TaylorMade’s Performance Decision Kit is something should be at retail

With its namesake mountain looming in the background, twilight descending, and the empty, emerald-green fairway laid out in front of me, the 18th hole at Superstition Mountain Golf Club in Golf Canyon, Arizona, was the perfect place to have a little fun.

No one else was around that evening, so I dropped five or six three-ball sleeves of the newest golf balls on the ground and started hitting approach shots, pitch shots and chip shots until darkness made it too hard to see. I made little notes on a pad about how each ball felt and flew, how much it appeared to spin (I didn’t have a launch monitor), checked-up on the green and which balls seemed to end up closest to the hole.

It was the first time I’d really tested golf balls, and it has become a yearly ritual that starts my season every year, although, sadly, Central Connecticut is not as pretty as the Arizona desert in late March.

I have encouraged Golfweek readers to buy three-ball packs of newly released balls at the start of every season and test them against the ball they currently play on several occasions, so when I recently received TaylorMade’s Performance Decision Kit, I thought a brand had finally made the job of ball testing a little easier. Inside the box were six two-ball packs of each urethane-covered ball in the 2024 TaylorMade stable: TP5, TP5 Pix, TP5x, TP5x Pix, Tour Response and Tour Response Stripe.

One box, three different balls in both white and in each ball’s visual-technology version.

The TaylorMade Performance Decision Kit includes six two-ball packs of TaylorMade balls. (David Dusek/Golfweek)

But when I reached out to TaylorMade to find out when the Performance Decision Kit was going on sale to the public, I got the bad news: This unique box will not go on sale to consumers. It was created for select members of the media and influencers to make them aware of TaylorMade’s new offerings for 2024.

I recently went to TaylorMade’s golf ball manufacturing plant in Liberty, South Carolina. I have also visited Callaway’s facility in Chicopee, Massachusetts, along with Titleist’s golf ball plant in New Bedford, Massachusetts, several times. These state-of-the-art facilities turn out millions of dozen boxes of golf balls every year thanks to lots of proprietary systems, customized machines and other automated processes. The assembly lines are built to make thousands of the same ball at a time, paint them, number them, add them to sleeves and then get those sleeves into…