GolfSpy MPR

Tester: Michael Riley It is no mere formality to express my gratitude to MyGolfSpy, our moderators, and PING for the opportunity to review the G700 irons. Whether measured in dollar value or number of review applications, some of these opportunities are especially coveted. Being chosen for this review is a privilege, and I hope to do right by this great community. Getting into golf and why I play My dad, me, and my son I began playing golf in my teens, when my dad and I would play a few times a summer. I always enjoyed it, but never pursued the game seriously. My non-committal relationship with golf continued through my twenties. This changed about six years ago when I moved to the far west end of Michigan's Upper Peninsula to become the pastor of Calvary Baptist Church of Wakefield. There was a young man in the church who I needed to talk with—and he was an avid golfer. For the sake of conversation, I started playing. And I got hooked. Golf is almost perfectly designed to be an addiction for me. First, there's the obvious social element, which is valuable to me as a pastor. Second, I'm an analytic problem solver. Golf is just physics, right? It always seems like I should be able to figure it out, and solving that puzzle is deeply compelling to me. Third, I love gadgets and technology, and the training aids and launch monitors and the tech of the clubs themselves all feed that interest. Fourth, despite the frustrations of the game, being outdoors at the course is a wonderful release from the pressures of ministry. Family trip to Erin Hills for last year's U.S. Open Finally, and increasingly importantly, I golf to spend time with my family, especially my son Kirke, who is five. He began swinging toy clubs at one. By the time he was three, he was playing nine-hole rounds. He genuinely loves the game. He'll practice for hours on his own, and we watch the Tour for a few hours each Sunday after services have ended. He can now walk nine holes with me, or we can cart 18. From his tees (about 1,100 yards for nine holes) he beats me about half the time. An ordinary hole for Kirke: great drive, a couple meh approaches, slick pitch, confident putt My younger son Christopher also shows some promise. He's currently three and he's already bigger than his older brother. He doesn't take it nearly as seriously as Kirke does, but he hits the ball hard. My hope is that I have my golf partners for years to come. How I play As for my own golf ability: I'm solidly OK. Game Golf has me right around a 15 handicap. My score almost magnetically reverts to bogey golf: good rounds fall apart, bad rounds turn around, and (voila!) I shoot another 90. Game Golf generally likes my approach game and my putting (relative to handicap), but scolds me for my driving and short game. So a typical hole for me begins with a poor drive, followed by a solidly respectable second shot in the vicinity of the green (very rarely on it), a mediocre short shot that ends up too far from the hole, and then two putts for my bogey. If the putter heats up and a few of the first putts drop, I'll shoot in the mid-80s. I've never broken 80; that remains my biggest golf goal. The G700s may be forgiving; video ain't. Here's the swing that'll be testing these irons (captured in my first garage session with the G700 7 iron): My current irons are the Adams XTD Tours, with the KBS Tour 120 stiff shafts and Iomic grips. I picked these up when Adams clubs were being clearanced and I like them a lot. Little offset, a fairly compact head: I'm a sucker for the look at address. I know everyone hits their 7 iron 150 yards; so do I. My short iron game is in solid shape (again, relative to handicap), but the stats tell me that my long iron play could use a significant upgrade. Why I applied PING's marketing for the G700 highlights distance and forgiveness with an emphasis on aesthetics. So here are the questions I want to answer in this review: Do the G700 irons deliver usable distance gains across the set? This will first require me to find out if they increase distance at all. If they do, do the distance gains (and hiked lofts) create problematic gapping issues in the bag? Does the distance come at the expense of control, either in terms of left/right dispersion or loss of stopping power? Do the G700 deliver on the promise of forgiveness? Most likely, my answer here is going to be found on the course. Is my less-than-consistent swing getting better-than-it-deserves consistent distances? Does PING deliver on its goal of packaging these improvements in an aesthetically pleasing package? Some readers here are entirely results driven: if the ball goes in the hole, you couldn't care less what the club looks like. For me, part of the enjoyment of the game is appreciating the art of the tools. I don't want to play a club that reminds me how bad I am every time I look at it. Will the offset and all-around chunkiness of the G700s be tolerable or even (gasp!) appealing? I'm a long way from a scratch approach player. If an iron will allow me to hit the ball further and (here's the important thing) to a repeatable number, scoring should improve. That's ultimately what I'm in this test to find out. Fitting My main clubfitter has been “buy cheap stuff on eBay and see what works.” But for this test, I hoped to get a real fitting. And to my surprise, I even found that there is a PING authorized fitter about an hour away from me. Unfortunately, he and I simply couldn't get our schedules to sync before we had to get our orders placed. So I'll be the tester representing the majority of golfers who don't get fitted for clubs. My first step was to visit PING's online fitting tool. As one who sits in the middle of the bell curve for adult male size, I expected to be stock everything. But depending on my wrist-to-floor measurement (which seems to vary every time I try it), PING kept recommending clubs built upright, and once even suggested an extra half-inch of length. Because my most dreaded iron miss is a big pull draw/hook, and given the significant offset of the G700s, I was leery of going too much upright. In the end, I went with stock lengths, the Nippon Modus3 105 shafts (stiff), and a single degree upright. PING deserves kudos for permitting us to request 8 irons, going 4–GW. In my current setup, I play an Adams dHy 4 and then 5–GW in the XTD Tours. Given the expected launch properties of the G700s, I really wanted to put the G700 4 iron up against the Adams dHy. As for the wedges, my PW and GW function almost entirely as a 10 and 11 iron; I don't use them for pitching and chipping. For that reason, I wanted to keep the G700 wedges as part of the set. PING generously accommodated this request. First impressions PING shipped our irons fast. We got our specs submitted to Rob on July 2. By July 10, my new irons arrived. That's impressive, and so PING earns another star. The box came packed well, with each iron in a temporary neoprene sleeve. As for looks: these irons are clean and big. I love the overall shape of the club. While I enjoy playing my XTD Tours, their cavities have more crevices and corners than most irons (they're a pain to clean). By contrast, the G700s look like a blade—but one that has had too many trips to a cheap all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. By itself, a G700 looks gorgeous. Its girth only becomes glaringly obvious when you set it next to a more svelte iron. The 4 iron is noticeably larger than my Adams dHy: The 5 iron's backside shows up at address, which is not ideal. That said, given the dull reflective finish of the iron, it almost camouflages itself. You can see the effect here: The size difference is readily apparent in the 7 iron. The XTD Tours are a fairly compact player's cavity/GI iron. The G700s are—ahem—not compact. I will give PING credit on this, however: the topline of the G700s is actually relatively trim. I suspect some adept shaping and polishing enhances this effect: What this adds up to, at least in a first impression, is a big club that doesn't totally look so big, especially where it counts, at address. They're in my bag and will see their first action in my league match tomorrow (as I'm writing). With Game Golf, I'll be tracking everything, and I'm eager to see the results.

I had a altogether meh round, but the standout stat was my putting. I had (gulp) 22 putts on the front nine. Two 3-putts and a 4-putt. Seriously, Evnroll? And then, for no particular reason, 14 putts on the back. OK, Evnroll, you're safe again.

Got to walk nine with Kirke again this morning. Decided to take a video of him playing his favorite hole: a 175-yard, downhill par 4 (for him). A great tee shot, followed by a slightly chunky hybrid and a thin 8 iron over the back of the green. From there, he hits a really deft little pitch to 6-8 feet, and rolls in the bogey putt.

I'm not sure there's a better description of the XTD Tours than "something to play and grow into at the same time." If Ernie Els played them, I'm not expecting to ever outgrow them. And yet even at my 15-handicap level, I find them very playable.

Those are my irons (unless the PING G700 review knocks them out of the bag). Great clubs.

Just got my Evnroll ER6, in black, 34". Early results on the basement putting green have been very promising. Should get it to the course this week.

At one point, each of us has held (or will hold) that one putter that was meant for us, the one that, if we bagged it, would have made us virtually invincible on the greens. And each of us rolled a putt with it, watched it lip out hard, and put that putter back on the rack in disgust. And the golf gods chortled.

Woohoo! I just bought myself a black Evnroll ER6! Used today's eBay coupon (PERFECTDAY) for 15%. Looks to be in pristine condition, shipped for just under $250. Now to sell a bunch of sticks from the basement to cover that cost

Related: if you take 5 minutes to read a 3 foot putt that you have to make, you will certainly miss it. If you hit the same 3 foot putt while walking, hitting the ball backwards between your legs with the backside of the putter, you will make it virtually every time.

Do you have a database that generates similes for you? No one on this forum makes me laugh at more random lines than yours. Good stuff!

Jon Sherman of the website Practical Golf (a good read, one I recommend) was running a contest last week to get one of his new hats. I got picked :-) It arrived today, and I'm probably going to be fighting my son for possession of it.

Corollary: their will be no relationship between a great range session and the round that follows.

Now, here's the broader question, based on the responses so far: are the golf gods actively malicious, inflicting pain for their own enjoyment? Or are they moderately benevolent, teaching us character through hardship?

Related: if you wait for the green to clear, you'll chunk the ensuing shot. If you don't, you'll hit the shot of your life into the group ahead of you.

This is precisely what compelled me to start this thread. Over in the "shot of the day" thread, I wrote about the hole out I had today from 140, in the midst of a round when I could barely hit the ball at all. https://forum.mygolfspy.com/index.php?/topic/21462-What-was-your-“Shot-of-the-Day”?#entry428049

While a Rock Flite is virtually impossible to lose. Which creates a paradox: if you can't lose a Rock Flite, how are the woods full of them? :-)

As a pastor, good theology is really important to me. But the golf course is a bit of an exception. While my confession says that I believe in one true God, I also kinda believe in the golf gods. (Don't tell my congregation.) So I thought it would be good here to compile the doctrine of the golf gods. What are things that we know about them? With any luck, we'll have some substantive disagreements about the doctrine of the golf gods, forcing us to form golf denominations :-) I'll start. 1. The most fundamental truth of the golf gods is this: they will always punish hubris. Any comment about having solved this game, or any aspect of this game, will be punished, often severely. There are lots of subpoints to this point, but this is foundational. 2. The golf gods will always permit the golfer having an abysmal round one fantastic shot. This keeps golfers coming back, allowing the golf gods to torment them more later. OK, add yours! What do know about the golf gods and their activities?

Following our men's league round (which I lost my part of, playing pretty poorly), my partner insisted we enter the two-man best ball competition for the back nine. Unlike me, my teammate is actually good at golf. My hope was that we'd use three of my holes, and I'm counting ties as my holes :-) We tied the first two (bogey/par), so I was feeling OK. And then I entirely lost the ability to play golf. Repeated shanks. Popping up drives. Two holes in which I just pocketed my ball. I couldn't have been more worthless as a teammate. We get to 17, a very short downhill 275-yard par 4. I top/pull my drive off the inside of the hosel, about 40 yards into the rough under a tree. Attempt to hit a low hook under the tree, topped it again, back into the fairway. Now looking at about 140 to the hole. Pulled my 8, took a good practice swing, and hit the shot. Immediately I knew it was good contact on the right line. One hop, into the hole. Got to see the whole thing. It's the longest hole-out I've ever had, and a birdie on the scorecard on a day I wasn't contributing anything. My partner was down by the green (where his drive was) and watched it go in. What a crazy, nutty game.

If there was a hall of fame for pictures to disturb OCD golfers, this would be in it

Current score, garage windows broken by golf balls: Me: 1 My son: 1

Not so much something I'm thinking about, but something my son is convinced I need to buy him: this box set of Rickie Fowler clubs. I'd love nothing more than to do it, but I'll be honest: it's hard to do it (at $200) when he leaves his clubs around the yard, occasionally drags them across asphalt, etc. Maybe when he's 8, not 5 :-)

Only bumping this thread because I'm looking for an excuse to post swing videos of my son We've been out a few times this year. Following the guidelines from US Kids Golf (http://www.uskidsgolf.com/tournaments/local/course-setup), I've set up an ~1,100 yard course for Kirke. He's shooting bogey golf pretty consistently now at age 5. Right now, he's been beating me more than I'm beating him

The low temp here on Saturday was in the low 40s. Coats were shed as the morning went on, though.

Responding to my own post here, but I uploaded videos of each of the boys getting up and down. First, the three-year-old: And then the five-year-old:

Spent the morning with my 3 and 5 year old boys, putting and chipping on the practice green. Then we played three holes together. Guys, this is the best.