Lee Trevino famously said that golfers stuck in a thunderstorm should hold up a 1-iron.
Why?
“Because even God can’t hit a 1-iron,” he said.
Over the last 30 years, amateurs and PGA Tour pros alike have taken note, because there are much easier-to-use alternatives to long irons.
Today, 1-iron usage is a unicorn on the PGA Tour, replaced by 5-woods, 7-woods and hybrids. Even with the advent of hollow-bodied iron designs and more specifically designed driving irons that have kept 2- and 3-irons alive, pros seem to draw the line once an iron gets stronger than 17 degrees.
But not Ben An.
An won the DP World Tour and Korean PGA Tour’s Genesis Championship over the weekend in a playoff. The win will probably be best remembered for the driver off the deck he drilled on the 15th hole from 290 yards to within 10 feet when he was trailing by two, or his emotional celebration with his grandmother, who watched him win for the first time in their homeland.
But gear junkies might have noticed something else: Not only is An one of the few pros still carrying a 1-iron, but it’s also the longest club in his bag, other than his driver. He doesn’t have a fairway wood, which explains why he needed to hit driver into 15.
The 16-degree Titleist U505 driving iron has been in An’s bag since the Valspar Championship in March 2023; adding the club to An’s arsenal was an idea cooked up by An; his swing coach, Sean Foley; and JJ Van Wezenbeeck, Titleist’s senior director of player promotions. Van Wezenbeeck said they had been trying everything to find An a secondary option off the tee from strong-lofted 3-woods to high-lofted fairway woods.
Pro wins tearfully on home soil, then shares touching moment with Grandma
“We kind of had run the gamut with Ben,” Van Wezenbeeck told GOLF.com. “He’s such an elite iron player that — the way he hits a fairway wood, he’s really up on it on a driver. But an iron, he really does a great job of controlling the face and compressing it. So his coach Sean Foley kinda looked at me and said, ‘We need something.'”
That’s when Van Wezenbeeck asked the pair if they were open to “anything.”
Like, say, a U505 1-iron.
The U505 is not the daunting blade 1-iron of yesteryear. As Van Wezenbeeck describes it, it’s an iron with more hybrid-like properties. It has a flat face, like an iron, but like a hybrid, it has a wide sole and low center of gravity. That low CG is helped by heel and toe tungsten weights, creating a higher MOI.
Although Van Wezenbeeck said the range at Valspar runs slightly downhill, An and Foley’s attention was piqued when they saw 265-yard carries out of the gate. The club, with a few tweaks here and there — including a switch to 41-inch Graphite Design Tour AD VF 95 X shaft before the Paris Olympics — has been in An’s bag ever since.
“I hit it high enough, I have enough speed, I have enough spin rates,” An said in a Titleist YouTube video earlier this year, “so why not try to build that iron that has really low loft, so I can hit it straighter off the tee? Because that’s the whole purpose of using the 3-wood.
“A lot of people are surprised by how high I can hit this one, and it’s been a great club off of the tee. I can hit it low, maybe 20, 30 feet off the ground up to like 120 feet off the ground.”
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Surprisingly, An’s 1-iron model isn’t reserved only for the game’s elite or those who have access. The U505 1-iron is actually a retail offering from Titleist.
“During the testing with Tour players were like, Hey, this is this is kind of stepping over that threshold for that player that really doesn’t — or has scar tissue from playing a hybrid 10 years ago when they didn’t have the CG adjustability that we do today, and said I’m looking for something more iron-like,” Van Wezenbeeck said. “Should we make this down to 16 degrees? And as we look at the loft progressions, we were like, ‘That’s a 1-iron.’
“We have other players at maybe an Open Championship that will test this golf club under the right conditions.”
Among them: C.T. Pan, who will swap out his 7-wood for aU505 1-iron, contingent upon his needs.
While it might not be your grandpa’s blade, the 1-iron is alive and well in professional golf.
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