At this week’s Valero Texas Open, as with virtually every PGA Tour event, if you carefully watch the driving range on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, you’ll see a fascinating host of supplicants tending to every conceivable need of the Tour stud.
Mostly white men, like the Tour, some are over 60 and in exceptional shape, joined by trim younger caddies in shorts and tanned muscled calves, pudgy agents pitching a photo shoot or new shoe deal, eager swing coaches, nutritionists, future tournament sponsors, photographers, a few reporters and, busiest of all, the technicians or tour reps from the club manufacturers whose 18-wheel trailers (“tour vans”) hover nearby.
One of them, Titleist’s Aaron Dill, can be seen emerging from the van dozens of times a day, walking intently with a club in hand or new instructions from a player circling in his brain. He’s been doing this almost two decades, but unlike his colleagues from TaylorMade, Cobra, PXG, Callaway, Srixon and others, he doesn’t handle drivers, irons, shafts, balls or putters.
He only does wedges.
Specifically, about 28 different models of the Titleist Vokey wedge, named for the Canada-born craftsman Bob Vokey, now 85, who came to Southern California in the 1980s, grew a reputation among Tour players and then joined Titleist in 1996. The Vokey wedge so dominates the Tour that Dill, whose official title is “Director Vokey Player Relations,” estimates this week in San Antonio about 100 of 156 players will use a Vokey. The Vokey stable would include Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas, Wyndham Clark, Ludvig Aberg, Cameron Young and Tom Kim, among hundreds of others at every level of pro golf.
“I was just a punk kid from Redding, California, in 2007, when I came to Titleist,” said Dill in his tight-but-spotless 8-by-12-foot workshop within the van, as he ground the last touches on a Masters-bound 60-degree lob wedge for Tom Hoge. A former club pro built along the lines of, say, Rickie Fowler, Dill is in a crisp short-sleeved shirt with Titleist and FootJoy logos. He’s juggling a dozen things but calmly looks you in the eye.
“Bob Vokey is and was a mentor to me. He would write every detail of what a player wanted on a little Titleist spiral notepad and keep them in a shoebox, like something my grandfather would do. Golfers are not always great at articulating what they’re feeling. They might just say, `The club is digging or sticking, or it’s too hot, too bouncy.’ They’re just responding to feel. They’re listening to and feeling the ball. Bob was great at translating all that into actual specs. He’s still a hero to me.”
Vokey was similarly impressed. “I first met Aaron at the Professional National Championship,” he recalls. “I asked, ‘Who is this guy running all over the place?’ I always knew that I could teach someone about wedges, but I can’t teach hustle and work ethic.”
Wearing his clear plastic lab glasses, Dill grabs a green felt-tip pen to draw an oval spot about the size of an apricot on the sole of a wedge, marking where he will be shaving off roughly 20,000th of an inch of metal to help a player’s wedge glide more smoothly through the TPC San Antonio bunkers. Such detailed grinding could be applied to the heel, toe, trailing edge, or leading edge, greatly affecting how a club works through the turf or sand, and how the ball reacts on impact. Vokey wedges, the retail variety, have a number of unique “grinds,” explained more fully here. One of the most popular Vokey grinds on Tour, says Dill, would be the “60T,” which Titleist says, “is ideal for a shallow angle of attack in firm conditions, with low bounce and a narrow crescent surface.” Here’s more wedge decoding: https://nextroundgolf.com/blogs/news/decoding-vokey-wedge-grinds-a-comprehensive-guide
Are You Getting the Spin You Want?
Dill starts the grinding process by choosing from dozens of stock and prototype clubheads he keeps in wide shallow drawers in his shop. Like most of his colleagues, Dill has memorized the exact specs – shaft length, stiffness, loft, lie, bounce, grind, grip style, thickness, etc. – of many of his players. Tapping his temple, Dill says, “I have Jordan Spieth right here.” (In 2017, at the Travelers Championship, Spieth famously holed out from a greenside bunker, with a 60-degree Vokey wedge, to win a sudden-death playoff at TPC River Highlands over Daniel Berger for his 10th career victory. “There’s a lot of pride when that happens,” says Dill.) According to PGAClubTracker.com, the most popular wedge on Tour is the new Vokey SM10 model, followed by the SM9 and three other Vokeys, usually in sets of a 46-degree pitching wedge, then a 50 gap, a 54 or 55 sand, and a 60-degree lob. Here’s a wonky discussion of the SM10 wedge https://www.vokey.com/nav/sm10.aspx#
It’s a humid, windy Tuesday morning on the San Antonio range, where things are about as chill as the row of elite ball strikers can be before a tournament, and Dill has time to do what he likes most. Patiently reading a player’s mood and his tasks at hand, he approaches their bags, grabs their Vokey and simply asks, “Are you getting the spin you want?”
That may elicit a shrug or a five-minute high-tech testimonial. Most players are deeply appreciative of the trailer techs, and some, like Justin Thomas or J.T. Poston, can talk wedgeology all day. “But you’d be shocked,” says Dill, “to know how many players have not been truly `fit’ to their wedges, even though they may be changing out their wedges every few weeks.” This means that world-class players may think they’re hitting a 60-degree wedge when it may actually be playing at 59 or 61, or worse. Something insignificant for the weekend amateur translates into this horror for a pro – about a half-degree in loft, depending on the wedge, could translate into as much as two yards in distance.
“I’m asking my rookies all the time,” says Dill, “when was the last time you got fit? So, can you imagine the people who just walk into a golf store and grab some wedges because they look really good and they never get fit to them?”
Yet, while precision is paramount in Dill’s craft and fortunes are invested in micro-incremental technical changes, he acknowledges that there’s also a psychological element to what he does. Sometimes, whether admitted or not, the player simply needs an expert’s assurance that his clubs are technically perfect, so that his mind can be freed of nuts-and-bolts doubt and flimsy excuses.
“At the end of the day,” says Dill, surveying a wedgeworks that creates some of the most complicated tools in sports, “I’m just selling confidence.”
Bruce Selcraig is a former staff writer for Sports Illustrated who has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic and Harper’s, among others. selcraig@swbell.net