For some unfathomable reason, I recently decided that I was going to put together Bryson DeChambeau’s exact set of golf clubs and play a professional tournament with them for a Golf Monthly YouTube video. Bonkers, right? Upon hearing what I was attempting, Avoda Golf stepped up to the plate and offered to send me Bryson’s actual backup set of irons! To explain how fortunate I was here, there are only two sets of these bespoke, curved faced, 3D printed, one-length irons in existence… Bryson has one and Avoda sent me the other.
WATCH: PGA Professional Joe Ferguson goes through a range session with Bryson DeChambeau’s Avoda irons…
Before hitting the course for my tournament round, that morning I decided to go through a full range session to try and make some sense of the most unusual golf equipment I had ever laid my hands on…
(Image credit: Future)
The first club I picked up from this set was the 60˚ lob wedge, and what immediately struck me was the length of the club. As a user of traditional length golf clubs where increments of half an inch are generally used between each club, my first touch of a 6-iron length lob wedge (every iron from 5 – LW in this set is 37.5”) was a little disconcerting, to say the least. It should be noted here that Bryson actually uses one-of-one Ping Glide 4.0 wedges specifically made to the 273-gram weight requirement, but we were unable to source those. Instead, Avoda provided us with the original set of wedges that were designed to go with the main iron set, built to the exact same spec of shaft, length, swing weight, and grip.
(Image credit: Future)
The second thing that stood out to me was the sheer thickness of the grips. DeChambeau uses a Jumbo Max Tour Series XL grip, which comes in at a butt diameter of 1.46”. For context here a typical grip you would pick up off the rack would have a butt diameter closer to 1″, so as a percentage increase it is pretty significant!
They are frankly nothing short of massive, more akin to a cricket or baseball bat handle than a golf club, but as Bryson himself says, golf is probably the only sport using a stick (as such) to employ grips as thin as we golfers generally do. As I said, baseball, cricket, lacrosse, hockey, etc all have handles much closer to the dimensions that Bryson uses, so maybe he is on to something?
(Image credit: Future)
Upon making my first swings and strikes with the lob wedge, two more things became immediately apparent, the first of those being the sheer…
..
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Latest from Golf Monthly in Features…