We caught up with TaylorMade’s Director of Product Creation, Matt Bovee, to talk all things MG5 and how these wedges can improve your short game.
Hi everybody. You know, when it comes to wedges, uh there’s feel and then there is forged feel. Talking about the new Tailor Made MG5 wedges with director of product creation, irons and wedges, Matt Boie. Hey, Matt. How are you? I’m good, Hugh. Always great to see you. Yeah, great catching up with you. So, uh we’re all very excited about the the new Tailor Made wedges, forged wedges for the first time. Why? Ultimately, feel is the short answer there. Um, you know, there’s a a longer story to that, but really we we believe that feel is paramount when it comes to having um confidence in your short game, a great short game. You talk to the players with the best short game, right? Um, they have incredible feel. That club is like an extension of their hands, their arms, their brain, they know what that shot’s going to feel like before it ever comes off the club face. And to have the best feel, you need to have the best amount, like best feedback. and to have the best feedback, the best feel with a wedge, it needs to be forged. And that’s ultimately how we got to this this forging uh decision for MG5. Create the best possible feel so players can get that feedback. I was going to ask you about the the the feedback you’ve gotten from not only tour players, but players almost at every level, right? Yeah. I mean, we test obviously with tour players. We also have a wide array of staff professionals with Tailor Made that we’ll do preliminary testing with and we do all sorts of player testing inside the R&D space as well. They’re definitely appreciating and picking up on the Forge difference. Uh Greg Cesario uh who is part of our wedge design team. He was just out on tour uh this past week at the Windham and got a lot of great feedback as we debuted MG5 with them and and multiple comments about how good that wedge feels. And people keep telling us that and it’s just perfect validation. And I mean, you love to hear it after you put so much time and energy into creating something that you’re hoping feels the best as we’ve ever created, and it certainly seems to be resonating. Were the players telling you that there was a noticeable difference between the MG4 and the MG5 in terms of feel? Is it like a a revolution or an evolution in this case? I mean, they’re definitely picking up on the feel. They uh like the feel and they like the feedback that they’re getting. Is it a revolution or an evolution? I think that’s going to be dependent upon player. Um, I definitely think that it’s a it’s it’s on the cusp, right? It’s certainly an evolution forward. Um, it’s no secret that forge product feels better. Like that’s just generally accepted by the golf community and and again, that’s a road that we want to go down. So, if you want the best feel, it’s got to be forged. And there’s a lot of different ways to do forging. This is a single piece solid body forging. Um, which is going to give you the best feel. Yeah. and and then we’re talking about feedback from tour players, but obviously these these wedges, there’s something in there in the and we’re going to get to the different grinds in a bit, but there’s something in there for everybody. Yeah, 100%. Um, if you only thought about designing products for tour, you’d be missing out on 99.9% of the market, right? Um, so we want to make sure that we have stuff, uh, grind offerings and wedge designs that your average golfer is going to be able to utilize and find success success with. And that’s when you get into our different grind options, I think, is a big piece of that. Some nice shaping changes that I think that they’ll appreciate. Uh, one of which is designed to inspire a little confidence. And then other performance upgrades like a new groove, which is going to give you more spin, and not just more spin, but more spin consistently. And that’s how you have control over your wedges. So there’s a lot for the average player. Nice segue into my next question. Actually, it was about the grooves. Wedges are all about grooves. They are scoring clubs, right? So, so you need them to work exactly the way you want them to work. Talk about some of the new technology in this groove pattern. Yeah. So, totally new groove pattern for us on MG5. Um, and it’s a more aggressive groove design. It has sharper radi and steeper draft angles, which is going to help provide a little bit more grip or grab on the ball. Um, and really that’s born out of a manufacturing change for us where we are uh cutting the grooves into the head using a new method which allows us to have tighter tolerances over those grooves. And as you can imagine, the tighter your tolerances are, the more control you have over that, the more you can push towards those conformance limits. And when it comes to groove geometry, there’s a lot of different conformity rules and and ways to push that. The way that we’re doing that is again with that steeper draft angle, sharper radius at the edge to really provide some of that grip, which is giving you more spin uh overall and most notably when you’re getting the non ideal conditions, right? When you have a little bit of moisture between the ball and the club face, which I think so many players underestimate how much that impacts their golf shot and how little moisture it takes. It does not have to be raining. It’s just like a little bit of dew on the grass can completely change your launch and spin numbers. Um, this groove in combination with that spin tread technology, updating that pattern on the face, uh, it both of those things providing more spin, more consistency. Yeah. And and obviously spin is what we want certainly around the green. Like I say, these are your scoring clubs. Uh, one thing we did notice with the MG4, when our director of instruction, Kyle Gordon, and I were testing the MG4 is, we actually wet the the the club face, and we found that the spin didn’t go down all all that much. So, you’re saying this is an even better scenario for wet conditions with the MG5. Yeah. No, 100. Yeah, exactly. Um, so really our goal is to retain as much spin as possible. MG4, fantastic performing wedge. best performance wedge we’ve had to date. This new group really even kicks it up a notch further. And the reason we’re always striving like the reality is you’re probably never going to retain 100% of the performance, but if we can retain as close if our goal is 100%. You know, we want to get as close to that as we possibly can. Um providing performance consistently is just a huge part I think of tailor made of our R&D team of our culture. Um, in the case of wedges in this embodiment, I think talking about using a tour player as an example, uh, you know, they they flip tea times Thursday to Friday, right? So, if you have a afternoon tea time on Thursday, it’s the winds come up, it’s dry, it’s baked out, you’re going to get a ton of stopping power. Um, as you will with a lot of different wedges. When you turn around, you play that early morning round on Friday and there’s dew and moisture in the grass, that’s when things are going to change, but you still need performance that you can count on. Same thing with, you know, the average weekend player. Well, the stakes aren’t as high. Like sometimes you got a morning tea time, sometimes you got an afternoon tea time, sometimes you’re in the fairway, sometimes you’re in the rough. You just like, you want spin that you can count on, and that’s what this is designed to do. So, you are getting better spin retention out of MG5 than MG4, which I think is huge. We’d mentioned that there is something for everybody in this lineup. There are six different grind patterns. Uh, let’s talk a little bit briefly about each one. Let’s start with LB. Okay. Yep. So, LB stands for low bounce. As you as you might have guessed, it designed for players that are on more firm conditions, tighter conditions, or have a little bit more shallow angle of attack. Um, another way to look at that is players that can really kind of control the low point of their short game. Um, so it’s usually going to be a player that’s got a decent set of hands on them. Uh, but it doesn’t have to be by any stretch. Sometimes when you’re just you’re shallower at the ball, you want that leading edge to be a little bit lower to the ground. A lot of versatility built into this. Compared to MG4, it’s going to play like it’s actually got a little bit less bounce. So that’s kind of the gist on that. That one’s for firm, tight, more shallow, or you just have good control of your wedge game. Okay, let’s move on to SC, the SC grind. So this one’s built off the back of SBC on MG4 for anybody who might be familiar with that. Just some subtle refinements here. Traditional C grind. This plays on the low to midside. um mid area of bounce, which allows that leading edge to sit like nice and tight to the ground, but a lot of heel and toe relief so that you can open this up and really manipulate the face. We This is a good wedge for anyone that um it gets creative with their short game, right? Uh has good imagination in terms of how you’re going to hit shots, high shots, low shots, whatever you’re dealing with. This is a great wedge when it comes to being someone who likes to play with versatility. And we have the the all allrounder, the SB grind. Yep. SB, so four-way camber on this one. It’s intended to work for a wide array of swing types and turf conditions. So, you know, from like medium firm all the way up to like, you know, your your medium softer conditions, which is going to be the vast majority of what people play on short of maybe unless you’re in like the UK and it’s like really really firm conditions. Also designed for people that are steeper or or also on the shallower side. It’s a great all-around wedge. The four-way camber allows us to do that with having some versatility built in. good out of the bunker. Really like it’s it’s the wedge where like it just it fits a lot of players games and that live in in that mid-bounce world. Yeah, it’s like the utility infielder in baseball. You can do a little bit of everything. Exactly. Uh next up we have the HB grind. Obviously stands for Hugh Burl. Uh thank you for that by the way. You get the royalty check. Not yet. I’m still waiting but I’m sure it’s coming any day now. Yeah. I certified male. You think I did? High bounce, right? High bounce. Yep. And this is a perfect for anyone that’s a little bit steeper or plays in really soft conditions. So, uh, again, a lot of leading edge protection here, but we wanted to make sure that we’re offering a high bounce wedge that has versatility built in. So, when you look at the sole, there’s lots of heel relief. Um, and you can go through and you can really open this thing up and still play a lot of good shots with that. So, it’s forgiving, provides some protection, but you’re not sacrificing on versatility. And we’ll wrap it up with the TWW grind. Geez, what does that stand for? I’ll give you one guess. Yeah, so MG5 Tiger Grind. Uh that’s been uh uh something players have have looked for from us in the past. So we want to keep that in our lineup, but it has been updated with Tiger’s latest preferences when it comes to wedge design. So when working with him, he wanted to modify his 60 specifically to have a little more bounce on that leading edge. So you’ll notice if you were to compare MG4 Tiger to MG5, that leading edge looks different. there’s not as much of a pronounced bevel on the front. And then there’s also less heel relief than there has been in the past. So that’s just something the way that Tiger is looking at his short game and a change that he wanted to make. So we wanted to offer that to players. If you want to play with Tiger’s playing, you got the carbon copy. Matt, you’re excited about these. I’m excited about these. All of us at Golf Town are excited about the new MG5 wedges from Tailor Made. Uh six different grinds. To find out which one is best for you, just simply head to your local golf town and talk to one of our master club fitters. Matt Boie, thank you so much. Yep, my pleasure. Hugh.
