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Old school? Miura’s all-forged ori­en­ta­tion is just one of many trends that are thor­oughly modern

There is no deny­ing the tide of tech­nol­ogy is car­ry­ing all to longer and higher, and per­haps straighter, if not truer of chip and putt—the equal­iz­ers. Yet when look­ing at the larger grid, a good amount of the buzz that’s charg­ing the equip­ment dia­logue has a big jolt of old fash­ioned tried-and-true run­ning clean through it. If seek­ing coa­lesc­ing trends in all the “Madi­son Avenue,” a num­ber jump out: The blade is not dead, cast rules, forg­ing is in growth mode, the con­sumer embrace of cus­tom fit­ting could be bet­tered by a bit more reach and man­u­fac­tur­ers are increas­ingly going GM, and hope­fully to greater success.

Soup to Nuts

Look­ing for a hot trend?  Inte­gra­tion is in, with more com­pa­nies embrac­ing a Chevy-to-Caddy-type ori­en­ta­tion to the show­room.  Look at stal­warts Ping and Titleist, for exam­ple.  One remains mid-and high-handicap friendly yet its stealth play is an iter­a­tion of the blade, of all things, a but­tery blend of tar­get seek­ing and an envi­able amount of assis­tance, and, heaven for­bid, there’s now a forg­ing in the line.  The other con­tin­ues to try to reach the mar­ket seg­ment that doesn’t receive free name-embroidered bags, even as it solidly remains the brand of sticks for sticks.

“We want to be able to pro­vide the per­fect set of irons for every type of golfer out there,” explains Sharon Park, man­ager of irons and wedge R&D at Cleve­land Golf, of her company’s reac­tion to what’s over­tak­ing much of the indus­try.  “Obvi­ously there is such a range of skills, and we want to make sure play­ers have the oppor­tu­nity to choose from among Cleve­land prod­ucts rather than being required to go some­where else.”

Take a look at Cleveland’s cat­a­log. The tour crowd can grab a wee manly blade in the CG1 Tour, the accom­plished and the aspir­ing can opt for vari­a­tions of the CG7 and CG16, and chops can cozy up to the HB3 hybrid irons.

So like oth­ers, Cleve­land can take play­ers from cradle-to-grave, so to speak.

For all the thun­der and light­ning that always emanates from Call­away, last year’s release of a game-improvement forg­ing was the company’s most strik­ing release, arguably, since the S2H2 con­cept was con­ceived back in golf’s Juras­sic period. The Dia­blo Forged slots in to serve the needs of a cus­tomer torn between the for­give­ness of the X-24 HOT and soon-to-be-released RAZR X clubs, and the “tour” forgings.

“We have a full range of irons for all play­ers now,” says Luke Williams, Call­away Golf’s direc­tor of inno­va­tion, address­ing playa­bil­ity fac­tors as well as the met­al­lur­gi­cal processes used. “His­tor­i­cally, we, and most of our com­peti­tors, tended not to have such vari­ety in the lineup. Most have gone or are going that direc­tion now. By tar­get­ing designs for spe­cific play­ers, with the mate­ri­als and tech­niques now at our dis­posal, we can offer that variety.”

Forg­ing Ahead

“Typ­i­cally our forged offer­ings have been our better-player irons, the irons that are sought out on tour, by club pros, and by other highly skilled play­ers.  Forg­ing has always had a ‘mean­ing’ for such play­ers, the look, the feel,” adds Williams. “The Dia­blo Forged was an effort to take forg­ing more toward the aver­age player.”

The for-America exten­sion of an immensely pop­u­lar club sold in Asia under Callaway’s Legacy sub-brand, the Dia­blo Forged did not reach this mar­ket with­out what Williams dubbed “some inter­nal debate,” essen­tially dri­ven by the much more wide­spread accep­tance of and appre­ci­a­tion for forged clubs in Asia than here, and that it might appear as “a bit more of a player’s club” than Amer­i­cans have come to expect from the com­pany. It’s here, and from the market’s reac­tion Call­away is “glad we did it.”

Like an NFL front line, golf club design is all about mov­ing weight around effec­tively.  There’s more sky’s-the-limit poten­tial when it comes to cast­ing, at least on a dollar-for-dollar invest­ment basis, and it is a less-expensive process over­all, which trans­lates well to sales, and as a result cast remains the alpha male of the mar­ket, par­tic­u­larly here in the states.

Con­versely, some of the buga­boos, deserved or not, asso­ci­ated with invest­ment cast­ing have gone by the way­side.  There was a time when the cognoscenti pointed to hot and dead spots in cast clubs, a marble-or-mush effect reput­edly endemic to the pro­ce­dure of pour­ing molten steel into an empty shell. Williams doesn’t believe cast clubs from the names in the game were ever truly incon­sis­tent, but acknowl­edges improve­ment: “There is no doubt the cast­ings of today are much bet­ter than they were 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.”

And there is the mat­ter of feel, one of the sup­pos­edly supe­rior traits of forged irons. Yet for all the improved tac­tile sen­sa­tion of a well-struck non-cast club, it is our ears that are pick­ing up the dis­tinc­tion between mate­ri­als and tech­niques, so that improved “feel” of a forg­ing is audi­tory satisfaction.

The suc­cess on tour of all-cast or mostly-cast club lines from the Pingss and Cleve­lands and Tay­lor Mades of the world belies the notion that the best play­ers in the world seek out sticks only of hammered-and-cut blocks of soft car­bon steel.

Yet forg­ing has its fans, as seen in so-called cast companies—Ping?!—embracing what’s long been con­sid­ered the mate­r­ial of choice for “play­ers,” greater num­bers of game-improvement forged mod­els enter­ing the mar­ket, and com­pa­nies such as Mizuno long feast­ing on a nearly exclu­sive diet of forged steel.

Then there is Miura Golf.

Kat­suhiro Miura got into the golf busi­ness in the late 1950s, and sev­eral decades later he estab­lished Miura Giken, or Miura Man­u­fac­tur­ing, where he began forg­ing what became a line of highly-sought-after niche irons. Far from a house­hold name on this side of the Pacific, Miura gained some­what sub rosa fame in the 1980s and ‘90s man­u­fac­tur­ing for the Asian mar­ket Miura-tagged clubs and also mod­els stamped with the names of other com­pa­nies, includ­ing some of the lead­ing retail brands, says the company’s vice pres­i­dent of North Amer­i­can oper­a­tions, Bill Holowaty. (Con­fi­den­tial­ity agree­ments limit what the com­pany can dis­close.)  See­ing its acclaim rise, the com­pany now pro­duces clubs only under its name.

Based near Osaka, the heart of the steel indus­try in Japan, and where samu­rai swords were first man­u­fac­tured, Holowaty says, it is not sur­pris­ing that Miura makes only forged irons (and wedges) using a num­ber of pro­pri­etary processes includ­ing a “spin­forg­ing” process for attach­ing milled and pre-drilled indi­vid­ual hosels to faces that have a grain struc­ture that the com­pany claims is the best in the indus­try.  Holowaty equates the grain of the steel, if seen under mag­ni­fi­ca­tion, to a “glass jar filed up with sand, while other processes would show mar­bles and grains with small voids and spaces.”

Bet­ter Arrows Still Need Bet­ter Indians

The he said/she said of man­u­fac­tur­ing claims notwith­stand­ing, Miura’s love affair with the process of forg­ing lies in more than the art of the craft.

“Mr Miura’s feel­ing on who can play a forged golf club and what a forged golf club deliv­ers is such that he believes there is tal­ent in every golfer.  He believes that forged clubs allow that tal­ent to come to the sur­face. The level of per­for­mance, the level of feed­back you get from the iron may not be totally real­ized [by all play­ers], but there cer­tainly is a ben­e­fit to it.  His feel­ing is any­one can play a forged club.”

Holowaty holds that a forged club, in Miura’s expe­ri­ence, will close to square more effi­ciently than a cast club, and for all the play­ers out there chan­nel­ing Trevino or Furyk, the impact posi­tion is where pure or putrid is realized.

Take a blade (cast or forged): Those who play ‘em know there isn’t as much wig­gle room when it comes to con­tact and result, and that’s exactly what many are look­ing for, the idea being equip­ment can help—or force—us to improve when we aren’t falsely assured by some­thing that looks like a spat­ula with more for­give­ness than grandma.  Now add another para­me­ter.  The pleas­ing and telling forged “feel” pro­vides another type of feed­back at impact, and it can turn in an instant; a forged club can be a highly sen­sory and effec­tive instruc­tional tool on hits both solid and missed. (And let’s be hon­est, as the tech­nol­ogy that allows weight to be moved all about the club­face is nearly as applic­a­ble to the process of forg­ing, a forged Frisbee-on-a-stick is pos­si­ble.)  So the moral of the story is that clubs that are made, how­ever they are made, to mask less can teach us more, or at least some of us.  As Callaway’s Williams contends:

“Are you some­one who is more inclined to look to equip­ment for improve­ment, or are you on the other end of the spec­trum, the player who has used the same clubs for 20 years and who thinks improve­ment is some­thing that comes through prac­tice and instruction?”

Randy Henry has spent decades work­ing both sides of the player-improvement game.  Henry is the founder of Henry-Griffitts, like Miura a long-time niche-sized provider of equip­ment, albeit cast not forged irons.  Henry-Griffitts has had pro­fes­sional play­ers in its sta­ble over the years—Peter Jacob­sen for one—but the cor­po­rate focus remains recre­ational play­ers and get­ting well designed, fairly priced and per­haps above all else prop­erly fit­ted sticks in their hands.

Henry also is a teach­ing pro.

“With my back­ground, I have a dif­fer­ent point of view. The swing is always a part of select­ing and being fit­ted to equip­ment.  It is not just the club and the player.  When we fit some­one he [or she] will have an idea about that equip­ment and the swing.  You can’t go in and con­demn peo­ple to who they are; you need to fit them to who they can become.”

Not every­one has the time or the incli­na­tion to find the answers in the dirt, a la Hogan.  Jobs, fam­ily, other interests—no one seek­ing to improve should avoid a fit­ting sim­ply because Jim McLean’s not on speed dial. (See­ing your local PGA or LPGA teach­ing pro is a good alter­na­tive, however.)

The big man­u­fac­tur­ers are not blind to the notion, even if all of their fit­ters and retail accounts don’t sport a sta­ble of PGA of Amer­ica Class A instruc­tors in house.  Williams says Call­away does fit with a nod toward why and how the per­son being fit­ted hits the ball, apart from the sheer mechan­ics of body dimen­sions relat­ing to some dis­crete shaft length and lie angle.

Williams offers another piece of advice—be hon­est.  If you can’t or won’t spend the time on the range, under the watch­ful eye of an instruc­tor, you might need to lean more toward a rad­i­cal fit solu­tion to help com­pen­sate for a bread-tie-length back­swing and Lizzie Borden-like move from the top.  (I once under­went an OEM fit­ting and the imme­di­ate “solu­tion” was to put me in exces­sively long and upright irons as a means to com­pen­sate for phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions and how they played out in my swing.  I went more stan­dard in set up—length and lie in keep­ing with my sta­tic measurements—and have been work­ing on flex­i­bil­ity and range time.)

“The ‘best’ play­ers I play with, what­ever the hand­i­cap, are those who are most hon­est with them­selves,” he advises. “And that’s the key to a good fit­ting.  Be hon­est about your­self, your phys­i­cal abil­i­ties, your time, and set your expec­ta­tions at a rea­son­able level, then relay that to the fitter.”

Hon­esty?  We are talk­ing golf, are we not?

Ah, go ahead, give it a try.  And if you lapse, the next iter­a­tion of the equip­ment cure-alls debuts next month.