Brian Beaky, CG Editor

There’s nothing quite like the PGA Merchandise Show, the annual trade show in Orlando where the manufacturing world’s heavy hitters roll out their new product releases for the world’s leading golf retailers (yes, including our own Puetz Golf), who in turn decide what products — and in what quantity — they want to sell in their stores in the coming year. A successful club launch at the PGA Show can mean hundreds of millions of dollars for a company like Callaway or TaylorMade, while a bad review can have an equally crippling impact. With so much riding on success at the show, it’s no wonder that these same companies pour millions into product development. Over the past three years, it seems that the technological developments in golf club manufacturing have entered warp speed — almost coinciding perfectly with the life of this magazine. The buzz phrase at the annual PGA Merchandise Show in January 2007 was “moment of inertia” — drivers and irons with high MOI promised a higher trajectory and less spin, the perfect combination for a long, sweet shot. Five months later, we published the very first issue of Cascade Golfer, introducing our readers to the concept of MOI and highlighting a few of the products that — we would soon discover — had kicked off a new era of innovation and development unlike any we’ve ever seen. In the 34 months since that first issue was published, we’ve seen the development of interchangeable shafts and adjustable weights, clubs with polymer inserts and others with laser-etched grooves so deep and biting, the PGA has had to legislate them out of the game (though not entirely out of the bags of certain two-time Masters champions). You may think that, with all this development behind them, golf club manufacturers couldn’t possibly come up with something new again this year. You’d be wrong. From Adams Golf to Titleist and beyond, the floor at this January’s PGA Show was packed wall-to-wall, hitting cage to hitting cage with things we never thought we’d see in a golf club, from drivers with clubheads filled with nothing but air (compressed air, mind you, but still just air), to others with shafts made not of steel or graphite, but both — steel to reduce flex, and graphite to reduce weight. We’ve filtered through the dozens of new products and picked out a few that we think are worth a mention. They’re not necessarily the flashiest, or the most advanced – but they’re our favorites.