Golf International Magazine
January/February 2004

We’ve all heard that the shaft is the engine of the golf club, so how come most golfers are preoccupied with the trim?

The extent to which the vital role of the shaft is either misunderstood – or virtually ignored – by consumers is one of the great mysteries of today’s equipment market.

It was a point Nick Faldo raised in suggesting that as many as 90% of amateurs use clubs that do not suit their game. “As professionals we can fiddle and tinker with clubs and get them absolutely perfect. Amateurs, on the other hand, buy clubs off the shelf and don’t have a clue what they are getting,” he told the Sunday Telegraph last January. “Above all, they need to check that their shafts are right for them...it’s not that difficult to get a shaft checked.”

He might have added that golfers might be in for a surprise, especially when checking a shaft’s flex or, more specifically, the consistency of flex, a factor which many believe should dictate the way a shaft is aligned in the head so the club can perform to its optimum. Ever wondered why your 5-iron and 7-iron are fine but your 6-iron never behaves? This might be why.

In February 1999, an American golf visionary, Dick Weiss, was granted an audience with the Balls & Implements Committee of the United States Golf Association (USGA). Armed with a variety of shafts of different materials and a frequency analyser to measure their flex, he demonstrated how imperfections in shafts could well be hampering the performance of golfers without them knowing it. And, bizarrely, this was in a way that could not be corrected under the existing rules.

For his coup de grace, Weiss produced a steel shaft, one of the most popular models on the market, and showed how variations in stiffness around its circumference meant that it could effectively play as anything from extra stiff down to ladies’ flex simply depending on its orientation in the clubhead. (For techies, the frequency analyser recorded a massive 44 cycles-per-minute variation in flex between the shaft’s weakest to stiffest orientation.)

Within days the USGA had drafted an amendment allowing shafts to be analysed for their irregularities and reinserted in a clubhead so that they performed as if they were symmetrical. Four years on, the activities of Weiss’ company, SST (it stands for Strategic Shaft Technologies), which owns the essential patents for this process known as shaft ‘PUREing’, has captured the attention of some 200 tour professionals, who have reportedly fine-tuned their clubs in this way.

Among the converts are the winners of some 50 major championships, including Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Raymond Floyd, Ben Crenshaw and Greg Norman (albeit they won their majors before PUREing was possible). Add in reigning major champions, numerous long-driving specialists and a new generation of stars graduating from the Challenge Tour, and you have a genuine equipment phenomenon - one which is gradually trickling through to the discerning club golfer.

It should immediately be pointed out that shaft PUREing itself is not directly concerned with recommending types of shaft, nor even absolute levels of flex. While these are certainly important issues, they are club-fitting decisions that should be customised according to an individual’s swing with the help of a qualified fitter.

As Weiss himself clarifies: “For any given shaft, PUREing is simply about finding the one most stable orientation where it will perform to its optimum. It doesn’t matter what clubhead you then put on it, or what standard of player is hitting it.”

For example, let’s refer back to Weiss’ own ‘Eureka’ moment when an impromptu discovery in his Miami workshop in the mid-’90s first launched his quest that has led to a revolution (literally) in club assembly. It was while developing a new method of extracting shafts without damaging them that Weiss decided, on a whim, that he didn’t want the Aldila logo on his own driver shaft facing directly up at him at address. So he nonchalantly turned it to ‘3 o’clock’ before reinserting it back into the Ping Zing 2 head.

“The very first shot I hit felt like a sharp knife through butter,” he remembers. “It was feeling I’d never had before. The ball sprung off the face and went dead straight.”

Intrigued by his new-found consistency off the tee, Weiss later went back into his workshop to cut the shaft in half and noticed that, in crosssection, its graphite wall was thick on one side and thin on the other. Here was a structural anomaly which, his tinkering suggested, had a marked effect on the club’s performance.

After a few more years’ research, Weiss underlying contention is that despite the supposedly extraordinary advances in golf equipment down the years, all golf shafts feature irregularities in roundness, straightness and stiffness that are inherent in the various manufacturing processes.

“From an engineering standpoint, it is impossible to make a golf shaft perfectly symmetrical and straight. This is true of steel, graphite, titanium, boron or thermoplastic,” he asserts. “This is the main reason why two seemingly identical golf clubs can perform very differently, and why a single club can alter dramatically when realigned.”

With shafts invariably being installed randomly into clubheads since the game began (cosmetic logo considerations aside), it is only by chance that they are aligned so as to minimise the performance effects of these inconsistencies that may inadvertently be plaguing a golfer’s game. SST’s raison d’etre is to locate the shaft’s most stable orientation by means of a sophisticated computerised process and reinsert it with pinpoint accuracy into the clubhead. The aim is to ensure that the shaft’s vital bending characteristics are repeatable, thereby allowing golfers to be more confident that any errors are solely down to a swing flaw rather than the shaft’s asymmetry.

The great irony is that, as mentioned earlier, such correction through realignment was disallowed in the rules prior to 1999 due to a “semantic conundrum” that on the one hand implicitly acknowledged that shafts are in practice not straight yet on the other hand denied golfers the right to restore the very symmetry that the rules themselves require .

Weiss explains that in addition to his eye-popping demonstrations of asymmetry with a number of shafts of different materials, he tried to appeal to the USGA’s fundamental doctrine of fairness – the principle that all golfers are entitled to neutral, unbiased equipment. “A golfer might have a swing that already has a tendency to induce a strong slice – how can it be fair that he may be playing with a shaft randomly installed with an asymmetry that itself accentuates his swing flaw?”

Since the USGA granted Weiss relief under the rules, the number of shafts realigned by SST PURE has reached the million mark, with the technology now accessible through a select group of hand-picked licensees. In the UK, there are currently two outlets that offer the service: The Golf Factor in London and Golfsmith Europe in Cambridgeshire, with both doing a brisk trade for star names on the European Tour (both men’s and women’s) down to the discerning club golfer keen to benefit from this latest offshoot of custom-fitting.

“Even without consumer advertising, people are becoming increasingly aware of PUREing through the Internet and word of mouth,” says Neal Cook of Golfsmith, who offers the service through club professionals. “While the performance benefits are difficult to measure objectively, the concept makes technical sense. We’ve certainly had a lot of repeat business – a client’s driver one week, his irons the next.” In this way PUREing has already become a new category of retail for the golf industry, with the club professional not merely helping his customer but generating some passive income through referrals to SST licensees.

The hardest task, however, has been to convince leading manufacturers of the benefits of a new technology that SST Pure controls exclusively. Yet there have recently been some important breakthroughs. Makser has become the first club manufacturer to offer a range of clubs fitted with premium-PUREd shafts, for an extra £50 per wood and £250 per set of irons.

“PUREd shafts are golf’s best kept secret and we are pleased to be the first to take the technology to the masses,” says director Felipe Artola. “It allows us to make the best possible product with the finest components available.”

Meanwhile, some shaft manufactures are themselves entering the fray with PURE versions of already popular shafts set to hit the market. These include the graphite PURE Rifle from Royal Precision and the UST PUREGold ProForce, the latter now available as a custom order from Titleist in 2004. But with the concept being so intangible, and the performance benefits necessarily variable, many remain unconvinced by the PUREing bandwagon, among them shaft giants like True Temper and Nippon.

“Our tests in the USA suggest that there is no reason to warrant the spining or PUREing of high quality shafts,” says David McCarthy of True Temper. “I’d be astonished if players could tell the difference with shafts such as Dynamic Gold, ProLite and Grafalloy ‘Blue’.”

Heath Chapman of Nippon distributors, CQI, says: “Admittedly we haven’t heard of PUREd players going back to randomly installed shafts, but we have carefully tested our own range, including the Nippon 950GH and the Commercial Grade graphite, on SST PURE’s own measurement system and find them to be Grade A shafts – as close to perfectly symmetrical as you can find”.

Whether or not you believe in PUREng as an essential equipment panacea there’s no doubt that the interest surrounding it is raising awareness of the dynamics of the golf shaft and the principles of custom club-fitting.

“PUREing is one addition to the customisation process, but when trying to build a perfect set of golf clubs for any golfer, it is only part the package,” explains Michael Pettigrew, managing director of The Golf Factor. “Golfers serious about their equipment will also want to address clubhead design, loft, lie, swing weight and grip thickness and other shaft factors such as length, flex, kick-point and frequency matching”.

Club golfers should also be aware of the vital link between club-fitting and instruction.

“Analysing the shaft can tell us whether a golfer has developed a swing flaw to compensate for a bias in an unPUREd shaft,” explains teaching pro Jon Fitzpatrick, who advises clients of The Golf Factor. “Similarly we can check that the flex is appropriate for not merely his swing speed but also his load profile and hand action. We might also recommend a shaft that builds in room for improvement; perhaps a slightly stiffer flex for a player working on increasing his clubhead speed through a fuller turn.”

Ultimately, PUREing can only really be judged effectively on an individual basis so, as always, golfers are advised to experiment inquisitively rather than expect the Holy Grail, with most club-fitters commenting that the different feel of a PUREd shaft takes a few shots to get used to.

As for the long-term implications, it could be argued that with so many players on tour already adopting the technology, the most interesting statistic is not so much the number of wins on tour but whether we will start to see scoring records under attack. In that sense, is it ‘PUREly’ a coincidence that several course records have been set in recent years with PUREd shafts, including Tommy Armour’s 72- hole PGA Tour record of 254?

Cynics, of course, will be quick to reel off Lee Trevino’s famous quip: “It’s not the arrows, it’s the Indian.”

Maybe, but what if the Indian had got a ‘PUREd’ bow? ...