Listen up low-handicappers, we’re not telling you it’s time to replace that 4-iron with a hybrid — although if you want to, we won’t stop you — but it may be time to look at a more forgiving option than the rest of your set.
Enter this week’s winner, Russell Henley, who like many players on the PGA Tour uses a combo set of irons, swapping out the 4-iron that matches with the rest of his set for a more forgiving model.
Specifically, Henley employs a set of six-year-old first-generation Titleist T100 irons for his 5- through 9-iron (the vast majority of Titleist staffers use a Vokey pitching wedge instead of the set one), but within the last year, Henley decided to swap out the T100 4-iron for a more forgiving current generation T200 hollow-bodied 4-iron.
Now, this isn’t a move because Henley doesn’t hit his T100 4-iron well or high enough. He won his most recent PGA Tour title before this past weekend with the full set of T100s and had played with that setup until this season.
While we don’t have a window into exactly how Henley found the T200 4-iron to be a better fit, the more forgiving and faster design of the T200 likely led to an improvement in ball speed retention and Henley could more easily hit the ball speed window he’s looking for to create proper gapping. It’s also not only that Henley could hit the proper ball speed he needed — he could have accomplished that simply by strengthening the T100 4-iron — but he can hit it easier and more often.
Ideal gapping involves 5 mph ball speed differences throughout a set of clubs, so if the T200 4-iron was more consistently 5 mph faster than his T100 5-iron, it was a no-brainer to throw it in the bag.
Throwing a more forgiving long iron in the top of the set has been a growing trend on Tour for the last few years. Scottie Scheffler, Justin Thomas, Tom Kim, Rory McIlroy, Tommy Fleetwood all do it. Even Tiger Woods, in recent years, has removed his blade 3-iron and replaced it with a more forgiving hollow-bodied model.
These aren’t just driving irons either, this is all done to create better gapping throughout the whole bag.
So if you find yourself hitting your 4-iron and your 5-iron similar distances, try a more forgiving option like Henley and see if you can get to that optimal gapping.
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