Magic wands: the new graphite shafts are lighter, stronger, better. Should you make the same switch tour players are making?

Golf Digest, Feb, 2003 by Andy Brumer

The first thing people see when they walk into Kit Mungo's golf shop in Ventura, Calif., is 15 brightly colored custom-graphite driver shafts lined up against the shop's counter, as enticing as stick candy to an 8-year-old with a quarter to burn, and even more colorful with the Day-Glo purples, oranges, reds and yellows streaming in every direction. "My customers don't hesitate to reshaft these days," says Mungo. "If they're not happy with their drivers' performance, they'll change the shaft, not the driver."

Apparently, the only thing giving them pause might be the smorgasbord of shafts on display, because the golf shaft, especially the high-end graphite model, isn't mere appendage or affectation anymore. It's gained a marquee status all its own.

Even Tiger Woods, long a throwback with a steel shaft in his driver, toyed around with a graphite model at the end of last season. Like all of us, he was searching for a little more distance and thought he might find it with the latest shaft technology.

He isn't alone. More than 90 percent of PGA Tour players use graphite shafts in their drivers, according to the Darrell Survey, which tracks equipment use on tour. And they're not buying clubs off the rack. Though steel is the overwhelming choice for iron shafts, high-tech graphite shafts are becoming the rule in drivers.

"There's nobody on tour who plays the kind of stock shaft in a driver that you'd buy in a club off the rack," says PGA champion Rich Beem, who uses an Aldila Tour Gold shaft in his clubs. And where the tour goes, inevitably so goes the consumer.

Already at the Carl's Golfland retail stores in Michigan, an estimated 15 percent of customers want their new drivers equipped with custom shafts, and that number is growing. The switch-outs and custom orders are no small enterprise. Some shafts, such as the Fujikura Speeder 757 and the AccuFLEX Icon, sell for $300 installed, doubling the price of some drivers. Generally, custom shafts fall within the $50 to $200 range, a result of the grade of graphite, the manufacturing process (less resin, more graphite) and the intangible factor of star appeal.

"There are some people out there who will pay for the cachet of playing the top shafts on tour," says Mike Beal of Fuji-kura. His company scored its biggest coup when Woods used Fujikura's Pro 95 graphite model at the Disney Classic and Tour Championship last year, leading to a rush of requests at club-repair shops across the country.

Logic doesn't always reign when it comes to shaft demand. Kouros Kuo, a club-repair man at a shop near Los Angeles, says, "People come in here all the time and ask if we have `the Laker shaft.' " (It's a reference to the popular UST Proforce Gold graphite yellow shaft with purple trim.) "Even if I suggest a better shaft for their swings, they still want that one because of its colors."

Technologically, there is a discernible difference in the new shafts. Manufacturers seem to be getting closer to the paradigm of shafts being a perfect, weightless connection between grip and clubhead, but is the precision of these new high-end shafts beneficial only to the best players in the world?

Generally, all of these custom shafts have greater torsional stiffness than their stock shaft counterparts, or in equipment-speak "less torque." According to John Oldenburg, head of research and development for Aldila, "Torque is the most expensive thing to control in the manufacturing process." Not coincidentally, today's increasingly large titanium clubheads place more stress on the shaft than ever, especially at the tip end.

Al Jackson, president and chief of design for AJ Tech shafts, believes lower-torque shafts help all golfers. "Excessive torque reduces accuracy, because it makes the clubhead twist off-line on off-center hits," he says. "Because high-handicappers mis-hit the ball more often than pros, they may benefit from a better shaft even more."

But don't go overboard. "Only golfers with a very aggressive downswing, a very delayed release and a swing speed greater than 120 miles per hour should consider a torque measurement under 2.5 degrees," says Golf Digest Technical Panel member Tom Wishon, president of Tom Wishon Golf Technology.

The most tangible benefit of the shaft explosion might just be the supply of so many viable options. Benoit Vincent, vice president of research and development at TaylorMade, says even the 12 stock shafts in his company's line don't guarantee a perfect fit. "It's not a matter of custom shafts being better than stock shafts," Vincent says, "it's a matter of them being different and therefore complementary to what's already available."

Tom Cook Sr., 2002 Professional Clubmakers' Society International Clubmaker of the Year, says fitting the average golfer can be even more demanding than fitting the best pros, because with average golfers a clubfitter has basically one chance to get it right. Fortunately, the best clubfitters not only have a lot of shafts at their disposal, they have launch monitors and computer swing analyzers that can match the right shaft to the right swing. But don't expect the impossible.