With this week’s Cognizant Classic, the PGA Tour has departed its early season West Coast swing and landed in the Southeast for the yearly Florida swing.
That also means a departure from cool-season grasses like rye, bent and poa and a return to Bermuda grass like the pros are finding this week at PGA National.
On this week’s episode of “Fully Equipped,” co-host Kris McCormack, who is in Palm Beach Gardens at the Cognizant, reported back to fellow co-host Wadeh Maroun on the changes many pros were making this week to account for the change in grass. Specifically, with wedge grinds.
McCormack said a lot of PGA Tour veterans are already familiar with what to do and it often necessitates going up in bounce and using more full-soled wedges from sandy Bermuda lies.
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“It’s kind of cool, going around the practice green and also going out on the golf course and watching the creativity that some of these players have with their short game and with their wedges,” he said. “And I just look in envy and wish that I could pull off some of the shots that these guys hit.”
Maroun pointed out that it’s easier for pros to get dialed since they have tour trucks on-site at every event until Wednesday, and McCormack added that the grinding wheels were running hot this week with players adjusting the soles of their wedges.
“Just working on wedge shapes, working on sole grinds and taking a little bit of material off, shaping the leading edge, shaping the trailing edge, getting the heel relief right,” McCormack said. “Every truck that I went on was just humming with wedges. And I mean, that’s pretty typical starting the Florida swing.”
And for most of these adjustments — 90 percent McCormack guessed — these aren’t stock changes. They are as-needed changes.
“They’ll literally have a caddie come in or the tour rep will come in and they’ll just, ‘Oh yeah, I need to take a little bit more off the heel,'” McCormack said. “‘Or I need to take some off the leading edge or need to take some off the trailing edge.’ Or this particular player likes to hit more dead-handed shots with a way-open face while they kind of lower the toe into the ground.
“You look at some of these wedges after they come off of the wheel and it’s just like, ‘Wow! Like that’s a that’s an aggressive angle,’ or like, ‘Yeah, I’ve never seen anything like that from a grind perspective,’ and it goes right in the bag.”
For more from McCormack and Maroun, listen to the full episode of GOLF’s “Fully Equipped” here or watch it below.
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