Top golf wedges from popular golf club manufacturers.
When you’re out for a nice meal, choosing an appetizer, main course and dessert holds no particular fear. Any idiot can navigate a menu. The wine list — that’s another story.
Wedges are the wine of golf. They’re complex creatures. Vino’s body, balance and terroir (never mind legs, chewiness and other mumbo jumbo) have nothing on wedges’ bounce, grind and leading edge. The wine must pair with the meal; the wedges need to pair with each other and with the rest of the set. What’s more, a Bordeaux isn’t also occasionally asked to pull double duty as a Beaujolais or a Riesling, but a gap wedge might be opened or shut to function as a sand wedge or pitching wedge if the situation requires. Mon dieu!
With wines, you can call in help from a sommelier if it’s a fancy joint or just be like a friend of ours and automatically order the second-cheapest bottle. With wedges, you could (and, at some point, should) go to a custom fitter or your local pro — or, for the very online, as an increasing number of us are nowadays, give clubmakers’ handy selector tools a spin.
A box-ticking trip through many of the major makers’ offerings reveals that the material is consistent, but the approaches vary. Everyone asks essentially the same questions to get the same vital info but in a distinct and on-brand way. Just as each club designer makes wedges that look a bit different, so too do web designers and questionnaires. Take the time to take these tests — a few minutes each, no SAT flashbacks — and you’ll learn not only which wedges may well be right for you at each company but also maybe which brand you vibe with.
Ping, for example, was founded by an engineer, Karsten Solheim, and will forever be an engineering-centric company. Ping people are more likely to know their dot color than their blood type. (If you don’t get this, you are not yet a Ping person; it refers to the company’s color-coded club fitting system.) So, it’s little surprise that its WEBFIT selector requires you to first create an account and enter general body measurements, scoring info, ballflight trajectory and shot shape, etc. — engineers love data like, well, a vampire loves blood. (As noted in GOLF’s April issue, the company recently introduced a wedge app that will spit out two suggested grind options, which you can take to a Ping-authorized gear maestro for a drilled-down fitting.)
Ping’s WEBFIT wedge-fitting tool. Courtesy
Then come what one eventually grasps are the meat-and-potatoes issues for almost every wedge selector. These are: typical turf conditions you encounter; typical sand conditions you encounter; your full-swing angle of attack, as measured by your divot depth; how you like to use your wedges and how you sole them; and how much loft you’re comfortable using before you start getting twitchy.
