Equipment Insider: Mahan survives narrow Firestone
EDITOR'S NOTE: Each week in the Equipment Insider, Adam Barr -- PGATOUR.COM's equipment columnist -- will provide breaking news, notes and analysis focused on PGA TOUR players. Adam will also appear in video segments for PGATOUR.COM.
It's not always hot streaks that lead to multiple wins in a season. True, of the five multiple winners on the PGA TOUR this year, Ernie Els, Jim Furyk and Justin Rose went two, four and five weeks between win No. 1 and No. 2, respectively. But Steve Stricker had a five-month break between trophy hoists (Northern Trust in February; John Deere in July). And now Hunter Mahan has joined the multiple winners club in 2010 with his victory at the World Golf Championships-Bridgestone Invitational, five months and one week after he won the Waste Management Phoenix Open.
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So what has changed in his bag, and what has stayed the same?
The driver is still a Ping Rapture V2, as it was in Phoenix. Mahan didn't have a stellar tournament from the tee in Ohio -- he was 30th in the field in accuracy, hitting 61.8 percent of his fairways for the week, and 21st in distance (305.6 yards average) -- but he didn't let the tee ball beat him, either. That's an important key at Firestone Country Club, where there are still enough trees to narrow the look -- and the fairway -- from the launching pad. The field's accuracy numbers were down overall compared to other TOUR events where there's usually more room to drive the ball.
The V2 can bust it, for sure -- that 305-plus average is hardly plinking -- but the technology story has a lot to do with stability as well. Tungsten pads on the outside of the head keep weight low and back, controlling spin and encouraging a high launch angle. The result, Ping says, is a more controllable flight. And except for one mishap that Mahan attributed to user error -- the wayward drive on the 16th Sunday that forced him to make an adventurous par -- the design helped Hunter keep the ball in play all week.
| In My Bag: Hunter Mahan | |||||||
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One big change since Phoenix has been Mahan's irons, which are now Ping S56s instead of S57s. While the 57s served him well, the update to the S56s allowed Mahan to get the most out of Ping's new stabilizing bar technology. The bars, placed behind the face in the cavity of the head, are narrower in the long irons to maximize ball speed and wring out every yard. The bars get progressively wider as the irons get shorter, which produces a lower, more controlled trajectory, Ping says.
The body is steel, but there's a piece of tungsten in the toe; its weight and position vary according to where the center of gravity is needed: down in the long irons for a dependable high launch; a little further up in the shorter irons to enhance that controlled trajectory mentioned above.
As for the hybrid club, the Ping i15 Mahan used to get out of botanical jail after his bad shot on 16 is the same one he had at Phoenix. He compares it to a 5-wood. And the par-saving putt on that hole was made with the same Ping iWi D66 that worked so well in keeping Mahan from wasting strokes at the Phoenix Open. At Firestone, Mahan led the field in putts per green in regulation and was T3 in overall putts per round. Not surprisingly, he also led the field in birdies with 19. As usual, those are the stats that tell a large part of the tale in most TOUR wins.
It's been a good year for Ping in terms of TOUR validation of their products. Bubba Watson and Lee Westwood broke through with their first wins on the PGA TOUR. Louis Oosthuizen used both the Rapture V2 driver and the S56 irons in winning the British Open this year. And Bill Lunde, another Ping staffer, used the same tools to win the Turning Stone Resort Championship last week in upstate New York.
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