Callaway Paradym Ai Smoke Fairway Woods

Gear: Callaway Paradym Ai Smoke fairway woods
Price: $349.99 with Project X Cypher 2.0 shaft, Project X Denali Black shaft or Mitsubishi Tensei AV Blue shaft and Golf Pride Tour Velvet 360 grip
Specs: Forged stainless steel face and body with carbon fiber crown and adjustable hosel
Available: Feb. 2

Who They’re For: Golfers who want more distance off the tee and from the fairway, plus ball-speed protection on mis-hits.

The Skinny: Using artificial intelligence, Callaway created different faces for each of the four Paradym Ai Smoke fairway woods so they are optimized to enhance distance and protect ball speed for specific types of players. 

The Deep Dive: Fairway woods can be the most challenging clubs to design because engineers need to deliver the ideal flight and desired distance both off the tee and on shots hit off the turf. It’s not easy.

In the four Paradym Ai Smoke fairway woods, Callaway studied thousands of swings made by a wide variety of golfers and developed unique “Swing Codes,” mapping where players of different abilities make contact on the face.

Shop Callaway Paradym fairway wood

As you would suspect, accomplished golfers found the center of the hitting area often and delivered the club to the ball on a neutral path, while mid- and higher-handicap players made contact all over the face and tended to swing from out to in. Callaway also observed that many players who struggle to make solid, consistent contact tend to have a steep angle of attack into the ball. At the same time, accomplished golfers only swing down slightly as they hit fairway woods.

So Callaway utilized artificial intelligence to optimize performance for different players. Engineers instructed supercomputers to virtually design and test thousands of faces to reveal which could deliver a blend of distance and ball-speed protection on mis-hits for different types of players. The result is four faces, each with unique thick and thin areas, that are now in the four Paradym Ai Smoke fairway woods.

The standard Paradym Ai Smoke Max fairway wood will be available as a 3-wood, 3HL, 5-wood, Heavenwood, 7-wood, 9-wood and 11-wood. It has a carbon fiber crown to reduce weight on the club’s top and help lower the center of gravity. Removing a pair of stainless steel reinforcing beams from the sole that were present in the original Paradym Max fairway woods saved another 24 grams of weight.

For fast-swinging players and golfers who generate excessive spin, Callaway…