The Best Buy in Golf? It's low-price balls. Here's why

Golf Digest, July, 2002 by Mike Stachura

Cheap is good.

In fact, lower-price golf balls are not just a whole lot better than they used to be, they may be as good for your game as the priciest of balls. That's because the difference in performance between golf balls that cost $35 or more a dozen and those that retail for $25 or less can be much less than the price tags suggest. Nowadays, lower price is not necessarily an indication of lower performance, especially if you're a golfer of average skill.

Frank Thomas, who tested thousands of golf balls as technical director for the U.S. Golf Association, puts it this way: "Ninety percent of the golf equipment made today is better than 90 percent of the golfers' ability to utilize it. For most of us, we don't have to pay a lot of money to get a very acceptable ball and one which is generally better than we are."

Unquestionably, many of the new lower-price balls have benefitted from technology that has trickled down from high-end models. As a result, "The degree of trade-offs between the extremes is not as significant as it used to be," says George Sine, vice president of golf ball marketing for Titleist.

Two-piece balls feature a solid core and firm shell often made of Surlyn, a less-expensive but more shear-resistant material than the urethane covers of high-end balls. Not only is the material less expensive, it gives the typical golfer what he wants, says Dave Branon, former chairman of Dunlop Slazenger Group Americas. "The most desired characteristic in a ball, according to consumer studies, is distance, and it is the least expensive attribute to buy."

Today's premium balls are typically multilayer in construction--a solid core is surrounded by a thin hard mantle and soft-feeling cover made of urethane or a similar elastomer. "This is the combination that the very best golfers want," says Thomas, who now serves as Golf Digest's Chief Technical Advisor. "All golfers can benefit from using this type of construction, but all may not need it. And it is an expensive product."

Think of a multilayer ball as a two-piece distance ball encased in a tour-caliber cover. As such, multilayer golf balls such as the Titleist Pro V1, Precept Tour Premium LS, Strata Tour Ultimate 2, Nike Tour Accuracy, Maxfli Revolution and Callaway HX offer the distance benefits of harder-feeling, lower-spinning two-piece balls off the tee while providing softer feel and more spin around the greens.

But here's the beauty of cheap: The two-piece ball also has a few new tricks up its sleeve, even as ballmakers are holding the line on prices or reducing them. On the outside, there are newer, softer forms of Surlyn. On the inside, the cores of some of the hottest "value" balls are much softer than the two-piece "rocks" of old. Indeed, overall compression ratings for some of the latest two-piece balls have dipped into the 60s, even 50s--versus the 90- and 100-compression ratings common a decade ago--without sacrificing playability for most golfers.

Increasingly, many balls on either end of the price spectrum hover in the same range of cover hardness and core softness (see chart, opposite page). On average, the best-performing lower-price balls have a 10- to 15-percent lower (or softer) compression rating than high-end balls, while their covers can be about 20-percent harder than high-end balls, sometimes less.

Although the compression of a ball is only one factor in its overall performance, the softer-core value balls are designed to give average swingers the opportunity for more distance off the tee. "They're better for the player with a medium to slow swing speed--the balls come off the face faster because they can be compressed more easily," says John Calabria, vice president of research and development at Dunlop Slazenger Group Americas and a member of the Golf Digest Equipment Panel.

Precept led the charge to high-performance/lower-price balls with the giddy success of its low-compression MC Lady, followed by the rollout in January of the even softer Laddie. Other ballmakers have rushed into the market created by the Lady. Maxfli's Noodle is a low-compression distance ball that sells for less than $20 a dozen. Even cheaper is Dunlop's LoCo, short for Low Compression. Titleist's hot-selling NXT has a compression in the same range as the Lady. ("People think it's the affordable version of the Pro V1," says Greg Milligan, owner of Bobick's Pro Shop in Grange, Ind.) And the grandfather of all two-piece balls, Spalding's Top-Flite brand, has a low-compression option in its new XL 3000 line, the Super Feel, which sells for $18 a dozen.

Traditionally marketed as durable distance balls, many lower-price models now offer short-game performance sufficient to satisfy even expert players. Says Sam Farlow, an Alabama state senior amateur champion who has played the Precept MC Lady: "It doesn't bite quite as well with a chip shot, but other than that it really doesn't have a weakness. It seems to be the kind of ball that works out well for everybody."