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Find out more about Steve: Steve Pike is an award-winning journalist who defined golf business reporting in the early 1990s as the first Golf Business Editor for Golfweek magazine and later at Golf World and Golf Shop Operations magazines. As a business, travel and golf writer, “Spike’’ has climbed volcanoes in the Canary Islands, ascended the Great Wall of China, teed off in the Austrian Alps, and shared single-malt scotch with Sir Michael Bonallack at the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, Scotland. |
Golf Digest's annual "Hot List" of new clubs for 2009 will hit the stands in a few days, but here's a sneak peak. As in past years, the '09 Hot List basically uses the same approach as your eight-year-old's soccer team. That is, everybody gets a trophy. There are a couple of reasons for this approach. One, is that it's hard to find a bad piece of golf equipment these days; and two, Digest doesn't want to alienate any advertisers - or potential advertisers - by dissing their products.
For example, in the $350 and above driver category, winners of the Hot List's "Gold" award in '09 are Callaway FT-9 and FT-IQ; Nike Dymo/Dymo 2 STR8-FIT; Ping Rapture V2; TaylorMade R7 Limited; Titleist 909 D2 and 909 D3.
Winning Silver in the $350 category are Adams Insight Tech A4; Cobra L5V; Titleist Comp; and Tour Edge XCG-V.
In the $350 and below category, the winners are Adams Speedline; Callaway Big Bertha Diablo; Cleveland Launcher; Cobra S9-1; Ping G10; and TaylorMade Burner..jpg)
Silver winners are Cleveland HiBore Monster XCS; Mizuno MX-700; Nike Dymo/Dymo 2; and Wilson Smooth.
How did Digest's panel of judges decide on the winners? Four ways: Performance, Innovation, Look/Feel/Sound and Demand. It's interesting that Performance counted for only 40 percent of a club's score. Gee, I thought the club was all about performance. Or at least 50 percent.
Demand counted for 10 percent of a club's final score, which again is an intersting number given the fact that the Hot List judging was done this past Fall and that some Hot List product isn't on the market yet. That doesn't even take into account that the market conditions in the Spring of '09, when all the clubs hit the shelves, will be different from the market conditions in the Fall of '08.
That's okay, though. Just so everybody gets a trophy.
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