Welcome to Wall-to-Wall Equipment, the weekly gear wrap-up in which GOLF equipment editor Jonathan Wall takes you through the latest trends, rumors and breaking news.
Pure perfection
One shot.
That’s all it took for Bryson DeChambeau to go from lost to angry during the week of the Open Championship. Only DeChambeau wasn’t situated on the range at Royal Liverpool when he had this revelation. He was roughly 70 minutes from the course at clubfitting center Scottsdale Golf, hammering balls in an indoor hitting bay after spending six hours taking his clubs apart to solve a question that’s confounded DeChambeau for nearly five years.
How does one of the fastest players in golf regain some semblance of control on the course?
To understand how DeChambeau ended up here, it’s best to start at the moment when everything changed. In the aftermath of an opening-round 74 at the Open Championship, DeChambeau made a call to Peter Lord, director of Professional Golf Europe and Vega Golf, to see if he could help make sense of his equipment.
“It’s unusual to get a call on the day of the tournament instead of a Monday or Tuesday,” Lord told GOLF.com. “Bryson said he needed help, that he’d tried everything over the last five years — swing-wise, pressure points on his grips and hands — except for the one he’d stopped doing years ago.”
For whatever reason, DeChambeau had gone away from having his clubs undergo a process known as “puring” in recent years, whereby each shaft is analyzed using a shaft analysis machine from SST Pure (Strategic Shaft Technology and Plane of Uniform Repeatability) to find the most stable orientation.
Due to manufacturing tolerances, SST Pure founder Dick Weiss started to notice that not all golf shafts were perfectly round or symmetrical, and even the smallest imperfections — be it wall thickness, straightness or roundness — could cause variations in how one shaft performed versus another within the same model family.
A shaft with the incorrect orientation, when assembled, might release too much or not enough at impact compared to what it’s designed to do. The goal behind the SST Pure machine is to make sure each shaft bends on a neutral axis, which can lead to tighter dispersions and more consistency throughout the set.
While it’s not widely publicized, countless pros have put their clubs through the SST Pure process over the years, including Tiger Woods, Justin Thomas, Jason Day, Dustin Johnson and DeChambeau. When asked why more golfers don’t “pure” their clubs, Lord used an analogy he picked up from Weiss to hammer home the benefits SST Pure provides.
“It’s like if you go to get new tires on your car,” Lord said. “If they don’t balance them, you’ll be driving home bouncing around and the steering wheel will be vibrating. It’s like balancing for your golf shafts. It helps them perform like they should be performing.
SST Pure
“It’s taken me this long to think why have I not done this,” he continued. “Of all the sleepless nights I’ve had, why didn’t I think about doing this? I haven’t been able to hit this shot for 5 years.”
The shot he was referring to was a draw that launched at 13 degrees and bent 20 yards left-to-right with 1,600 RPMs of spin. The end result was 330-340 yards of carry. These were numbers DeChanbeau admitted he wasn’t able to consistently achieve at the time because he feared the ball might nosedive left at a moment’s notice. In the end, DeChambeau saw an uptick in dispersion and consistency with all of the clubs in his bag, leading him to believe he’d made the right decision to have the clubs torn apart and rebuilt.
Lord cautioned DeChambeau that it might take time for him to get back to where he could go all-out with each club in the bag. This was not an overnight fix. But even early on Lord saw things were starting to improve.
“The next day out he was four shots better than the previous day to make the cut,” Lord said. “He didn’t do anything amazing the next two days, but you could see a difference in where he was having his misses. It was bubbling around in the background.”
One week later, DeChambeau shot 58 at a LIV event and heaped praise on a new Krank driver he recently added to the bag. The driver has always been one of the most important clubs in DeChambeau’s bag, but what ultimately makes the former U.S. Open champion one of the most feared golfers on the planet is when he’s able to tighten up his misses, something he’s been able to do with the help of SST Pure.
“The change from then to shooting 58 — I can’t explain the difference,” Lord said. “This is someone who got in my car on Thursday and said he didn’t know where the ball was going. Outside of the driver head, nothing else changed.”
Putter update
Putter changes for Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler produced a mixed bag in Memphis. McIlroy, who went to a Scotty Cameron Phantom 5.5 mallet, ranked 23rd in SG: Putting and finished one shot back of eventual winner Lucas Gloves. (A mid-tournament alteration to the putter turned out to be the bigger story.)
For Scheffler, things didn’t seem to click with TaylorMade’s Spider Tour X SS Proto putter. He ranked 62nd in SG: Putting for the week, losing 2.953 strokes to the field, en route to a T31 finish.
