So which Golf Clubs are in a Basic Set? So here’s my main full set of golf clubs, and in this full bag of clubs, I’m allowed to carry 14 clubs around the golf course. I don’t have to take that many with me, but I’m allowed to take 14 and as you get better, I’d encourage you to carry 14 clubs because each club is built and designed to do a specifically different job and each club is actually designed to basically make my life as a golfer easier. Some people look at a big set of golf clubs like this, they’re a bit daunting, they’re not sure what each one should do and they get confused by them. But honestly each club will make your life a little bit easier.
The major golf clubs in this set are actually broken down into a couple of different basic families. We have the family of the irons and there’s the most of those, and then we have the woods. Now the woods are so called because historically they were made of wood about 20 years ago, all golf clubs in this family were made of woods, or actually made of wood sorry, but now they’re metal or steel or titanium and we have a great big club head, a very long shaft and actually not a great deal of angle on the club face, and this one specifically is my driver, and the driver is also numbered as the 1 wood. Now the 1 would being a low number, hits the ball low to the floor and hits the ball a very long way. So this is often the golf club that we would tee off with first on our very first shot on each hole. So it’s a big head, the longest shaft and it actually has a head cover, now the head covers are purely for vanity just so that we don’t scratch the paintwork on the top of the club head. Somebody once asked me whether this was to keep the driver warm, which I thought was a nice idea but it’s not actually the case, so your head covers go on your woods just to keep them looking nice.
Then after the drivers and the woods, we have this little chap. Now this is a hybrid golf club, hybrid golf clubs have been big in the game for about the last 10 years. Now hybrid golf club is effectively half an iron and half a wood, so it kind of sits between the two families, often these might be referred to as rescue clubs, quite versatile clubs, lots of different shots that you can hit with hybrid clubs and we’ll talk about those later as well.
And then we’ve got the irons, so the family of irons, they don’t have the big bulbous bit on the back. Now all the different numbered irons change the height the golf ball flies and also the distance the golf ball flies, so if I take my longest iron, which is my 3 iron and my shortest iron which is my sand wedge, now my 3 iron and my sand wedge, you can see they're different lengths, and different loft angles on the club face. So, the angle on the face here on my sand wedge would hit the ball quite high and my loft angle here on my 3 iron would hit the ball quite low. So the difference in the lengths, and the difference in the loft, produces different heights and different distances to the shots. Just to keep it simple so you can remember the way that works; the higher number, the higher the ball will go, the lower the number, the lower the ball will go, and if it goes lower, it will actually roll further and the high number goes up in the air but doesn’t go very far when it comes down.
You also got to understand where the wedges fit into this set. So within a set of golf clubs, we have 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 iron, then we a pitching wedge and the sand wedge, it will say on the bottom P or PW or S or SW for pitching wedge and sand wedge. Now you can think of the pitching wedge as the 10 in your set, and you can think of the sand wedge as the 11 in your set, so 3 through to 11. The higher the number of the club, the higher the ball will go up into the air.
Also in your bag, we will have a putter. Now a putter is often the club that you’d use the most on a golf course, because this is the one that would generally get the ball into the hole. Slightly different to the other clubs it has very little or no loft on the club face, it’s a completely different design around the back, you can also have a line on the back to help you aim it into the right direction, and actually it’s the only club that’s allowed to have a square grip which when you first pick it up can feel a little bit funny in your fingers, but it is designed to help you point the club in the right direction.
So there we’ve got the woods, the hybrids, the irons, and then the putter, and that’s everything that I would need in a full set of golf clubs. Remember you’re allowed to carry up to 14 but you don’t have to have that many in your first set. I hope that makes things a bit clearer for you.