Pigamingi: Which golf ball is the best for you?

I cringe every time I visit the pro and hear a golfer excitedly request for a Callaway, Titleist or a Wilson ball, by just uttering the brand name and not adding the model name.

If you walked into Motor Hub on Kiambu Road (seriously, it does exist!) and asked salesman Desagu to sell you “a Peugeot”, the cheeky comedian would look at you and wonder whether you have in mind your Grandfather’s indefatigable Peugeot 404 of Joginder Singh’s Safari Rally fame, your Dad’s Mount Kenya Cowboy’s Peugeot 504 Injection, Pike’s Peak record breaking 208 T16 or the new sporty Peugeot 508? The first two are extinct, so knowing Desagu, he would probably convince you take home an Olweda.

Out of the boxes of twelve or sleeves of three, golf balls look pretty much the same. The only difference appears to be the packaging. Just like sugar, whether it’s made from South Nyanza cane milled at Mumias or smuggled from Brazil through Somalia, with or without mercury! But golf balls are differentiated by a brand and model name.

All major golf club manufacturers seem to produce their own golf balls, obviously trying to cross sell one product by leveraging their known brand in another. Within each brand, there are several models. For example, Srixon’s 2018 offering comprises of the Z-Star, Z-Star XV, Q-Star, Q-Star Tour, Soft Feel, Lady Soft Feel Srixon AD333 Tour and AD 333.

On the ball itself, a number ranging from 1 to 99 is stamped below the names.

With such a wide offering, how does one choose the right ball? Most club golfers usually base their choice on hearsay, price, brand names and packaging; basically playing inky, pinky, ponky, and most likely coming up with a donkey.

My first experience

When I started on the game and asked a club golfer which was the best ball, he told me Topflite, unequivocally. That kind of made sense since I had seen posters at various sports shops declaring Topflite “the longest ball.” I would later find that length is not the only determinant.

Of course he was wrong, as I would find out later. He was also right in that since I was a beginner, what I needed was a cheap ball that I could lose in the bundus or dunk in the ponds without feeling too much pain from the loss.

The golf ball has evolved a lot since the Scotts invented the game. Cutting the story short, the discovery of rubber led to development of the famous bouncy one-piece solid rubber ball. This evolved into one made of rubber bands wound into a ball then covered in the sap of the balata tree. The balata ball was best known for the smiley that would be cut when it was bladed with an iron.

The first big development in golf ball design came about when golfers realised that old balls with a rough surface would fly further than new smooth ones.  These accidental scruffs were soon formalised as concave depressions on the surface, dimples.

The engineering

The next major development was the discovery that the function of the cover could be separated from the core, and thus the two could be made from uniquely different materials. Thus evolved the modern practice of a separate cover made of a hard-wearing material, and a soft core made of bouncy materials.

The modern golf ball has either an ionomer, trionomer or urethane cover. The two-piece ball made with a cover surlyn, remains the most popular because two-piece is an easier and cheaper manufacturing process and surlyn is cheaper too.

Urethane on the other hand, is more resistant to scuffing, thus the ball lasts longer. It is softer and hence more easily grabbed by the grooves on a golf club face. This is important for creating spin. Spin is required for stopping the ball on the green, creating lift, and for working the ball. While it is more expensive, urethane can be cast to a very thin layer, almost painted on.

Research into the performance of the core led to a cores made of several layers of modified rubbers that get softer towards the center. Layering allows the different materials to provide different properties to the ball for different shots. The most popular layer configuration is three-piece, comprising of a cover, a mantle layer, and an inner core.

Creating the lift

While the cover is important for lift and shot-shaping, the second layer, the mantle is crucial on short game feel shots. The core and any other layers in between are of important for driving and distance control in the long game.

The airfoil principle used for airplane wings to create lift is also used for golf balls. The dimples on the surface of a spinning ball would in effect cause the air on the upper side to move faster than the air at the bottom, thus causing lift.

A thin turbulent boundary layer of air that clings to the ball's surface allows the smoothly flowing air to follow the ball's surface a little farther around the back side of the ball, thereby decreasing the size of the wake, which in turn results in a longer flight.

Research shows that bigger shallower dimples create more lift. Extreme high trajectory is however not desirable since a ball soaring up early would be at the mercy of wind. Golfers with natural high trajectories need a ball with a low penetrating trajectory. But the ball still needs to achieve a certain amount of lift in order to achieve optimum carry.

Dimples

The number of dimples matters. They range from 300 to 500, the variations depending on the mathematical corners of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, and the possible symmetrical locations of dimples on a sphere. Sorry, lost you there. A-Level maths. Most golf ball dimples fit within the 320- 420 dimples range, with 330 as the most popular.

The shape of the dimple matters too, the main concern being stability of the ball during flight. Since circles cannot tessellate (google that), some manufacturers have experimented with merging the ridges between the circle ball to a hexagon instead of leaving it smooth and flat.

Others have filled that space with another smaller circle, such that the ball now has two sizes of dimples. An even more innovative design was dimple-within a dimple, which features a smaller dimple in the middle of the main dimple.

A recent superficial innovation introduced by Callaway is drawing black hexagon patterns on the ball, making it look like a miniature football. This Truvis concept makes the ball look bigger, giving a golfer more confidence. Before Truvis there were multicolor balls, yellow being the most popular, and some with transparent covers. All touted better visibility.

The science

But just like a racing car, the most important feature for performance is not the fancy airfoil erected on top of the boot the outside, but the engine and transmission inside. Raw distance comes from hitting and compressing the ball against the clubface. The ball reacts by jumping off the clubface due to the energy stored in the compressed ball.

 A harder ball flies farther, and provides more control, but needs a bigger impact to compress. A lower swing speed golfer would be unable to extract this property. A softer ball on the other hand, compresses more. A long driver would feel like it got completely squashed onto the face, thus losing control.

Comparatively, a medium speed swinger will find that a low compression ball flies farther than a high compression one. Ball compression was the buzz word by the end of last century and was heavily used for marketing.

In 2001, a PGA golfer teed up a Precept MC Lady ball, a soft core low compression ball, that he had found lost on the course and to his surprise, achieved longer stable drives. The story went around and sales of the Precept MC Lady ball sales rocketed. There was one problem though: Machismo. Male golfers hated the idea of playing a “women’s” ball, as if it had tits drawn on it! So they would black out the y in the Lady name.

Soft ball

Precept pounced on this serendipitous discovery and rebranded the ball as the Precept Laddie. The Soft hype is now so extensive that almost every ball manufacturer now has a new Soft ball or has upgraded old models to soft versions.

Fast forward to 2016. Soft is the new black in golf balls. Callaway released the Chrome Soft, a ball that became popular with male golfers with slightly reduced swing speeds, which saw some ditch the Prov1.

To stem the bleeding, Titleist went into overdrive to create a high-end soft ball, the 2018 Titleist AVX. The AVX however has a Surlyn cover instead of urethane to avoid cannibalizing the Prov1 and of course to save money on the cover.

Competition on the high-end ball market is tight and manufacturers are splitting hairs in an attempt to differentiate their balls. No single golf ball can achieve the many combinations of the factors that determine ball performance for different Tour golfers simultaneously. This has resulted in the premium balls being offered in two versions, such as Titleist Prov1 and Prov1x, Bridgestone BS and BXS, Srixon Z Star and ZStar XV, Taylormade TP5 and TP5x. The x denoting the harder lower flying penetrating version.

Now that you know the properties that define a golf balls, you should be able to decide which ball is the best for you. Golf balls are generally produced for golfers in four tiers.

Professional

If you are a Professional golfer go to a ball-fitting expert to determine the best high-end multilayer, urethane cover ball that fits your ball flight. The market leaders are Srixon Z star, Taylormade TP5, Titleist Prov1, Callaway ChromeSoft, and Wilson DX3 come to mind. New entrants are Snell MTB, Vice ProPlus and Kirkland Signature.

The low teens handicap amateur club golfer, should forget these premium balls and go for multilayers with a surlyn cover. Among the best balls in this range are the Titleist Toursoft (formerly the NXT), Titleist AVX,  Bridgestone B RX, Bridgestone Extrasoft, Srixon Q-Star Tour, Srixon AD333 Tour, Taylormade Project (a), XXI0 Premium and Wilson Duo.

Golfers with a few years’ experience and those in the high teens or low 20s handicaps are the ones most likely to buy expensive balls in the hope of buying a better game, thus wasting their money. Choose high-end 2-piece orbs: Titleist DT Trusoft (formerly the DT SoLo), Taylormade Project (s), Callaway Supersoft, and Srixon Soft feel, PRGR, Srixon AD333, Precept Laddie Extreme and Topflite Gamer.

For beginners and any golfers above 25 handicap, head straight to the cheapest 2-piece ball you can find: Do not pass Go, and do not pick $200!  The word Distance is your cue: Srixon Distance, Taylormade Distance+, Aeroburner, Callaway warbird, Dunlop DDH, Maxfli Noodle, Pinnacle, Slazenger, Topflite, Volvik and Precept Powerdrive. 

These low end balls are dirt cheap, and sink in the water just like other expensive golf balls! Enjoy your golf, keep it in the short grass.[email protected]