WHATS NEW IN THE GAME


By Gary Van Sickle


High Heat’s new 3-wood puts ‘the love’ back in your game


since I had left knee surgery in 2015. You don’t care, I understand. But


P


it’s noteworthy because last fall I was effectively whiffing every club in my bag except one—the Knuth Golf High Heat 3-wood. The fact that it’s the only club I have confidence in now should tell you something. And it reminds me that I haven’t really loved a 3-wood, always my most cherished club back in the persimmon days, since the early Adams Tight Lies. Hey, that’s at least 20 years ago. I’m feeling the love again. The High


Heat 3-wood has a low, wide profile. It gives me the mental image of a rear fender from a 1958 Corvette. It is painted a glowing blue. I like the look. I love the result. When you make decent contact with the High Heat, the ball jumps off the face so easily, you almost don’t even feel it. That reminds me of how it felt when I hit the occasional home run a million years ago playing baseball. I first encountered the High Heat


3-wood and the new High Heat Hybrid at the 2016 PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando, where I hit a prototype at demo day. Dean Knuth, the club’s inventor, modified the 3-wood further before starting the manufacturing process, which delayed the club’s introduction until late last summer. The High Heat 3-wood is as


easy to hit high as a 5-wood but has the power and length of a 2-wood (if such a thing still existed). Knuth, a former Navy man who later worked for the United States Golf Association and invented the SLOPE rating system, created the High Heat 3-wood (along with the highly rated High Heat Driver and High Heat Hybrid) without the unlimited resources of the big equipment makers.


38 | AZ GOLF Insider | SPRING 2017


ardon me for sulking for a moment but there’s a reason behind my fine whine. My game has dropped off precipitously


“The major brands get tour


pros playing their clubs so they can advertise but they’re trapped making clubs for them,” Knuth said. “What about the average players, who can’t hit those clubs? “You have to have a deep and


low center of gravity and that’s nonexistent in the major brands. Their centers of gravity are forward and up. The other thing I did was work on the face. It’s a low profile but the face is eight millimeters longer than any other brand and that gives you a larger sweet spot, so you can hit it almost anywhere along the face.” A deep and low center of gravity


(COG) raises the moment of inertia (MOI), Knuth said, and makes the High Heat clubhead more stable. That also adds to the gear effect, which means that shots hit off the toe or off the heel will tend to come back toward the target line. “Hitting is believing,” Knuth said.


“We’ve got a 30-day guarantee because we’re sure people will like our product. We don’t get any returns. You’d think some people would say, ‘I’ll just hit it for a few weeks and send it back,’ but they keep it.”


Since leaving the USGA, Dean Knuth has spent his time developing the High Heat brand of golf clubs. His latest is the High Heat 3-wood.


Knuth came up with the original


High Heat driver eight years ago, making a clubhead out of pressed Russian titanium. I considered it the hottest driver in golf at the time. He produced only a limited run of those clubs, however, and didn’t continue because of the difficulty in obtaining materials from Russia and a wide variance in quality control. He brought out a new version of the


driver in 2015, then followed up with the 3-wood and hybrid in 2016. He knows that being a boutique golf manufacturer makes him a serious underdog. “I’ve gone my whole life with people


doubting me,” Knuth said. “I came up with a technique to find Soviet submarines but nobody believed me until they were shown the proof. I came up with a better way to rate golf courses and nobody believed me until they were shown the proof. All I can say, this is another development of mine that you have to see to believe.” High Heat clubs are available


online at www.knuthgolf. com ($299 for the 3-wood; $249 for the hybrid). n


Gary Van Sickle was the senior golf writer at Sports Illustrated and Golf.com for 20 years. He still writes about golf from his office in Pittsburgh.


www.azgolf.org


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