Hot List Or Hokey List

Posted by John

January 9, 2009

The much awaited, at least by some, Golf Digest Hot List for 2009 has just been released. Is this a useful tool for picking your next driver, irons, hybrid, wedge or putter? Or is it a lot of pandering to the same manufacturers who buy most of the advertising in the magazine?

This isn’t just a problem for golf, but for all sports with dedicated magazines that try and rate equipment. If you’re Golf Digest and Callaway is buying a lot of ad space, how do you come out with a ‘hot list’ and not give some of their clubs ‘gold medals’. If you want to keep them as advertisers it’s probably not a good idea. Maybe that’s why Golf Digest gives out gold medals like your kindergarten teacher gave out gold stars.

I’m not saying that the best clubs on the market didn’t make the list. It’s just that everybody seems to get a gold medal. I didn’t remember to count how many drivers got them, but the listing goes on for pages. And how about the rating categories; performance, innovation, look/sound/feel and demand?

If I’m buying a club I care about performance, but do I really care about the others. You can certainly make a case for look/sound/feel but those are very personal. What sounds like music to you may make my head ache. Technology is nice, but doesn’t mean a thing if it doesn’t effect performance. Demand? I don’t get it.

I do like reading what the testers had to say. It’s nice when a club you love, like the Ping G10 hybrid, gets rave reviews. Who doesn’t like validation? It’s also a good compendium of all the new clubs available, their relative pricing and a starting place for understanding performance. Maybe I’ll try the Ping Rapture driver this year because it got rated high in that area and I liked my old Ping driver a lot.

Bottom line; there’s definitely some good to the list, just take the gold medal stuff with a grain of salt. For a comparison, you can go to places like Rankmark and see what an independent rater comes up with . If you want to check on the Golf Digest street prices, I suggest you go to Budget Golf. They’ve dedicated an entire section of their site to all the clubs on the Hot List. I’ve found them to have great prices on equipment, so if you’re thinking of rebuilding your arsenal this year, it’s a good place to start.