Ryan Moore Stole My Idea!

Ok, so it wasn’t really my idea, but I’ve thought about doing it for years. People thought I was just nuts, but it makes perfect sense to me. PGA Tour star Ryan Moore seems to think so also. Moore debued a new set of forged irons this week at the SBS Championship that don’t have number designations. Instead, all his irons have the loft figure stamped on the bottom. So instead of a 5 iron, he has a club that is stamped with “30”. His set starts with a 60 degree lob wedge, and goes down through the irons in 5 degree increments. Most iron set have 4 degree increments. For Moore, the larger variance in lofts allows him to fill some distance gaps, especially with the shorter irons. By this formula for instance, his pitching wedge is 50 degrees, and the nine iron has 45 degrees of loft. Most modern sets have a pitching wedge and nine iron with 46 to 48 and 42 to 44 degrees, respectively. “Now I have a 125-yard club,” Moore said. “That is a great number to have a nice, full swing at it. Then I have a 140-yard club, instead of having a gap from 115 yards to about 135 or 140, then 150.”

As a pretty long hitter myself, I’ve always struggled with a large distance gap between my pitching wedge and sand wedge. I proposed to a few friends an idea a while back to get a set with 5 degree gaps, but none existed and bending a set off the rack would change the bounce angles, and the sole grind wouldn’t work the way the club maker intended. Perhaps now I have found my solution! Instead of reaching for a seven or eight iron for that 175 yard par three, I’ll reach for my “40” or “35”!

Ryan Moore recently became part owner of an up and coming golf equipment company called Scratch Golf. I’ve admired their clubs for some time and they have a pretty good following on the various tours for their butter soft feel and huge variety of sole grinds. With the addition of hall of fame and master clubmaker Don White, Scratch Golf is poised to be one of the premier custom shops in the world. It also appears Moore himself has undergone a bit of an image change since joining Scratch Golf. I’ve given him a hard time in the past about his skater bum off the street wardrobe choices, but this week I have noticed him wearing a normal baseball cap and more color. He is still wearing those spikeless skater style shoes, but at least in the third round at Kapalua he isn’t wearing those drab dirty gray slacks that are a sized too small and he even managed to shave! Progress!

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