Equipment
What clubs are in a golf set?
A full golf set covers five categories — a driver, fairway woods, irons, wedges and a putter — and the Rules of Golf cap the total at fourteen clubs in the bag for any round that counts.
The driver is the longest club and lowest lofted, built for maximum distance off the tee. Fairway woods and hybrids sit below it, used from the tee on shorter holes or from the fairway on longer approaches. Irons make up the bulk of most sets, numbered by loft — lower numbers hit further and lower, higher numbers shorter and higher — with modern sets often replacing the hardest-to-hit long irons with hybrids. Wedges cover the short game: pitching, gap, sand and lob wedges, each with progressively more loft for shots closer to the green and out of bunkers. The putter finishes the set, used almost exclusively on the green. The R&A and USGA cap any competing set at fourteen clubs total — carry a fifteenth and, in stroke play, it's two strokes for each hole where the breach happened, capped at four strokes a round; in match play you lose a hole per breach, to a maximum of two. However many are in the bag, our golf gifts for men mark the course they're carried round, alongside how you actually hold one.
Written by Craig Fearn, The Golf Gift Co.
From the journal