Green Grass Golf Shop

This is a statement that I see quite a bit answering questions about club fitting, “I can’t hit my 4 (or 5) iron, so I need a 4 (or 5) hybrid to replace it with the same distance.” When in reality, I’m not sure that your 4 hybrid ever went the same distance as your 4 iron, even when the modern hybrid was first introduced in the late 1990’s. Back then even if you got the first ever Cobra Baffler 3 hybrid to replace your 3 iron, you were getting more of a 2.5 iron. Now that was not a big deal at all, if hybrids only ever went 1/2 club further than the iron they replaced that’s a pretty easy 1:1 swap for most with a little bonus distance from their new longest “iron” in their 3 hybrid. Then back when I was last fitting in person for Titleist clubs at the last country club I worked with in the late 2010’s it was a pretty simple rule that a 4 hybrid goes about a club longer than a 4 iron. At that time it was pretty easy to say you need a 5 hybrid to replace your 4 iron, 4 hybrid to replace your 3 iron, and on down the line. But these days with every golf club going so much higher and further, how are you supposed to replace a long iron with a hybrid?

Just the same as my previous fitting articles, a theme I will keep pounding until I’m blue in the face, for most that’s impossible to answer without a fitting in person. The only time I could even tell you how far you should be hitting a certain hybrid is if you were shopping for a club that you were already fit for, just in a different loft. If you had a TSR2 hybrid in 18 degrees that you were properly fit for, and wanted to know how far you’d hit the 21 degree head in the same shaft and setup, that I can tell you based on the club you already have. However, that is all I can tell you, and only because you already have that same club that you are looking for. A sentence I see often is something along the lines of “well my 4 iron is 22 degrees, so I need a 22 degree hybrid to replace it, that’s how loft works.” That is only true for older clubs that lack the technology of the modern irons we’re playing today, back when all clubs were made of the same materials with the same building process. These days you not only have irons sets with wildly different lofts, when you compare those irons with other different lofted sets, even the clubs built to the same loft will go different distances. Each different iron that you look at, even those built to the same loft, generally have different materials they are made with, different processes to put those together. They have different testing, development methodologies, built with varying thicknesses, more or less material is used in different places, MOI is different with each iron set based on where materials are built into an iron head, how much, how little or what proprietary metals and polymer mixtures are used. AND to top it all off, those materials, MOI ratings, head shapes and sizes work differently for each different player. The same way your buddy’s micro-dose he’s been taking for years to get through his day does hardly anything for him, but sends you straight to the fetal position locking yourself in a dark closet talking to Mr Walkway (mister-walk-down-me-I’m-the-walkway, lead me to the building f**k you) his P7TW irons are going to work differently in your golf swing than in his. In that same vein, I can’t tell you how far you’d hit another totally different club just based on how you hit another. Nobody can tell you how far you’d hit a 21 degree Titleist TSR2 hybrid based on how far you hit your Callaway Rogue 4 iron, or any other club for that matter, even a Titleist iron.

One thing I can tell you is that if you are looking to replace an older hybrid and match that distance, you need one with weaker loft to do that. So your 10 year old 19 degree hybrid is going to pale in comparison to the distance you can get from a brand new 19 degree hybrid. Along those same lines, if that 19 degree hybrid once replaced your 3 iron in distance, it’s going to replace a much longer club these days, more like the theoretical distance you’d get from a 1 iron in your set. If you are looking to replace your 3 or 4 iron with the exact same distance, you need something with much higher lofts to do that in a hybrid club design. If your 4 iron is 20 degrees, you’re definitely going to need at least something in the 23-25 degree range to match that same distance, if not even an even higher loft. With how far hybrids are going these days, just getting similar lofts or hybrids with the same number as your iron to be replaced is almost certainly going to lead to WILDLY out of control distances, gaps that are multiple clubs wide at the top of your bag, and a lot of frustration if you aren’t expecting it.

No matter what irons you have, what hybrids you are looking for, what clubs you are or aren’t looking to replace, you need an in person fitting to see how far you would hit those hybrids. If distance gapping is important, that is not something that you can do online, you need to hit the clubs with your unique swing mechanics to see how far they would go for you.