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By Steve Pike
As the "dog days'' of the season approach, it's time for a breath of fresh air. In this case that means Tom Wishon, one of the golf industry's more respected club designers and a man never shy about speaking his mind, comes down from the mountain top to talk about the virtues of custom-fit golf clubs.
“Ninety-eight percent of the golfers who think they have been custom fit really haven’t,” says Wishon, president of Durango, Colo.-based Tom Wishon Golf Technology.”Golfers have no idea what professional custom fitting is all about or what it can do. Most golfers still think they have to be a low single-digit player to benefit from fitting. Most club pros and retailers think this. Golfers don’t really know the facts about fitting because the big companies and their marketing have never educated them about it.''
With that in mind, Wishon says, “I can darn well guarantee you that if all golfers had their clubs built from the ground up through an Nth degree fitting analysis, 70 percent of them would see an immediate change in the way they hit the ball. And to me, that is what a new golf club technology has to be to be able to be qualified as a true advance in technology. If the golfer does not see a visible change in the way they hit the ball within the first two-to-three times they use the clubs, it is a phantom technology and not a real technology.
"Nth degree custom fitting is a real technology that still lies out there for 98 percent of the golfers to discover and realize that it very much is not only the one remaining new golf technology left to be discovered, but it is the one technology that can bring about the most significant change in how the majority of golfers hit the ball,'' Wishon says.
So the question is, how much farther can club designers ‘push the envelope’ and stay within the rules of set forth by the U.S. Golf Association?
In terms of buying ‘off the rack,’ Wishon says, “Technology is dead and used up. But in terms of how Nth degree custom fitting is a new, significant golf club technology? That is the one remaining technology left for golfers to discover and benefit from.”
And that observation comes straight from the mountain top.
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