There’s a lot of excitement in the air at this time of year. How can you beat the Christmas season? When you’re out and about, taking some time off, meeting with friends, enjoying a long lunch and doing a little shopping, we hope you’ll stop by the Golf Lab.

If you haven’t been by the Golf Lab since we installed our Max Out Shaft Max and Launch Max fitting systems, you should stop by to update your fitting. Fitting for flex by swingspeed alone is not reliable. Before we make a recommendation for shaft flex, shaft weight and bend profile, we want to know how a player “loads” the shaft in his swing. The Max Out Shaft Max makes that possible. It is an instrumented club, wired with sensors in the vertical and horizontal planes. When you swing, it plots shaft deflection against a timeline. The result is a “fingerprint” of your swing. If you are a senior player, fitting yourself with softer and softer flexes, you absolutely need to test your swing with the Shaft Max. We are fitting a much higher percentage of senior players with stiff and even extra stiff shafts based on testing results.

The ultimate step in fitting a driver is to find out what happens to the ball. The Max Out Launch Max takes two pictures of the ball, microseconds after it leaves the club. We find out the ball speed, launch angle and spin with the highest degree of accuracy of any system. With that information and our computer model, we can tell you exactly how efficiently your driver is performing – and your potential. With precise Launch Max data, we can dial in your driver to the perfect specification. We do that with head shape, moveable weights, loft and the flex, length, weight and bend profile of the shaft we choose. There is no better system for precise driver fitting. If there’s going to be a new driver under your tree, make sure it fits you.

Our launch monitor testing has turned up some “hot” heads that for some unknown reason seem to get the ball going four or five MPH faster than normal. As usual, you can find out exactly how much better your new driver performs. If it doesn’t perform, you don’t take it home.

For a full review of the SUMO Squared by Leith Anderson, Click Here

View Leith's picks for "The Best of 2006"

If you haven’t read the original book yourself, we’ve got some of the hardbound copies. Anyone who is interested in how and why golf clubs work needs to read “The Search” book.

If you’re interested in buying a classy gift for yourself or someone very special, we have one set of Mizuno’s limited edition “MP-100 Commemorative Irons” created to celebrate Mizuno’s 100th birthday. This set comes with its own display case. We bought one of 2006 sets that were manufactured to show we were good Mizuno sports. The set is intended to retail for $1900 That’s too much for a set of irons unless you can capitalize them as a business asset and depreciate them. So, we’re going to let this set go for a song. (Give us a call and we’ll sing it for you.) If you want to do something really decadent, you can put them in your bag and play them. They’re a classic muscle back blade, reminiscent of the new MP-67.

All the best,

Leith, Bob, Clint, Heather, Eric, Patrick, Andrew and Michael