Equipment Insider: Kuchar likes classic look of no-offset

text size

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.

Check out more of Adam Barr's equipment coverage at AdamBarrGolfGearGuide.com.

Matt Kuchar, 1997 U.S. Amateur champion, came onto the PGA TOUR with great expectations. He won the 2002 The Honda Classic...and then the game bashed him around a bit. Kuchar did not hoist a regular PGA TOUR trophy again for more than seven years.

In between, he missed the cut in six of nine regular PGA TOUR starts in 2006, but finished tenth on the Nationwide Tour money list to get his card back for 2007. Kuchar continued to climb back to where he was expected to be, winning at Turning Stone in 2009.

Now, it seems, he is about to summit, as the mountain climbers say. His win at The Barclays, the third in his career, makes him an odds-on FedEx Cup favorite. Looking back at the wilderness he has climbed out of, Kuchar no doubt remembers some fine-tuning of his game, when he became a player with more dimensions than just Young Phenom.

Kuchar's bag reflects that maturity as well. When we spoke to him in Canada, Kuchar expressed his suspicion (always with a smile, of course) of too much offset in his irons. That opinion was based on his self-knowledge, and it paid off on the playoff hole at Baraclays, the par-4 18th.

With 192 yards to go out of the left rough, ball just visible, Kuchar dropped a Bridgestone J38 7-iron on it with an almost chunky sound. But the resulting shot was sublime: off the backstop-slope back right on 18, rolling in and out of the collar in a reverse J-hook that ended at tap-in-birdie range. Hand over the trophy.

Those J38s may not be very offset, but they do have a cavity back -- so for Kuchar, it was a matter of choosing the right game improvement feature for his swing and avoiding features he didn't need. A more offset club may have yielded a death-yank way left of the green.

In My Bag: Matt Kuchar

Driver: Bridgestone J38 prototype, 10.5 degrees Driver shaft: Graphite Design Tour MD-6S shaft 3-wood: our Edge Exotics CB2, 16.5 degrees Irons: Bridgestone J38 cavity back Iron shafts: Aerotech SteelFiber i95 Ball: Bridgestone B330-S

The preference for classic looks may also explain Kuchar's driver choice, the Bridgestone J38 prototype. At 435cc, its head is essentially a more compact version of the 460cc model already on the market. Kuchar isn't the first pro to edge toward the smaller look; there are even some 390cc drivers floating around practice ranges.

A this tournament, Kuchar didn't burn up the driving stats: he was 34th in the field for distance (277.6 yards average) and T30 for accuracy (64.3 percent of his fairways). But he kept it on the relevant parts of a tough, tree-lined northeastern style golf course, which is an accomplishment in itself.

As for wedges, it's typical (and always very personal) for players to have the lofts bent a degree or two from the club's manufactured specification. Only one of Kuchar's wedges went into his bag in the same condition it came out of the box: the Bridgestone J38 52-degree. His J38 58-degree was bent a little stronger, to a 57. But his lob, a 60-degree as-manufactured from Fourteen Golf, has been bent way up to 62-degrees for some serious pop-up-ability. Notice, though, that Matt's gaps are consistent: five degrees from one wedge to the next.

CLEARED FOR TAKEOFF: Somehow it just fits that Bernhard Langer won an airplane company's tournament with an aerodynamic driver. Langer continued his torrid Champions Tour pace (five wins) with a victory at the Boeing Classic, thanks in large part to a good driving performance with his Speedline driver from Adams Golf. He only averaged 270.2 yards off the tee (52nd in the field), but he hit 81 percent of his fairways (T9), and we all know how easy the game gets from there.

The Speedline is the father of a four-driver product line that Adams developed using wind-tunnel technology. The airflow against and around the head on the way to the ball is optimized to increase clubhead speed and all the distance and accuracy advantages that come with that, Adams says. Other companies in the industry have followed suit, making aerodynamic drivers one of the big equipment stories of 2010.