Why is Soft Good?

[All4's]

Honest question for you. We always hear guys talk about getting irons they can grow into, which I am also not a believer in. Why does nobody ever decide to find a driver to grow into? I mean its the hardest club in the bag to hit for most based on length, why not grow into that?

Proper technique is proper technique. Hitting it on the "button" is the same across the board

Not sure. I'm also not one who subscribes the theory of buying irons to grow into. I was duped into making that mistake once and would never do it again or recommend anyone to do so. I don't like the idea of ever making it harder for you to score well.

I would agree you have to be a better ball striker to hit MB's well, but to say that you don't need to be a good ball striker to hit any 3 iron (GI or MB) in the air with accuracy isn't even close to true. You have to hit the ball well to get a good result with any club. The difference is the severity of you miss hits.

I guess it is subjective what you consider a "good" ball striker to be. Same for saying you have to hit the ball "well" to get a good result with any club. I see G15's and K15's saving a lot of bad swings with GIR's. And for the record I 100% support the iron doing that. Again, I always subscribe to using what allows you to post your best score if you care about score, or to have the most fun if you don't care about scoring.

I am saying that you absolutely have to learn better technique to hit an MB versus a GI. I'm not saying the club is actively teaching you anything. But if you want to consistently hit a 3 iron MB in the air 200 yards, you have to learn how to have a descending angle of attack, hit the ball first, swing on plane, etc. All hallmarks of a better swing. So the club is passively teaching you to do those things to have success.


If you dont strike a GI iron 3 iron well its not going 200 yards in the air either, every iron as far as to my knowledge needs to be hit with some kind of descending blow for the ball to get up in the air. You need all those things to hit an iron shot in general. I have played both blades and GI irons, GI irons help, they dont make the game easier for you.

They absolutely make the game easier for you. I think that is the whole and sole reason for their design and existence. You can have much more variance in swing plane, attack angle, clubhead speed, etc. and still achieve good results. I'm certain the club designers that JB has interviewed would attest to that.

 

[Hawk]

Meh, I quit caring.

I suppose you need to define what a 'good' result is too. My point is, clubs don't teach you how to swing them. They might veer off 40 yards or sting your hands, but they aren't teaching how to hit them better.

 

[Griff]

I am saying that you absolutely have to learn better technique to hit an MB versus a GI. I'm not saying the club is actively teaching you anything. But if you want to consistently hit a 3 iron MB in the air 200 yards, you have to learn how to have a descending angle of attack, hit the ball first, swing on plane, etc. All hallmarks of a better swing. So the club is passively teaching you to do those things to have success.

I can't, after years and years of success and failure with player's irons, agree with any of this. In theory it sounds good. In practice it simply doesn't work based on my nearly 30 years playing golf. The basis for a good golf swing is repeatability. Hitting a MB 3I does anything but promote a repetitive swing as the results are typically nonrepeatable for any but the best of ball strikers. You will constantly be making adjustments to get good results.

 

[JB]

I suppose you need to define what a 'good' result is too. My point is, clubs don't teach you how to swing them. They might veer off 40 yards or sting your hands, but they aren't teaching how to hit them better.

This is a great point though.
You can get feedback out of any iron.
There is no iron out there that is going to train someone how to hit it properly.
Less forgiveness will not train someone to hit properly in my opinion. In fact many believe it will do the opposite which is cause golfers to tinker with their swing more.

And from from those that say it does, I truly want to know why nobody explores this option in drivers.

 

[tnc200]

Why is feel so important? Why is soft feel better than hard feel?

The better the shot, the "softer" the feel. We have all hit shots both sides of the spectrum. If a clubmaker hinted a club would have an electric shock type feedback on mishits I doubt many people would even try that club. It's more lucrative to tell them it is soft when hit in the sweetspot.

 

[biggsy]

Question for those that are feeling this way. Most of the clubs that are considered "buttery soft" have horrible harsh feels when mis-hit. Obviously this is attributed to feedback, so how does one determine when it is good to have harsh and bad to have harsh feelings in a club?

It's a personal feeling and every person is different. I want harsh, but not horrible feeling if I miss a club. I'm not looking for permanent nerve damage or that cold aluminum bat to baseball feeling, just a little feedback or harshness to let me know I missed it. Every iron I have hit gives it to you, some more than others. Where is that happy medium? It changes in every club and year to year it's never consistent. You can change the harshness with a different shaft, sensicore, different glove or gloves, grip and on and on.

When I hit a good shot, I just want a hard enough metal to hit the ball as far as it should go, not rattle my nerve endings in doing so, yet be durable enough to where I am not having to replace irons every 6 months. Like TC said, it's something that is hard to describe but I know what it feels like when I hit it myself.

Some people have no feel and harshness doesn't bother them. I'm a little more sensitive in my hands with it. It's probably why I've never liked muscle backed clubs, I couldn't take the mishit feel you got with them.

I laugh when I hear buttery soft, I really do.

Really interesting topic.

 

[TC]

I dont know. How do you describe the feel of a good shot with a driver, fairway wood or hybrid?

I would say "smoked". A good golf shot for me is when there's a lack of any feel at all. It just feels like turf interaction.

 

[SW]

Why is soft good, if we play on the words we might as well ask why is hard bad.

Feel is the subjective part of liking a club over another. I would like to say that we always pick the club that performs better via hard data, but sadly that ain't the case a lot of times. A lot of people, myself included buy on feel. "Soft" is that term like forged that has been rammed down our collective throats for years, eventually we took it as law. Soft is better, cause TV told me so, cast sucks cause Golf Digest said so, etc...

For me I don't get caught up in soft/buttery/pillow I get caught up in how that shot feels in my hands and how it reacts in the air. I play some big game improvement shovels, when caught in the right place they feel great, when caught on the toe they feel not so great. For what it's worth my R11 feels like steel when I hit it dead center. Odd how soft differs through the bag. I don't want to hit irons that feel hard, that hurts. Make me two equal performing sets, one that feels softer and another that feels hard and I will buy the softer feeling set everytime.

 

[the_paulo]

I would say "smoked". A good golf shot for me is when there's a lack of any feel at all. It just feels like turf interaction.

You're gonna have Hawk on about bacon again with that terminology.

Lack of feel is difficult to describe too, although this is exactly what a good shot feels like.

 

[Doug the lefty]

For me, soft is good because I want less feedback (vibration, harshness, etc) through my hands. I'm not that old but I am beat down physically for various reasons so I want something that is as smooth/soft as possible. That is not why I switched to forged-lord knows we have beat that horse to death, revived it, and beat it to death again. I switched because these are the clubs that I feel most comfortable with for my game. So the question is, how do I attain more smooth/soft/butter since it is clearly not the club head. Well, I'm looking at different grips, balls, and shafts. I went to a Winn grip size W-5 and I feel that this dampened it a bit. My instructor also suggested I experiment with with a soft ball and I have switched to Nike PD soft. Now for the biggie-thinking about moving to graphite shafts and watching the threads on those very much.

 

[biggsy]

I would say "smoked". A good golf shot for me is when there's a lack of any feel at all. It just feels like turf interaction.

Well said. That's the one thing you get from a good shot!

 

[Lefty78]

Soft to me is more about the ball than the club which strikes the ball. The feeling of a well struck shot seems to be what folks here are describing as "soft". As others have said, this sensation is a lack of vibration in our hands and almost no feeling at contact with the ball. If that is soft, I have traded irons to achieve that feeling. Prior to getting the TM Tour Burners I had a set of TM Tour Preferred TP irons. Performance of the two sets of irons are about the same for me but the Tour Burners feel so much better (lack of vibration) than the Tour Preferred TPs. The TPs really felt harsh on anything out of the sweet spot while the Tour Burners almost never feel harsh. I doubt that the metal of the Tour Burners is any softer than the previous irons so that "softness" must be attributed to whatever engineering TM did to enlarge the sweet spot for us old guys that have trouble finding that little bitty sweet spot of the TP irons.

 

[Drumdog]

Why is soft good?

I think JB hit it right on the head when he mentioned marketing.
From day one, we are inundated with advertising on tv, print, radio, etc...
For the most part, and most products, "soft" is what is best.
Everything from diapers to towels to sheets, pillows, clothes, toilet paper, etc...etc...
It stands to reason that even in golf, we are convinced(by marketing) that soft is good....and I believe it.

 

[CharlieMoy]

Its pretty soft for the people who it is made for.

I didn't say that. I said that I found it interesting that people call a Pro V1x soft, when it's anything but soft. The cover may be soft, but that ball (and many other like it) is as firm as it gets in terms of compression/core. That's not a negative statement either. It's just a fact. The e6 is a soft ball, yet many will tell you the exact opposite. I suppose it depends on what your definition of a soft ball is. To me, it would mean a soft core that compresses easily.

 

[Danilo]

FEEL is the most overrated reason to purchase/not purchase or like/dislike clubs. I personally have not given any thot(thought) to feel when i am testing or thinking of buying a club. It means nothing to me and it has zero affect(effect) on the performance of a club.

Can you honestly stand behind this statement? How can you say that the feel of a club is not something that you give any thought to?
If you can take club A, and hit a 6 iron 150 yards, perfect ball flight, dead center of your target area etc (the perfect shot every time) but it vibrates like a Harley Davidson on a bumpy unpaved road. You then hit club B... a 6 iron, same perfect shot and exact same distance, but it does not vibrate, it does not feel like you've just hit a large stone with it etc... it actually feels very smooth, with no negative vibrations or bad feedback.... Would you even consider buying club A??

 

[the boss]

for me soft is easier on your body i.e your wrists elbows arms and shoulders if your hitting rocks its going to feel uncomfortable. where as if its soft there's less impact on the joints.

 

[smoothduffer]

Can you honestly stand behind this statement? How can you say that the feel of a club is not something that you give any thought to?
If you can take club A, and hit a 6 iron 150 yards, perfect ball flight, dead center of your target area etc (the perfect shot every time) but it vibrates like a Harley Davidson on a bumpy unpaved road. You then hit club B... a 6 iron, same perfect shot and exact same distance, but it does not vibrate, it does not feel like you've just hit a large stone with it etc... it actually feels very smooth, with no negative vibrations or bad feedback.... Would you even consider buying club A??

I have hit alot of clubs but i have never hit anything that felt so bad i wouldnt think of purchasing it based on the feel.I have never hit anything that felt so good i would buy it based on feel either so,yea i can stand behind my statement very easily. Feel is the single most overrated and missused word in golf,in my opinion,i give no thot to feel whatsoever and never will.To each his own but when i hear someone mention "feel" when describing how great or how bad a club is,i find it pretty funny.

 

[couch]

The way I always looked at it was in a baseball perspective, because that is the sport I grew up playing. Anything off the inside down by the handle is going to sting the heck out of your hands, same for the outside. But when you hit the ball smack dab in the middle of the sweet spot, you just knew it was a great shot. No stinging vibrations, or "harshness", it almost felt soft, barely even knew what happened. Now in the golf world its really the same thing, just with smaller objects. You know in golf if you hit a bad shot, because for lack of a better word it is "harsh." You toe it you can feel it or you catch it bad off the heel or scalp one its really noticeable. But when you do hit one off your sweet spot, to me it really does feel soft. When I nail the perfect shot I can really judge how that shot is going to turn out right of the bat because of how it felt in my hands leaving the club.

 

[d_in_la]

I think soft is an apt term for describing what we look for in a well struck ball, from a club perspective - the "pure" feeling. I think this feedback is true for many things. Shooting a basketball, hammering a nail, throwing a curveball, chopping wood, lifting a weight or even cutting a vegetable. Soft, in my mind, denotes the most efficient, or near most efficient transfer of energy. The sensory feedback we gets helps train our brain on what is the proper order of neurons firing to repeat, or in the case of harsh feedback, not to repeat. That feedback might be tactile, the vibration up the shaft, a twist against your grip and the sound that reaches your ears. I don't think anyone would want a harsh response for a well struck shot because that implies inefficiency.

As for golf balls, I think soft refers to how well the ball stops (backspin) on a high lofted club and how well the ball absorbs the energy transfer from a low lofted club.

How many people have had soft tactile feedback from their clubs with a well hit range ball that is hard as a rock but the sound is off? I believe that is because you hit the sweet spot, but since the transfer of energy is inefficient you hear a less pleasing sound.

 

[mariusvt]

Personally I think it is largely marketing. All clubs are different and one that person A claims is "soft" may feel harsh to someone else.

I skimmed a bit, so I apologize if this has been presented already. Hypothetically;

If you had 2 clubs, everything was identical about them, shafts, metal, grooves, forgiveness, etc. They provided exactly the same feedback on pure hits and mis hits. The kicker is, one club sounded quieter, softer and the other clickier, firmer. Everything else being equal, unbeknownst to you would you say the quieter sounding club was softer?

 

[Sean]

This is a bit of an overgeneralization, but any shot I hit on the sweet spot feels "soft" to me no matter the iron.

 

[eaglesgolf72]

Have you ever hit a Top-Flite?...I think that answers your question lol

 

[Pevans]

for me it's simple soft=pure= good results