Introduction to golf clubs

Golf is essentially about hitting a small white ball from point A to point B, where point B is a small hole in the middle of a patch of very short grass.

Golf clubs are the tools you use to hit the ball progressively closer to (and eventually into) that hole from your starting position.

Now we could presumebly take a wooden stick and use that to whack the ball again and again until we reach the hole. The problem with that is it’s not too efficient. We can come up with a stick better suited to the job in hand - we call this “stick” a golf club.

But there are two problems with finding the ideal golf club.

1. The distance between the ball and the hole on a golf course varies between an inch or two and several hundred yards. A club designed to gently prod a ball into a hole from a distance of two feet isn’t best suited to thumping it long distances through the air (and vice versa).

2. The terrain your ball is lying on isn’t uniform either. Sometimes it’s nice smooth low-cut grass. Sometimes it’s sand. Sometimes it’s deep uncut grass. A club suited to plucking a ball up out of sand isn’t much good on a smooth lawn surface.

To solve these problems, golf has come up with a whole bunch of different clubs for you to choose from while playing. So you can select the club best suited to the current position of ball and hole (in fact, selecting the right club for the right shot for the right situation is part of the challenge of the game).

Through time, certain types of clubs have established themselves as best suited to golfing needs. So you have clubs designed for hitting the ball long distances (drivers and woods), clubs designed to pitch the ball short to medium distances to the desired location (irons and wedges), and clubs designed to guide the ball smoothly over a flat surface (putters).

So there is now a kind of accepted set of clubs that every golfer is expected to carry to offer the right tools for the job in hand. This normally consists of something like a putter, a driver, a couple of woods, a set of irons and a wedge or two.

You may be wondering why golfers don’t carry around more clubs that they seem to - after all, you can’t have enough choice. You might also wonder why clubs don’t come fitted with jet propulsion methods and electronic guidance systems, to improve results.

The answer is that the administrative bodies that govern the game have a set of rules and regulations which limit the number and design of golf clubs you can use on the golf course.