What Speed Held Actually Measures, Rung By Rung

I was not being difficult. A ball speed figure with no surface attached to it is roughly as informative as a temperature with no location. The number is real, it was genuinely measured, and on its own it will not help you choose anything, because the club you are trying to choose has to work on more than one kind of ground.

So this shop does not record ball speed as a number. It records it as a ratio, four times, and calls the result speed held. What follows is what that means in practice and what the shape of the four figures tells us once they are written down.

The denominator is you, this morning

Every ladder starts on the first rung, which is mown fairway turf cut to about half an inch and watered normally. Five swings, average the ball speed, and that average becomes one hundred percent. Not one hundred percent of anything universal. One hundred percent of what you produced in this hour, with this club, in this weather, with this ball.

That is the entire trick and it is not a clever one. Because everything afterwards is expressed as a fraction of that morning's own baseline, all the variables people usually argue about drop out. It stops mattering whether you woke up stiff, whether it is ninety-eight degrees, whether you are playing a premium ball or a range rock. Those things move the baseline and the fractions stay comparable.

A ratio survives a bad day. An absolute number does not, which is why an absolute number recorded indoors in February has nothing useful to say about a club you will use in August.

Then the ground stops helping

Rung two is bare valley ground, kept thin and unwatered from June. Rung three is a kikuyu collar. Rung four is rough grown out and pressed down so the ball nests rather than perches. Same club, same ball, five swings each, all inside about twenty minutes so that fatigue and weather stay roughly constant.

What comes back is four percentages. A typical mid iron with a moderately wide sole, hit by a player of moderate skill, produces something in the region of one hundred, ninety-six, ninety-three and eighty-four. Those are not good numbers or bad numbers. They are the shape of a normal decline.

Look at the first row and the third. On a mat, or on rung one alone, all three of those clubs would have produced an indistinguishable result and the player would have picked whichever one looked nicest at address. On the full ladder they are three genuinely different tools, and which one is correct depends on where this particular golfer's ball actually finishes.

The drop between rungs matters more than the endpoint

The instinct is to look at the fourth column and take the biggest number. That instinct is wrong often enough that it is worth stating plainly: the fourth column decides ties, it does not decide first choices. Nayeli has been arguing this at me for a decade and she is largely right.

Most golfers hit the fourth rung four or five times a round. They hit something resembling the first and second rungs thirty times. A club that gives up six points between rung one and rung two is losing you speed on the shots you actually hit, and the fact that it holds up better in deep grass is not adequate compensation.

What we look at first, then, is the gap between rungs one and two. That is the honest fairway number in a valley where fairways are hard for five months of the year. The third row above loses eight points there, which for a player who mostly finds short grass is a bad trade even though the last column is the best of the three.

Where the steep drop usually is

People assume the biggest fall is between rung three and rung four, and for a small minority it is. Far more often, in this part of California, the steepest single step is between rung two and rung three: the move from bare ground to the kikuyu collar. Bare ground punishes bounce, the collar punishes hosel design, and most club heads are more vulnerable to the second problem than to the first.

That step has its own note in this journal and I will not repeat it here beyond saying that the speed you lose off a collar is usually a symptom rather than a cause. The face has already turned. The speed reading is just the receipt.

Five swings, not one, and never eight

Five is the number and it was arrived at by being wrong twice. Three swings produce averages that swing wildly on one poor strike. Eight or ten produce beautiful averages and a tired golfer, and by the fourth candidate on the fourth rung you are no longer measuring the club at all.

We also do not discard outliers. There is a whole practice in this industry of throwing away the worst strike of a block on the grounds that it was not representative, and it is a habit that flatters everybody. If a head produces one genuinely awful result in five off bare ground, that is information about the head, not noise to be tidied away.

What to do with your own card

If you have been fitted here, the four percentages are on the front of your ladder card for the club that won and the club that came second. Two things are worth doing with them.

The first is comparing the rung one to rung two gap between the two clubs, because that is the difference you will feel most weeks and it is frequently smaller than people remember. The second is checking the fourth column against how often you are actually in that situation. If you keep a round or two of honest notes about where the ball finished, you may find the club you did not choose was the better one for the golf you play.

Come back and tell us if so. We will re-run the two of them and, if the card was wrong, we will say so and rebuild at cost. That has happened four times since 2011 and each one taught us more than the sessions that went smoothly.