When you think of choosing your golf equipment so many brands come to mind. Companies like Titleist, Taylormade, Callaway, and Nike to just name a few, put out clubs each and every year and golfers have more choices than they have ever dreamed of. However how does somebody get through all of the marketing and find the right equipment for them? Every company makes claims that they are the best for each golfer and as most of our readers know, The Hackers Paradise is here to rip through the marketing hype and be a site for consumers, by consumers. With that being said there are hundreds of companies out there that many golfers have never heard of and will most likely never get a chance to try. THP wants to make sure that the best options are known to our readers and that sometimes means smaller companies that are not as well known.
The Company
Bob Burns Golf has been around since about 1975 and is a family owned business. In its early years, Bob Burns Golf was a one-man operation dedicated, in part, to the repair, modification, and restoration of golf clubs—but also to instruction and, most notably, perhaps, to the manufacture of custom-made clubs, including woods cut and handcrafted from unfinished blocks of persimmon or laminated maple. By the turn of the century, Bob Burns Golf was designing and manufacturing its own lines of metal woods and contemporaneously engineered irons, wedges, and putters. And very shortly, Bob Burns’ life-long interests in custom club-making and teaching would come together in the No Bananas Drivers.
Bob Burns Golf contacted The Hackers Paradise and asked us to review their line of equipment. We happily obliged and they sent over a package containing:
1. The latest in the series of the No Bananas Driver
2. A single 5 iron
3. Unique putter that we were looking forward to testing.
Each club is slightly unique in design and we will go through each piece and our thoughts after some testing with 8-10 players.
First Impression & Looks
The UPS driver dropped off a package that you could not misake. The clubs came in a large heavy tube clearly marked with the company brand and having never seen or tried any of their equipment, we were pretty excited. I will start off with a quick thought, if you are not a fan of offset drivers, these will not be for you. The driver is extremely closed and has an odd look to it, but in the sake of honesty, I could not wait to take this out and hit it. The irons look to be quite traditional looking and it came with a graphite shaft. The putter was also quite unique. Weight changing, stood out immediately when we first took a look and it was another club that we were looking forward to testing out.
Driver Testing
The Bob Burns No Bananas D.A.T Driver is incredibly unique. The Draw Alignment Technology (DAT) was created to help golfers “cure” their slice issues. The heel biased shape and curved ridges encourage an inside out swing, which is nice, however we found the real “Slice Cure” part of this driver was the fact that it comes 7* closed. We took the driver to the range and had 8 people try out the club. 6 golfers that fight a slice or play a cut and 2 players that are scratch golfers and do not have the same type of issues. A couple of things to note about this club after testing. If you do not like loud or odd sounding drivers, this one is not for you. When hitting the driver you must not think about the closed club face at setup and try to correct it. 3 out of the 6 golfers that fight the slice had it corrected somewhat by the Bob Burns No Bananas Driver. By somewhat, I mean that their slice was greatly reduced to a slight fade. 2 out of the 6 golfers had their slice basically cured off the tee with this driver. The 6th and last golfer still had the same troubles with the slice. Our scratch golfers hit duck hook after duck hook, which was do be expected. What we found the players saying was that they really liked the fact that the ball was going straight. Their drives had good distance and the driver overall felt good in their hands.
Iron Testing
Testing irons with only a single 5 iron is extremely difficult, however we were able to get some feedback on this one for the sake of the review. We had the same 6 people hit the irons and the feedback we got was pretty good. The irons have interchangeable heel and toe weighting but we did not test that part of the club out. What we did find was an iron that had good feel, good forgiveness, and felt overall like something that would fit into many players bags.
Putter Testing
The Roll In Putter is unique in a few ways. Most significantly, the putter features seven weight portals and adjustable screws of varying masses that you may use to customize your putting game. For the sake of this review it was setup to standard. Another interesting feature of this putter is the BigLite grip. This super jumbo putter grip weighs about 85 grams and is about 250% larger than traditional putter grips. We had 6 people test this putter on one day and 4 others test it on a separate day. While many of the testers really enjoyed the oversize grip similar to the ones we have reviewed in the past like the Wishbone, we struggled with this putter quite a bit. Each tester had issues with the feel most of all, or in this case really lack there of. Most would have liked to see this putter done in either a milled soft face or put an insert in there. We lined up putts from 5, 10, 20, and 30 feet and had each tester hit the Roll In Putter as well as their usual club. Five of the six testers made more putts with their usual club than the Roll In. I was the lone tester that made more with this putter than my own.
Final Take
Coming into this review we did not know what to think of the Bob Burns No Bananas Golf line. Coming out of the review we think that they are making clubs for a niche market of player. Those players that fit into that market, will be extremely happy with the results. The driver did exactly what it said it does and that is cure a slice. Not the traditional way mind you, however for those that say equipment cannot change the game, have not hit the No Bananas driver from Bob Burns Golf. Both the driver and the iron that we tested worked as advertised and were liked by almost everybody that hit them. So much so, that one of the players was planning on picking one up immediately. Straightening out his drive was adding almost 30 yards of distance, something we had to see to believe. The putter did not have the same results, but you cannot win them all. If you fight a slice and want a quick fix, you can check out their clubs at Bob Burns Golf you will be glad that you did.
Till Next Time
Josh B
