DRIVE FOR SHOW

The driver is a golfer’s most exciting club, and one that has changed dramatically over the past several decades

- JEFF WILLIAMS

No club in a golf bag provides more excitement, more exhilaration, more exclamation points to a player’s game than the driver. It’s your own personal blunderbuss, your hammer of Thor, your bolt of lightning that you can wield against your Saturday foursome or during a weekday pickup game. It’s the ultimate extension of your golfing ego.

After all, the driver is likely to be the club that you use right from the first tee, the club that magnifies your strength, maximizes your satisfaction. Sure, the putter ultimately determines your score, your wedges help save the day and any of the other clubs in your bag can provide a thrill now and then. But let’s face it, when you outdrive your best bud by 20 yards, regardless of the final score, there is a certain smile. And everyone dreams of reaching 300 yards. Maybe, just maybe, there’s hope.

The golf club companies know this. That’s why they invest millions upon millions of dollars in driver technology, looking for newer, lighter, more responsive materials and designs that fuel the driver mantra of “longer, straighter, more forgiving.”

Given all of its attention, the driver is also the golf club that has evolved more than any other in the last 40-odd years, morphing from the wooden persimmon drivers (and weren’t some of them just gorgeous?) to the new-age composite material behemoths that we play today.