Equipment Insider: Furyk plays to strengths throughout the bag
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.
The imperturbable Jim Furyk didn't lose emotional control Sunday. He released it.
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And he earned the right. Three wins this year plus the FedExCup -- essentially welded to the Tour Championship trophy -- thanks to Furyk's good play. The only thing that could have made his Sunday better was a win by his beloved Steelers.
Oh yeah. That happened too.
It has been a season of just about everything going quietly right for one of the most quiet, thoughtful guys on TOUR, a man with lots of supporters and virtually no enemies. Furyk won the Transitions Championship in Tampa and the Verizon Heritage at Hilton Head without much fanfare, clearly saving the celebration for the big score at East Lake.
Even momentary misfortune couldn't derail him. Just weeks ago, Furyk's drained cell phone battery wouldn't power his alarm. He overslept and missed his pro-am tee time, making him ineligible for the first playoff event, The Barclays, as the TOUR's rules then required. He might have been in the top 5 coming into THE TOUR Championship had he not gotten the unwanted extra z's. But instead of bemoaning his fate, Furyk just played harder.
One Z he did want was his golf ball, the Srixon Z Star X. It has fairly high compression for a tour ball, designed to get the most out of driver swing speeds above 105 mph. That fits Furyk's view of his strengths -- he has admitted that length is not the primary feature of his game, so a hot core could retain crucial yardage. (At East Lake, Furyk's average driving distance was 290.4 yards, 22nd in the field.) The cover on the X is a bit firmer than some tour balls, but still soft enough to get some short game work done.
| In My Bag: Jim Furyk | |||||||
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Speaking of which, the wedges are one of the few regions of Furyk's bag that have changed since Hilton Head. In the off week between BMW and the Tour Championship, Furyk had a look at some Callaway wedges, and asked a tour rep from that company to build him a 60-degree JAWS model, known for its up-to-the-limit groove aggressiveness. Combined with the existing Cleveland wedges in his bag, the strategy worked. Furyk didn't miss a sand save all week.
Fortunately, he didn't have to worry about it too often. Furyk hit nearly three-quarters of his greens in regulation, tied for the lead in the field. Helping him do this were Z-TX irons, forged cavity back clubs that seek to blend the best advantages from both schools of thought. The forging element attracts skilled players who grew up with clubs made that way, but the cavity back adds a measure of forgiveness. One thing that's often forgotten about cavities is, they're variable. Srixon describes the cavity back on its Z-TX as "slight," meaning that by not going too deep with it, there's no risk of the sole of the club being too wide and interfering with the crisp contact preferred by those who have mastered hitting down on the ball.
The Cleveland Launcher hybrid that Furyk had at Hilton Head was still in the bag at East Lake. But Furyk's experience with it in the post-rain section of the final round is instructive: players have to factor in not only equipment's strengths, but occasionally limitations, as conditions change.
"My hybrid was a tendency in wet weather to catch some jumpers," Furyk said after the final round. "It's like a flier lie out of the rough almost even when it's in the fairway. It lacks a lot of spin and the ball goes a long way. It came in handy on 15 because I was in between a hybrid and a 3-wood, and I told Mike ["Fluff" Cowan, his caddie], I catch a little jumper here, this thing flies, I might land on the green, and it did."
Did I say limitation? When you know what your gear can do and when, there seems to be no such thing for Jim Furyk.
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