they always felt fairly soft to me.

Whenever I played a PING shaft, I was like man, this is a fairly soft-feeling shaft. It doesn’t feel real harsh, and stiff, and rigid. Even when you got the really stiff performing shafts.

I realized one of the reasons for this is there’s two ways your shaft can bend. I was talking with the engineers about this.

So your shaft can bend in what’s called lead and lag deflections, meaning this actually bends the shaft like this, but is also has torque, so it will twist this way.

Kind of like imagine a clock, you’re turning a clock like this, I’m not going to be able to bend that enough to where you can see that there, but it has this torque factor too that goes down the shaft.

Now what they did, is they designed a shaft that’s nice and stiff to reduce spin on this type of flexing of the shaft, but then they kept it pretty shaft on the torque rating, comparable to shafts that are this stiff.

It feels nice and soft because when you hit the ball, it has a little bit of that softness because the torque is a little bit higher on there.

I thought that was something that’s kind of interesting with PING that they did to just always thinking about ways to make the clubs feel a little bit better, go the extra mile, and that kind of thing.

They even moved some weight around in this club head. In their woods this year, to make them a little bit less weight in the grip end, and move that weight around to make the club head even more forgiving here.

Pretty cool stuff. That’s the driver, let’s go on to the fairway woods which I have to say this is the best fairway wood that I’ve ever hit in my life. Let’s jump right in.

All right, so let’s jump in with the G410 fairway, this thing is really hot. So I hit the same thing, I was hitting this before the driver when I was getting my fitting done.

I hit a few and the same thing, the first couple, you’re not always going to hit it exactly perfect, but I hit my first shot, it was a little bit of a mis-hit, not bad, but then I look over to the TrackMan radar that’s measuring all the stats for this.

The 3 wood on the mis-hit went 275, which I can’t my 3 wood on a perfect shot 275 with my current model. It felt like a cannon, right? Even on a little bit of a mis-hit.

So I hit a couple more, and I was getting around probably 285 on average, and then I asked OK, what can Bubba do on one of these 3 woods. I was wanting to know like what’s the farthest you’ve seen?

He said he’s seen Bubba hit one of these 3 woods 310, which is pretty crazy. So I gave it a good rip, gave it everything I had, I could only get to about 302, but that’s just nuts with a 3 wood, you’re not supposed to be able to hit a 3 wood that far.

The cool thing with this, it is adjustable. I may have to add a little bit of loft if I want it to go a little bit shorter, which would be a good advantage, because now you can get it to come in a little higher into the greens and land a little bit softer, even though you’re not giving up any distance.

So again, this thing is super hot, it still has the turbulators at the top, and I have to say the feeling of this is amazing.

There’s only been a few clubs in my entire golf career, I’ve hit hundreds and hundreds of golf clubs. But when you first hit it, you think man, this is a heck of a club.

This thing is really different than the other ones out there. I have that sensation with this 3 wood, and the hybrid that I’m going to talk about in a minute. So this thing is really, really hot. Again, I’ve got the same, the PING Tour shaft is a little bit of a stiffer shaft, and nice club.

The hybrid is the next one and a little bit of a similar story there, although on the hybrid I hit one of my first swings just crushed it, hit it as good as I could, and when I started getting loosened up with this one, like I said, the 3 wood was going crazy.

I was probably averaging 285 or something like that, when I got over 300 with some of the ones I really tried to take a rip at. With this hybrid when I tried to take a rip at it, I was getting some of them up around 275.

It may cause a little bit of a problem where I’m not going to have any clubs that are short enough, which is a good problem to have. But this one, I don’t think I mis-hit it once.

Like I said with the 3 wood, there’s only a few times in my life, when I first hit my PING i15 driver, I was like this thing, for me, this is something unique, something special about this, I’m going to be able to hit this really well.

The same thing with this 3 wood, and the same thing with this hybrid. As soon as I hit it, I don’t think I’ve mis-hit one yet with it, probably 15, 20 swings. The same setup, same type of shaft.

One thing to make a note, whenever you’re getting your woods fit, so if you have a 65-gram weight shaft in your driver, maybe you have a 55, maybe you have something different, but usually what the rule of thumb is when you go to your 3 wood, you’re going to get 10 grams heavier.

If I have a 65 in the driver, it will be a 75 in the 3 wood, an 85 in the hybrid shaft. Now if you struggle a little bit with distance, I might recommend keeping those all fairly light.

If you’re really trying to get as much distance as you can, you may want to stick with the lightest weight shaft possible for your driver, your 3 wood, and your hybrid.

But I’ll tell you, if there’s one club that I say that you would have to hit this year of every club that’s on the market, this PING 410 hybrid is the one. I’ve never felt a hybrid that felt this good.

Launched super hot, really nice and high, and the cool thing is if you hit these too far, then you can always get a little bit more loft and that’s only going to make things better, because now it’s coming into the green softer, it’s landing on them softer, so this one’s pretty cool.

So I’ve got a 19° hybrid, again, I may have to turn that up to 20°, 21° to get it to go a little bit shorter and land a little bit softer on the green.

Now this PING putter, so this is the Sigma 2, the Tyne Stealth, so it’s just a black finish is why they call it the stealth, I think. But a really cool putter here. Let me cut off this tag.

One thing that when I got fitted with the putter, they had this really cool – and again, this is just another thing that PING does is the PING kind of difference, that no other manufacturer is going to do – so they have this one-foot thick granite slab, it’s about 60 feet, either 60 or 80 feet, I’m not sure.

But they have this entire room with this giant granite slab. It’s probably 8 or 10 feet wide, a foot thick, and 60 feet long, and it’s perfectly level.

So they’ve basically built this granite slab to be perfectly smooth, perfectly level, and then they put it on its own foundation, so even if the building around it fell down, it would all be on its perfectly level foundation.

Then they built everything else around it so that they would have, really, they went through all that expense, all that crazy effort, just so they would have a perfect putting surface.

Now I can’t remember what the stimpmeter on this was, but it’s something crazy.

Like a normal green they say the stent meter would be like a 6 on a stimp would be pretty slow, or really slow, a 10 would be getting up pretty fast, and if you see the major championships, these greens are just lightning fast, they’d be rolling like a 14 or so.

I think at Oakmont they were 14 during one of the last Opens. On this perfectly smooth granite polished slab that’s 60 feet long, that rolls perfectly level, it’s rolling like a 15,000 or something ridiculous.

They’re saying if you just tap the ball, it will roll all the way down across the slab. That’s how smooth and fast it is.

The reason they did this is just to be able to better test their putters, they want a perfectly smooth level that way they know if they see a putt curve or something go offline, they can trust that it was something that happened with the putter or with the golf ball.

Another little interesting side note is the dimples on the golf ball, and this is something that I never would have thought to be true, but the dimples on the golf ball are not perfectly smooth.

So if you catch a dimple, one side of a dimple, it can actually throw your putt off. The research that I’ve heard on this, is as much as a half of a cup, or a third of a cup from 12 to 13 feet.

Now it doesn’t mean that you’re always going to hit that far off line, but just shows you we’re not going to always make the putts that we think we’re going to make.

Even if we hit a perfect stroke, they’re just not all going to go in. There’s imperfections in the green, there’s imperfections in the golf ball.

The reason I brought that up is when they putt on that granite slab, when the dimples are rolling on it, you can really hear it kind of bobbling along.

They actually designed, again PING doing PING stuff, they designed a perfectly smooth golf ball that they could test on this granite slab, with the center of mass of the golf ball really nice and level, that way they could hit these at it would just roll perfect every single time. So pretty cool.

This putter was really nice. I liked this one. I’ve gone a little more to a mallet style. Again, like the driver, that has a really high, PING is the leader in the MOI in the drivers, same thing here with this type of putter.

All this weight on the heel and toe with these tynes, really spreads out the off-center hits, the center of mass off to the sides like this, and it’s going to keep the face from twisting, and it’s going to make it go a little bit straighter than say a typical blade-style, like an old school bullseye blade, just flat piece of metal.

So it has a nice, high MOI. One thing too, is when I picked this putter out, I got one that’s face balanced. I have a tendency myself to get a little bit overaccelerating.

So I’ll tend to be a little short on the backstroke, and then over accelerate coming through, which is a better way to do it than decelerating for sure.

But I tend to go a little bit on the other end, so if I miss one, I tend to leave it a little bit out to the right. Having a face-balanced putter helps you to eliminate those misses out to the right. Now some putters will be toe down, like this.

The center of gravity of a putter’s toe down, that’s going to make the putter head want to swing a little bit more, and if you tend to pull putts to the left, a putter like that or a putter design like that may be better for you.

So the cool thing about this putter is you can get it in a variety of options. You can get it with a face-balanced, or a slight toe hang, they made two different models, that depends on how the shaft goes in there is what changes it. So a pretty dag-gone cool putter.

I hit a few with this, it feels really, really nice, and I can’t say enough good things about it. So I’m excited to start testing this out, too. Now before I move on from the putters, I almost forgot.

PING has something – if you haven’t heard of this, it’s really cool – it’s called the Gold Vault. What they do is they have a special room, they have a replica, everybody that’s ever won on our using a PING putter, they have an exact replica of the same specs that they used and it’s a gold-plated putter.

Now another thing that PING does, again, they don’t brag on themselves, they don’t market a lot of these cool things that they do, but they actually send a solid gold replica of the putter to the player that won.

I believe Brooke Henderson actually has the most expensive won, she just won recently with one of these bigger mallet-style putters, and the gold, just the gold alone that went into the mallet was worth $45,000, so it’s pretty nuts.

They have over 3,000 different putters all solid gold that they sent to players. If you think about that, it’s easy to say oh, yeah, it’s PING, it’s a big company, that’s not that big of a deal.

But if you think hey, $10,000-$15,000 of gold in every single putter, they’ve sent out over 3,000 of those, and then they don’t even use that to market themselves and talk about that they’re doing this?

That tells you the kind of people that they are. They’re doing the things that’s right. They’re going way above what’s right, going the extra mile, and not even trying to market that themselves.

For me, I like that story to get out there, that’s just kind of the people that they are at PING, and it’s really cool. Another cool thing that they had there was Bubba Watson.

They had his wedge that he hit at Augusta, a replica of that one, when he hooked it out of the trees. So they had a gold-plated replica of that.

You cannot believe how big around the grip is, the grip is huge. He uses like 12 wraps, big over-sized grip, it’s turned sideways. It’s like the weirdest club I’ve ever held in my life, so it’s pretty neat.

So let’s go ahead and jump in here, let’s talk about, I believe the irons are in this box, we’ll have to see. Yep, nice, so these are the irons.

So I went with, again, I have a little bit of a tendency to spin the ball a little bit too much, so to kind of get up in the wind and go a little too high. So I went with the KBS Tour C-Taper, a fairly low spin shaft.

I actually went with an S+, which is a little bit softer than I’m usually using, but it felt really good to me. I went with the i210 irons, and we’ll show you some pictures of these close up.

These really felt nice and solid. One of the things that PING originally did and where they kind of broke the mold was they started out with perimeter weighted putters.

Everybody else was doing the flat, remember the old-style like Wilson 8802, or the Bullseye, just flat metal putter. When they originally designed the perimeter weighted putter, that was pretty revolutionary.

Now when they did the same thing with our irons, they started making irons like that PING i2 at the big high toe, and that was to really to make the iron a lot more forgiving, and it was just way easier to play, and that’s why that iron really went up in value. It really exploded, everybody started playing with it.

Since then, what they’ve done through better and better engineering, they have tons of engineers there that are always working on super-complicated stuff. But they found ways to make this club smaller, more compact, but not to give up the forgiveness.

So even though I went with the smaller head, the i210, their new 410 iron, I was really surprised by it. It’s actually as forgiving as some of the older-model PINGs with the really wide, fixed sole, big high toe, it’s actually as forgiving as those.

They found ways to make it just as forgiving being as compact as that. So again, they’re not going to put out clubs that don’t meet the standards to their previous model.

If it’s not better than their previous model, they’re not going to release that club. Now think about that with other companies, I’m not going to name any names here, but there’s companies out there that are releasing two and three and four drivers a year.

Now, can you truly make a driver that is better from an engineering standpoint and make four brand new version every year?

Not saying that you can’t, but it’d be pretty dag-gone tough. How could you come up with that much new stuff?

You’ll think that the production on a new set of irons, or driver, or woods, or whatever it is, a lot of times it gets started three and five years prior to it being released.

You’d have to be coming up with breakthroughs constantly which probably really isn’t possible. I think a lot of times they change up some things and they don’t really perform any better, but they just know they can sell it if it’s a brand new model.

So I didn’t get that sense at all when I went with PING, really cool, they only put out clubs that were going to perform better. That’s why you’ll see with PING, they don’t always release clubs right away.

Sometimes it takes a little bit longer for them to get a club out, because they haven’t made it to where it’s performing better than the previous model and they’re not going to sell clubs to you just because they know that you’ll buy them because it’s got a new paint job, or it’s a new this or that.

They’re really making sure that it’s the highest quality. So one of the things that was indicative of this, and this is not something you’re going to hear a ton, but they have a new low-spin version of their 410 driver.

This driver’s already really low spin, the normal 410 Plus that I got, it’s super high moment of inertia, meaning it’s as consistent as you can get.

The low spin version is trying to take a little bit spin away from it, but they didn’t want to release that until they were able to get the MOI, the moment of inertia, the forgiveness of that driver just right.

They had a little bit of trouble with some of the manufacturing, so they said OK, we’re just not going to release it. Until it’s perfect, until it’s the way that we want it to be, we’re not going to release the club.

That probably cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost sales, but they’re not going to give you a driver they know is not 100 percent as good as it can be.

I’d rather, I love that approach, because now they have you in mind. They’re not going to sell something that’s not the best for you.

I think that that really says something when they’re taking a loss profit-wise to make that happen, so it’s pretty cool.

Let me go ahead and unwrap the rest of these, then we’ll jump over to the wedges and other clubs. So the last box here we have, or one of the last boxes we have, is the wedges.

They make a few different models of these. These are what I would say is probably one of the best-looking wedges I’ve ever seen. This is the Glide Forged, let’s make sure that’s the right box.

So I got a 56° and a 60°, or actually may got a 54° and got it bent to get a little bit more bounce on it. I can talk about that very quickly here.

So whenever you bend the loft of the wedge, you’re either increasing or decreasing the bounce. So with this one, yeah here’s my 54°, and I like typically a really high bounce wedge.

So this is a 10°, I like it more around a 12° or 13°, so what you can do is if you buy a club, and again, PING does all of this.

They’re kind of the first company that ever did all the different dots, so you see the black dots, or red, or yellow, that’s depending on how your arm length and how tall you are, they can fit clubs specifically to you.

But they’re one of the best in the business with this. So they take a 54° wedge, and what happens is when you bend that to 56°, you bend it open, you get a little bit more bounce on the bottom of it here.

So this is a really nice, really cool looking wedge. When you look down at this, the shape of this just looks amazing to me.

It’s got a little bit of a higher toe, but it’s not the real – some of the companies are making the high toe that are just way sticking out there, they look a little bit funny – this one’s got a little higher toe, but it’s nothing crazy.

Really nice shape to it, that’s just a really pretty beautiful, the design on the back of the club looks really, really nice, really sharp.

So I got that one, the 54° bent 2° open so it’s actually a 56°, I’ve also gone gap wedge, so I did the gap wedge in the i210, which I think is going to be a really good, forgiving club.

I also got a 60°, and in the 60°, same thing. I like a little bit more bounce so I got a 58° with 8° of bounce, but it’s opened up, so they bent it to be a 60° wedge, just to get a little bit more on there.

A lot of times people think oh, the bounce is going to save me from chunking the club, it’s going to make my club bounce back up in the golf ball or something like that. That’s not really how it works.

Pretty much on most of your wedge shots, you’re going to have more than 8° or 10° of forward shaft lean. Really what the bounce is doing is helping through contact with the ground interaction, how that feels, how it sounds.

So I like a little bit more bounce. People think well maybe you can’t hit a flop shot with a log of bounce, but that’s not true either.

When you open this up, lower your hands, you’re going to be able to hit this nice and high, even if you have a little bit of extra bounce in there.

I think at one time, Phil Mickelson was using like a 10° or 12° bounce on his 60° when he was hitting those flop shots where he’d just stand right behind Dave Pelz, and flop it right over top of his head like five feet away.

Don’t let a little bit of extra bounce scare you. It can help with the interaction with the turf, and it’s a little bit of a safety cushion there too. If you hit slightly behind one, it kind of helps it glide through the turf rather than kind of bouncing back up.

That’s probably where the name, The Glide, came from, really good ground interaction from the sole design.

All right, so two more boxes, this is the bag. They sent me a stand bag too, because I want to walk, and this is the bag I was talking about, like we played in college.

I believe this is a Hoofer, back, I haven’t even checked it out yet. So really sharp, they get your name on their, it’s like I was talking about, they’re one of the biggest, probably by far the biggest, putting personal, put your name on there, put your logo, that kind of thing. It’s really affordable.

In college we always played PING-style bag. Had the team on there. I went to Eastern Kentucky University in Kentucky, Richmond, Kentucky.

We’d have our name on there, and it just feels cool. You feel good about yourself, you’ve got a nice looking bag with your name on it, just a little bit extra.

Now I’ve got my favorite club I want to show you now. All right, so this is my favorite club. For those of you who don’t know, I just had my first son. His name is Rhett Clay Ballard, he’s about four months old now.

PING does this thing where they have My First Putter, so they’ll actually design a little tiny putter for you, it comes with a – this is pretty cool – it comes with a shirt, like a little onesie there.

It comes with a hat, PING hat, so you can be all logo’d out. Then it comes with a little tiny putter.

The cool thing about this is it’s actually a real putter. This is a real grip, this is a real shaft, it feels like a metal head, and just like PING always does, the weighting is correct on this.

They didn’t take like some big giant really heavy metal head and stick on a little tiny shaft where the kid couldn’t even swing it. It’s light enough to where the kid could actually putt with this.

On the face of it, we’ll show you a close-up there, you can see it has the name of your child, it has the date that they’re born, the weight, and it’s really cool. All just kind of engraved on there.

You could actually play with this if you wanted to, or just keep it like as a little keepsake thing, but it’s pretty neat because it is a real putter. This is exactly the same.

As soon as Rhett can get tall enough to stand up, we’re going to have to test out our new putter here. I’ve already got him kind of holding this thing in the crib, so really excited about that.

All right, so hopefully watching this video, the one thing that came across to you is that PING is willing to take a loss, a financial loss, or not make as much money not by churning out tons and tons of product.

 

By putting out clubs that they don’t think perform as well as they can. They’re willing to really put their money where their mouth is to do what’s best for you, to only put out the best quality clubs.

That’s why I’m really proud to be on staff with ping. I like to think that Top Speed Golf has that same kind of philosophy.

We only do what’s right for you, and we’re willing to put our money where our mouth is too. We kind of show that with everything that we do.

Now stay on the lookout, we’re going to be going through, or I’ll be going through hitting the different clubs in videos to come, do more of a full review style.

Talk about some of the different settings, and the ways that I would play these clubs, and really how to get the most out of them.

We also have a lot of distance training. We just finished our first distance course, where we’re getting about an average in a three-week pretty of 12 miles an hour of club head speed gained, 12.7 right now, which is roughly 31 yards of distance.

That’s the average distance gained. We had one player gain 27 miles an hour of swing speed which would be like 70 yards extra distance on your best solid hit shots. So keep on the look out for that.

Go ahead and subscribe to the channel if you want to see these videos coming up, the PING reviews, the more of the distance stuff we’re going to be talking about.

Be sure to hit that Like, that really helps us out, and post your comment down below. I’d love to hear from you. All right, have a great day guys, play your best golf.