Global Golf Post - July 18, 2011

BY JOHN STEINBREDER
Necessity, as we all well know,
is the mother of invention. And
nowhere in the golf equipment in-
dustry has the validity of that adage
been more apparent in recent years
than in the wedge category, where
clubmakers have quite ably adapted
to rule changes regarding grooves
that took effect on the major profes-
sional tours in 2010.
Consider, for example, what
Nike Golf has done with its
precision-forged, VR Pro wedge
line, which the company released

in hopes of creating more spin in all conditions. “This all started with a phone call from Stew- art Cink at the start of last year’s golf season,” says Tony Dabbs, product line manager for golf clubs at Nike Golf. “He had had a morning tee time and found the dew on the grass was creating flyers for him out of the fairways with the new, conforming grooves. He wondered what we could do
about that, and our guys went to
work on a solution.”
According to Dabbs, that so-
lution came in the form of new
grooves, dubbed X3X, and the way
they were laid out on the wedge
face. “The genesis of the name
came from the minimum spacing
rule for grooves, which decrees that
the land space between them must
be at least three times the width of

The Nike X3X wedge has a lasered cross-hatch
pattern between the grooves for more surface texture.

Nike VR Pro Wedges
Get Their Grooves On
this past spring. It put more
grooves on the clubface than in
previous models, and put them
closer together and deeper in an
attempt to ensure cleaner and
more consistent ball flight and
spin while still conforming to the
new regulations.
At the same time, Nike engi-
neers applied a laser cross-hatch
pattern to the land area between
the new grooves, adding three times
the surface texture versus conven-
tionally finished faces in the process
the actual grooves,” he says.