Equipment Insider: Els wins with 'Mack Daddy' grooves

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Each week in the Equipment Insider, Adam Barr -- PGATOUR.COM's equipment columnist -- will provide breaking news, notes and analysis focused on PGA TOUR players. Adam will also appear in video segments for PGATOUR.COM.

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Wait, weren't we here just two weeks ago? Ernie Els rode the same Callaway bag to victory at the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by MasterCard that he did at the World Golf Championships-CA Championship at Doral 15 days earlier. The driver was the Callaway FT Tour, which has now been in the bags of four straight PGA TOUR winners -- but just three actual bags: Els at Doral, Derek Lamely in Puerto Rico, Jim Furyk at the Transitions -- and Els again at Bay Hill.

Els was fourth in the field in putts per green in regulation with 1.68 and T9 in putts per round with an average of 28. That kind of solid performance will certainly help going into the toughest putting test of the year, the Masters, next week. Ernie's wand of choice lately has been the Odyssey White Ice #5 model, whose face insert has a hard inner layer for consistent distance control. The outer layer has a rough texture to enhance the sound when face meets ball. And the friction gets the forward roll started sooner, preventing the kind of skidding that can knock a putt off course, Odyssey designers say.

Ernie used Callaway X-Forged wedges, designed by short-game genius Roger Cleveland. The grooves, which of course conform to the new condition of competition, are nonetheless "aggressively sized," as Callaway puts it. Those grooves have been getting a lot of attention for how well they have been spinning the ball on tour. The version of those grooves available to recreational players, who are unconstrained by the new wedge rules until at least 2024, are even more aggressive. They got the informal moniker "Mack Daddy," after it became clear that Phil Mickelson liked them in testing; he may even get credit for coming up with the nickname. In any event, it has stuck.

Callaway X-Forged wedge

Cleveland is also proud of the C-grind sole in these new wedges, which involves shaving some of the heel and a little of the toe away, so the back of the sole describes a letter "C" when viewed from the heel. The grind, which is standard on all X-Forged wedges, is something players often have done post-production anyway. The heel relief allows them to open the face way up, and from there they create whole catalogs of shots to escape from greenside annoyances. Cleveland's time in the Callaway tour van over the years convinced him that the C-grind should be there from the start.

About the only player with as much momentum as Els is Fred Couples, who in three Champions Tour starts has won 'em all and never shot more than 68 doing it. This is great news for Bridgestone, whose banner Couples carries, especially since he will play the Masters, where he won in 1992. Talking to people close to Bridgestone's U.S. operations (it's part of the massive Japanese rubber and industrial products company), you get the idea that they feel anything could happen, even with Couples playing his first Masters since he turned 50.

But let's not make too much of this age thing. The ball Couples plays, a Bridgestone B330, is designed to work best for players who move the driver at 112 mph -- or more. So clearly Fred's easy move actually packs a substantial portion of controlled violence.

Like many tour-level balls, the B330 is really a little machine, with plenty of moving parts -- they just all move in the same direction. The core, where the power comes from, is naturally a secret rubber recipe, but Bridgestone says it gives high initial velocity while reducing distance-robbing driver spin. An inner mantle surrounds that core; it transfers power. The outer mantle comes next, and its job is to provide a firm stage for starting the spin that skilled players use to work approach shots. Finally, like many tour balls, this one has a thin urethane cover, which gives the kind of click and feel tour players prefer, Bridgestone says.