As Fairway Stevie aptly noted in his blog last week, we had a peak at[photopress:callawayfti.jpg,full,alignright] Callaway’s new gear. In my very rudimentary testing, I came away quite impressed by what I saw. I hit the X-Forged irons and found them quite unlike what I expected out of Callaway — more akin to the better irons at TaylorMade. Now this was very preliminary — I hit a dozen 6-irons — but the feel was soft and I liked the results.
I then moved to the FT-5 driver, which I hit plenty long, but with quite a bit of a hard draw. That’s fairly standard for me these days, which is why I was surprised by the FT-i, the much-discussed square driver that is new to the market from Callaway. I hit a couple of dozen shots and the hard draw simply disappeared, replaced by a slight draw and a higher shot. It was about six or seven yards shorter, but in the middle of the fairway. Needless to say, I was impressed, especially given the consistency of the shots.
This weekend I stopped in at one of my favourite golf shops while in Southern Ontario visiting my parents. The owner of the store said increasingly the word among his patrons is the Callaway significantly outperforms the other square driver on the market, Nike’s Sumo Squared. It will be interesting to see if that trend continues, especially considering Sumo is $100 less in cost than Callaway’s offering.
