Bench Notes / Delivery
The Bounce You Add by Opening the Face
Two golfers can play identical wedges and present two entirely different clubs to the ground. The stamped figure is a laboratory measurement. What reaches the turf is something you decide with your hands.
Here is an exercise worth doing at home. Sole a wedge on a hard floor exactly as you would at address for a normal pitch, then look at the gap under the leading edge. Now rotate the grip so the face opens twenty degrees and look again. The gap has grown noticeably, and nothing about the club has changed. You have just added several degrees of relief with your hands, for free, and you can take it away again just as easily.
That is the entire content of this note, and everything below is detail about how much, in which direction, and what it means for the number you should be buying.
Where the Stamped Figure Comes From
The figure on the hosel or the sole is measured with the club soled at its designed lie angle, the face square, and the shaft vertical when viewed from in front. It is a reference condition, and it is a perfectly sensible one for comparing two clubs on a shelf. The problem is that it describes a position that essentially nobody uses in play.
Real golfers arrive with the shaft leaning forward by anywhere from two to twelve degrees, with the face somewhere between slightly closed and wide open, and with the ball anywhere from off the back foot to forward of centre. Each of those three choices moves the delivered relief, and they stack.
| What you do | Direction | Rough magnitude |
|---|---|---|
| Lean the shaft forward | Removes relief | About one degree per degree of lean |
| Open the face | Adds relief | Two to six degrees across a normal range of opening |
| Move the ball back | Removes relief | Indirect, via the lean it encourages |
| Move the ball forward | Adds relief | Also indirect, and it changes low point |
| Widen your stance and sit lower | Usually adds relief | Small, but it also flattens the lie |
Run the arithmetic on a golfer who habitually leans the shaft six degrees forward and plays the ball centre with a square face. A wedge stamped at twelve is behaving like something closer to six by the time it reaches the ground. Now take a second golfer who hangs back slightly, opens the face a touch as a matter of habit, and plays the ball forward. That same wedge is behaving like a sixteen. One club, two golfers, ten degrees apart in what actually happens.
This is why fitting a wedge from a spec sheet is guesswork, and why we will not do it over the phone no matter how nicely you ask.
The Consequence for What You Should Buy
The golfer with heavy forward lean needs a higher stamped figure than a chart would suggest, because they are going to remove a large chunk of it before the club reaches the turf. Sell that golfer a low-relief wedge because they are a decent player and you have handed them something that digs on every soft lie in April.
The golfer who hangs back and opens the face needs a lower stamped figure than the chart says, because they are adding relief with their delivery. Give them a high number on top and the sole skids off firm August turf and the ball goes over the green.
Both of those golfers may have identical handicaps, identical swing speeds and identical home courses. Nothing in the usual fitting inputs separates them. Only watching them deliver a club into the ground does.
Practical Ways to Use This
Buy the club for the shot you cannot change
You can open a face when you want more relief. You cannot easily close it below square to get less, because closing the face on a wedge does other things you do not want, principally aiming it well left and delofting it. That asymmetry means it is safer to buy slightly under and add with your hands than to buy over and try to subtract.
Practise the addition deliberately
Opening the face is the most useful short game adjustment there is, and most mid handicappers either never do it or do it only in bunkers. Ten minutes on a practice green hitting the same forty-yard shot square, then twenty degrees open, then forty degrees open, teaches you what your own wedge does far better than any article can.
Watch what opening does to your aim
Opening the face points it right for a right-handed golfer, and the compensation is to open the stance and swing along it. Golfers who open the face without adjusting alignment produce a lovely high soft shot that finishes twenty feet right of the flag, then conclude the technique does not work for them.
How We Handle It in a Session
We watch the delivery before we touch the racks. Face tape on the sole as well as the face, because sole wear patterns show exactly where the club is contacting the ground and at what angle. Then we hit the same shot from a soft lie and a tight lie and see whether the golfer instinctively adjusts or presents the same club both times.
That last observation is the useful one. Golfers who instinctively adjust can be fitted closer to the edges, because they will self-correct. Golfers who present exactly the same club regardless of lie, which is the majority, need the middle of the range and a wider sole, because their equipment has to do the adapting for them. Neither is a criticism. They are just two different fitting problems, and confusing them is how somebody ends up with a wedge they cannot use.