Question: Every new driver lineup seems to have one model that’s marketed as the “most forgiving.” If I just buy that one, am I going to hit more fairways?
Answer: As much as I’d love to tell you that the most forgiving model will solve all your consistency problems, there’s more to it than simply picking up the one with the deepest center of gravity, which traditionally is the mark of forgiveness.
In fact, Chris Marchini, who runs golf performance and innovation for Dick’s Sporting Goods and Golf Galaxy, has stopped using “forgiveness” entirely during fittings—and his reasoning is hard to argue with.
“I don’t even use the term ‘forgiveness’ anymore,” he said on a recent episode of Golf Digest’s Club Lab podcast. “It’s antiquated, because it means something different for everybody who plays the game. Your most forgiving version might be an LS head, and you would have never considered that if you’d never taken advantage of a fitting.”
Marchini’s revelation is a good reminder of how each equipment category is sold to golfers. When a manufacturer calls something their “high-MOI head,” that’s a claim about where the head sits within their own lineup, nothing more.
“That’s TaylorMade’s high-MOI head, or that’s TaylorMade’s LS head,” Marchini said. “It’s different for everybody still within those parameters.”
The thing is, the manufacturer claim might not fit your game. In some cases, depending on your delivery and miss tendencies, the most forgiving driver for you might be the low-spin offering.
That claim runs against everything the category teaches golfers. Low-spin heads have historically been the ones sold to better players, marketed on lower spin rates and ball speed. Generally, they’re the least stable in the family on off-center strikes.
Marchini’s point isn’t that the physics are secretly reversed. It’s that the label describes the head, and the fitting describes you, and the only way to find out which one works best for your game is to hit all of the offerings, not just the one you’re being told is the most forgiving.
“Don’t just hit the driver that’s the parallel to what you’re playing right now, or what you’ve played in the past,” he said. “Hit the entire family. If you go into a Golf Galaxy and that fitter doesn’t say, ‘We’re gonna hit the entire family,’ I actually would be disappointed. Because you can see the differences and the gains that you might not be considering, and where they’re coming from.”
Marchini’s insights on forgiveness also align with some recent testing we conducted, where we put 74 drivers—going back to 2017—on the Golf Laboratories swing robot and impacted nine different spots on each face. Almost nobody buys a driver based on what happens when they flush it, because every modern driver is good out of the geometric center. This is why it’s good to have a chart like this (above) that highlights miss tendencies.
Find a driver that matches up with your most common miss, and you’re more likely to have a club that saves you shots on the course. That’s meaningful forgiveness. In some cases, it might not be the high-MOI model, as evidenced by Ping G440 LST’s prowess in nearly every impact location. That one is the low-spin offering in Ping’s lineup, but it does some amazing things at a moderate speed of 95 mph.
So the issue in a fitting isn’t which head is the most forgiving, but rather which head gives you a level of forgiveness that applies to your game.
Marchini frames it as a lane. Ask a golfer where their worst miss lives, and you’ll almost always get an immediate answer. If left is the problem, the goal is a club that lets the golfer aim from the center of the fairway rightward and take the left miss off the table.
So what should you do? First, find out where you’re hitting on the face. Use impact tape or powder foot spray on about 10 swings, and you’ll have your answer. This is the single most valuable piece of information you can bring to a fitting, and almost nobody supplies it.
Then, hit the entire driver family, not just the head that corresponds to what you play now, and even test the one you might have already decided isn’t for you—like the low-spin model if you’re an average-speed player. Marchini’s advice is that if a fitter doesn’t put you through the whole lineup, you should be disappointed. He’s right.
So stop thinking the “most forgiving” driver in the lineup will net you more fairways hit. You might wind up with that club at the end of a fitting, but it’s better to go in with an open mind.