A fitting prize.

The late Luther Vandross once told us the best things in life are free.  Now being a Scotsman its a sentiment I wholeheartedly endorse!

In December, Callaway ran a 'Twelve days of Christmas' competition. Basically, you had to identify the golfer with a blanked out face and if correct you won a prize. These were everything from a hat to a set of irons. I was lucky enough to win. In fact I was lucky enough to win the top prize; a new set of Callaway irons!

Happy bunny to the Nth degree!

But just when I thought how lucky I had been my delight got cranked up to the next level.

Cameron from Callaway got in contact: "Do you know what irons you want?" he asked. Well this threw me. I had assumed that it would simply be a set Callaway had in stock, I never expected a choice! I felt like all my Christmases had come at once. Explaining to Cameron that I honestly didn't know. He then asked "Would you like to go for a custom fitting in St.Andrews?" I think my reply was along the lines of bears, toilets and woods!

A couple of years ago, I had written a story on Callaway's Performance Centre within the Golf Academy at St.Andrews. I never thought I would have the privilege of using it personally. It is a fantastic facility.

Fully trained professionals that know exactly what they are doing and fitting facilities second to none, including Trackman.

After a somewhat "entertaining" 2 1/2 hour drive I arrived a wee tad stressed, but after a large black coffee I started to feel humanish again and hit 25 balls with my own clubs to loosen off before meeting my fitter Greg Patterson.

Greg showed me through to the fitting bay and explained to me what we would be doing and about Trackman. Trackman is a launch monitor that breaks down all the information you need to analyse the technical aspects of your swing and show you were you can improve. Shows you the stuff that the human eye can't see.

We then started with me hitting with my own irons to give us a benchmark to work from.

Greg explained to me that what we were trying to do was find the irons that increased my ball speed and improved my smash factor.

What is smash factor? I hear you ask. Well technically smash factor is ball speed divided by club speed. If you swing a club at 100 mph and your ball speed is 150 mph then your smash factor is 1.5. Are you with me? Or basically how cleanly you hit the ball but let me emphasise that is the most basic of basic explanations. Your attack angle and your swing patch can both impact your smash factor; but in fitting it's basically used to make sure you are using correctly fitting irons. The Trackman web site is well worth a visit to get a proper explanation of everything this brilliant piece of technology does for golfers.

My swing speed virtually never varied more than a couple of mph throughout the fitting, my ball speed on the other hand did. The difference between the ball speed of my own clubs to the ones I got fitted for was 15mph. My smash factor went from 1.22 to 1.3. Greg had explained that he was aiming to raise this to as near as 1.5 as possible so we were definitely heading in the right direction.  A little work from me will help to improve this further.

During the fitting I hit the Apex, XR and big Bertha heads with varying lies, shaft wise we hit about 6 or 7 variations in well over an hour. To see the Trackman feed back on each combination was fascinating. It shows you everything from trajectory to distance, speed to spin, the analysis is phenomenal and combined with Greg's expertise leads to some amazing results. 

For example if I had been hitting balls by myself, I would have thought the XR was the ones I had hit most consistently. The Trackman, however, showed me that I would have been wrong! The head I hit, consistently better with and further, was the Apex. If buying off the shelf on a range without Trackman analysis I would have left with the wrong irons.

The XR looks very good on the eye and gives you confidence when you look at it. It's like a sleek X18 and is a very good iron.

The Apex is simply a stunning head, that gives you tremendous feedback. When I hit a bad shot I knew immediately if it was towards the heel or the toe. When you look down on the Apex you want to hit a good shot just to feel nothing but sheer pleasure from it.

At 52 I kinda knew my days of steel shafts were slipping behind me. I discovered that if any one thing was responsible for my increase in ball speed it was the UST graphite shaft. When I first hit it I thought it was too light, I was getting very little feel from it. The truth is, like most men, I simply didn't want to own up to the fact that graphite is simply better for me. 

Men, in particular golfers, have that macho ego. We are men, hunters, gatherers, providers! Graphite is for women and old men! Well that makes me either a woman or an old man then. If graphite shafts make me a better golfer then I am going to use them, simple as that! If you are like I was then simply go and hit a stiff graphite shaft in an iron, the difference in length is basically a full club.

So in about 10 days time I will get on the course with my new Callaway Apex irons and lets see how many shots professionally fitted clubs will save me.

As for the fitting experience at St.Andrews, I will simply say this. If you are buying a new set of Callaway's then try to do it there or any other Callaway Performance Centre.  These guys are use to dealing with professionals and top class golfers. In my experience they treat you in exactly the same way. I honestly have not a word of complaint nor could I find a single fault of the whole Callaway experience.

But I will end with a cautionary tale. It's been over 3 weeks since I hit a ball, so on Sunday I hit 300 at the Paul Lawrie range. This resulted in some awful blistering on my fingers; I basically hit 200 too many! As a result of this, towards the end of the fitting I was in a fair bit of pain and my takeaway got weak as I tried to protect my fingers. Please don't make that same mistake.