It’s a Fact!…I think?  Yup, it is!

What you are about to read below is an effort to apply some of the knowledge we, as clubmakers, have accumulated over the years.  A weak attempt maybe, but an attempt.  I started looking at the facts and figures and things began to happen.  Thoughts began to bubble, or maybe it was a gurgle; maybe that was my beer…whatever, it just wouldn’t stop.  Take a look.  This is world changing material.  This is the good stuff.  Stuff you can quote!  Remember you read it here first.

In a recent study, when individuals were asked, “What club would you throw away?”  38% stated they would throw away their 3 iron.  Another 8% stated they would throw away their 2 iron.  This means 46% of all golfers would throw away their longest iron.  With 26.5 million golfers in the US this means 12,190,000 golfers would throw away their longest iron.  Assuming they did throw them away and assuming the average longest iron is 39 inches long, if placed end to end they would stretch from New York City to St. Andrews, Scotland, The Home of Golf.  Or, in other words, a total of 7,503 miles.  (To be honest, I think that would only get you to the middle of the Irish Sea, but that isn’t as impressive.)  OK, Let’s assume instead we used these 3 irons for tomato stakes and each tomato vine produced 5 tomatoes.  Let’s assume each tomato produced 5 slices.  That would be enough tomato slices for 304.8 million Whoppers.

In this same study a lie angle change was needed, on at least one of the golfer’s irons, 99.9 % of the time.  The average correction was a 2 degrees more up right lie.  If we look only at the 5 iron, most researchers project a two degree more upright lie will direct a ball 20 feet further left at 150 yards.  With again, 26.5 million golfers, this would mean if they all hit their 5 irons at the same time there would be a yardage correction of 99,375 miles to the left.

It has been found that 28 out of 30 golfers are putting with putters that are at least one inch too long. If one inch of shaft were cut off each of these putters, that would mean 21,466,000 people would be able to putt better.  If we took that one inch of shaft and put it to better use, we could make 1,937,500 dinner forks, or 4,088,700 fingernail clippers, or 128,500 hub caps.  I suppose the next question then is, “Is that really a better use?”

The clubhead of a driver is in contact with the golf ball for 0.000450 seconds.  Therefore over 200 hits or about three rounds of golf can be played in the blink of an eye.  In the time it takes to quickly gulp a beer you could play a whole season.  Cheers!

There are 16,365 golf courses in the U.S., which cover 5,625 sq. miles, and another 448 courses are being built each year.  At this rate in six years there will be enough golf courses to cover the same area as the state of New Jersey (6,682 sq. miles).  Could you think of any better use for that State?

Think about this, if all 26.5 million golfers hit a ball at the same time, for those few seconds the balls were in the air, the earth would be 2,650,000 pounds lighter.

We find most golfers lift the club on the back swing instead of taking a nice turn and shifting their weight.  This also means the shift of weight back to the front is poor resulting in a push to the right.  Think about this, if we could get every golfer shifting 10 percent more of their weight on to the front foot at impact this would mean a better shot.  What else could it mean?  Well, if the average person weighs 150 lbs. and 10 percent, or 15 lbs. more was shifted forward, and every golfer in the US did this, it would mean a shift of 397.5 million pounds or 198,750 tons.  Now the real question…If every golfer faced East and swung shifting their total weight at the same time (3,975,000,000 lbs.), would this slow down the rotation of the earth enough to eliminate the need for an additional day on leap year?  Ok, this may be stretching things a bit.

Enough thought for a while.  If this gets you to thinking, please write those thoughts down, call a doctor immediately, then call us here at Pat Ryan Golf.  We love to hear them.