What Does a Pure Iron Shot Feel Like to You?

Feel is a difficult word to define for golfers.

Unlike many aspects of golf equipment, feel is subjective and emotional. There is a distinct challenge to pin down what feel means to each person, even for the best players in the world.

That was the impetus for this three-part “Finding Feel” docuseries from Titleist, a short trio of videos that explores the concept of feel and what that means to golfers.

As a golf nerd who lives for these kinds of 19th hole discussions, I was quickly hooked watching these clips. It’s a topic golfers are passionate about, regardless of how gear-crazy we are.

Titleist puts out surveys every year asking golfers what they want from their irons. Every year, the top response is feel.

Everyone agrees it’s important, but what exactly does feel mean?

The Challenge of Defining Feel

Part one of the docuseries starts with a question, and I invite all of you to share your personal answers down below in the comments:

What does a pure iron shot feel like to you?

The golfers in the video—amateurs and pros alike—are all stumped at first. How do you explain that moment when the club reaches impact and the result is immediate satisfaction?

Here are a few of their answers:

“When God and Adam are touching in the Sistine Chapel,” said amateur Bradford Wilson.

“It feels like the perfect wine pairing,” said amateur Brett Depue.

“Like hitting a ball of clay,” said Amanda Corr.

“It feels like the club and the ball are connected for just a little longer,” said PGA Tour player Cameron Young.

I’ll add my own answer here. To me, a pure iron shot is the absence of resistance. It’s kind of like hitting a baseball right on the label of the bat—you know within milliseconds that you’ve squared one up.

Club engineers are chasing these definitions for us, but it’s hard to do.

Making an iron by the numbers requires looking at distance, dispersion and angle of descent—but it also needs to feel like those subjective definitions.

“It’s a difficult problem for an engineer,” said Alan Hocknell, Titleist’s vice president, advanced research and innovation. “Because when you add complexity to the design of the club head, in order to gain advantages such as easier launch conditions or better off-center impact, these are naturally in conflict with the best feel performance.” 

Hocknell goes on to explain that Titleist puts in ample time figuring out how the human brain can process and discern feel so efficiently.

Can feel be measured by physics and detailed research? Yes, it can.

“It’s a big challenge developing a technical roadmap to try to describe or define something that quite frankly is emotive,” said Steve Pelisek, president of Titleist golf clubs.  

That Magic Moment

Less than half a millisecond. That is the amount of time that a golf ball and an iron are connected with each other at impact.

Part two of the docuseries explores everything that occurs at impact and how we perceive it.

There are a ton of variables involved with the feel of impact. How the club interacts through the turf, how the shaft is optimized for your swing and your feel through the grip are all factors.

But then there is also sound. You can close your eyes, hear a shot and know what it feels like without even being in the shot yourself.

Sound is absolutely critical to feel—some would argue it is the most valuable output because it says so much about impact.

In the video, Titleist researches go to the Western Electroacoustic Laboratory in Valencia, California, to gain a better sense of how to marry sound with club design. That laboratory hosts the largest civilian-use anechoic chamber in the United States (an anechoic chamber is a room designed to stop reflections or echoes of either sound or electromagnetic waves).

Clubmakers didn’t really consider the impact of sound on club design until about the mid-2000s when it became apparent how vital it was to players. Now Titleist records the audio of impact without any echo to get a perfect capture of that sound.

“When you take the recordings over 20 years, then you really start to have a catalog of what works,” said Chuck Golden, SVP of research and development. “From there, we can start to take an analytical approach and a predictive approach where we start to simulate acoustics in a virtual environment.”

The challenge is that every different part of an iron head has a different mode of frequency.

To get one cohesive sound that appeals to golfers, Titleist researchers will run virtual experiments with and without certain parts of an iron to see how it manipulates the sound frequency.

The recordings match up with the “signature” combination of all the parts, making feel just as much of a priority as performance is when it comes to design.

“When we began it was how much loss in terms of feel could we tolerate engineering all of this performance into a club,” said Marni Ines, director, product development at Titleist. “Now we are asking the question, ‘How can we have it all? How far can we push this?’”

What the Best Players Feel

Every golfer feels something different. With that being the case, Titleist leans on its stable of top players to help create an iron with the best feel.

In part three of the series, we get to see the pros react to trying the latest Titleist T-Series (T100, T150, T200 and T350) iron family that launched on the PGA Tour last year.

Players get to try the T350—a game improvement iron they typically wouldn’t play—and come away impressed with the feel.

“We always afforded ourselves a little more leeway in the game improvement category,” Ines said. “But we asked ourselves, ‘Why can’t we engineer the same level of feel to the 350?’”

Golfers often want to play irons with the feel of blades, but not everyone has the precision to play those clubs. But when the T350 has a feel on par with the T100, that removes barriers and allows players to choose whatever clubs allow for the best performance.

“Engineering feel, particularly in irons, is a perpetual challenge because we actually have to delight golfers, make them fall in love with our product,” Hocknell said. “That as an engineering problem to me is absolutely fascinating.”

Through all the studies, there is one question Hocknell and the Titleist staff is chasing.

“After all of the physics have been applied, does it actually make us feel good?”