Wedge Guru Bob Vokey on Tiger Woods's Setup, New Models and When Amateurs Should Get New Ones

Titleist's wedge expert has advice for how recreational players can avoid overthinking the many selections now available in the scoring clubs.

Bob Vokey was born in 1939 in Montreal, Canada. At 25, he left for the United States where he settled in Carlsbad, Calif., and pursued a career as a competitive golfer. However after realizing, as he puts it, that “my talent at golf was only going to take me so far,” he turned his attention to clubmaking. In 1976, Vokey opened his “Bob’s Custom Golf Shop” at Fallbrook Country Club in San Diego County. Vokey closed his shop 1986 to work with Gary Adams at TaylorMade Golf, which Adams started in 1979. In 1991 he helped Adams start the club manufacturing company, Founders Club.

Vokey joined Titleist in 1996 where his first project was to help complete the design of the popular Titanium 975 D driver. Soon after that, he began to specialize in wedges and is now one of the most recognized names in the golf club design and manufacturing industry. Effervescent, warm and always media friendly, Vokey has an unsurpassed enthusiasm for his work and the game of golf.

Recently Vokey talked to Sports Illustrated about his illustrious career and his newest creations, Titleist’s SM9 Vokey Wedges.

Sports Illustrated: How did you get into golf?

BV: Actually, my father was a golfer, and he was the one that led me into the game, and after moving to California as a young man, I started playing the mini-Tours. But I was hitting 3-woods into par-5s and these guys are hitting irons, so …

SI: So, you figured you needed to find something else to do.

BV: Right. That’s when I decided to focus on golf repair and designs, which led to me opening my own shop in the Carlsbad, Calif., area.

SI: Not long after that you met and went to work for Gary Adams, both at TaylorMade then at Founders Club, both of which Gary started? You designed all the different clubs there, not just wedges, right?

BV: Yes, I met Gary in the winter of 1979, 1980, right in there. He walked into my golf shop at with these boxes of metal driver heads wanting me to put them together into complete clubs. The only metal drivers I had seen were those old aluminum-headed ones you’d find at driving ranges a long time ago. I told Gary, “these metal woods of yours are driving range clubs; they’ll never replace persimmon woods.” A few years later, I’m working for Gary.

Bob Vokey has been Titleist's wedge guru for more than 25 years.  / Courtesy Titleist

SI: What did you learn about golf clubs from Gary Adams?

BV: Gary was clever and had a real can-do attitude. If I didn’t do something right with the design of a club, Gary would say, “Bob, that’s O.K, leave it like that … we’ll call it this … or that.” He’d come up with a name and a slot for in it and thoughts about how to market it. When I do anything today, I say to myself, "what would Gary say about this?” He’s always in my thoughts. He was a heck of a nice man.

SI: You went to work for Titleist in 1996, and not long after they asked you to head up their wedges for them. This was just a year before Tiger Woods turned pro, which he did as a Titleist player. Is there anything about the design or specs or adjustments of Tiger’s wedges back then you can share?

BV: We didn’t do much to them. He asked me to bend his 58-degree wedge to 56 degrees, which took some of the bounce off the club. But before bending, his wedges were clubs anyone could have bought off the rack. Tiger used those wedges during that run from ’98 to 2002 where he played some of the best golf most people will ever see.

SI: You often say that the Tour players are your the best “R and D department.” What then do you call the amateur golfers who play your wedges?

BV: They’ve been the best researchers too! The feedback from everyday golfers is just as important to me as the Tour players. I’ve learned from everybody.

SI: Let’s talk about wedge shafts. For many years, your stock shaft has been True Temper’s Dynamic Gold S200. How did you settle on that one for the stock shaft that golfers would find in your wedges?

BV: I did a shaft test with many of our Titleist club pros. I had them hit all kinds of shots with about 15 different shafts of all types. The question I put to them was “what shaft feels best?" The S200 came in on the top 5 of everybody’s list. Years ago, Tour players used cut-down 8-iron shafts to a wedge’s length and used it in their wedges, because that made their wedges flex a little softer than their irons for a bit more feel. Those shafts were no doubt as very close to flex and feel as our DG S200 wedge shaft.

SI: So, what led to your decision recently to begin to offer three lightweight wedge shafts in your stock offerings? Was it because so many amateurs and even some pros today play lightweight graphite or steel shafts in their irons, and you don’t want to see too big a weight discrepancy between, say, a 95-gram graphite shaft and your standard 130-gram steel wedge shaft?

BV: That has a lot to do with it. I’ve always believed that you wanted consistency going over from your irons into your wedges. Keep the same shaft in your approach wedge and your pitching wedge as you have in your irons, but when you get to the sand wedge and the 60-degree wedge, they can be a little different. That’s because with the sand and lob wedge you’re not making full swings most of the time, so you can do a lot of different things, even go to a shaft that’s lighter than those in your irons.

SI: Let’s talk about your new line, the SM9s, which have been designed to flight the ball lower. Why is that?

BV: We’re always working on the three keys to great wedge play, the first of which is shot versatility. This means having the right grinds on the bottom of the wedges for your game, for the shots you want to hit. The second key is distance and trajectory control, while the third is maximum spin. These two are inseparably related. So, generally hitting the ball low on the clubface with wedges is the optimum, because if you hit it too high on the face, you’re going to find the ball will balloon up too much into the air and come up short of the pin.

SI: So that’s why on the SM9 wedges you raised the club’s center of gravity in order to strike the ball low on the clubface?

BV: That’s exactly right. When you get that center of gravity in the right position, you’re going to get a lot better feel too. I’m a firm believer that when you get greenside, feel is so important.

SI: There are so many options with the Vokey line, the different grinds, bounces, lofts … what’s best for the amateur who has no clue as to what wedges to get for their game?

BV: I hear it a lot that “fitting is for better players” but that’s not true. We can fit anybody’s game. Our wedge selector tool on our Titleist.com website is a very good place for golfers to start, or even to make their decision. We did come to realize that nobody had a really good way for golfers to get fit indoors off mats, because the grind has everything to do with the club’s sole and ground interaction through impact. So, we launched a wedge fitting app that trained fitters use just over a year ago, which works really well even indoors off mats.

SI: So how does the golfer avoid overthinking all the wedge options available to them?

BV: Going to see your local PGA pro or a fitter. I would say go see a Titleist fitter because they’re well-trained and they’ll know exactly how to help you with all that’s involved. It’s not just the grinds, lofts and bounces that matter, it’s also the lie angle of the club, which is a much-overlooked aspect of fitting but one that’s so very important.

SI: How often do Tour pros change their wedges?

BV: The pros use what I call the "one, two, three, four rule." On average they change the pitching wedge once a year; the approach or gap wedges twice a year; they change three sand wedges, and four lob wedge changes a year. When the grooves on their wedges wear down, and they’ll see the ball rolling up the clubface faster and coming higher off the clubface with low spin, that’s when they get new wedges, because instead of the ball stopping four feet from the pin, they see it rolling out another six feet or eight feet past it.

SI: Should amateurs use the same wedge-changing rule?

BV: A good rule of thumb for the amateur is to replace their wedges is after 75 rounds of golf, maybe even 100 and with normal amount of practice. This doesn’t mean all of your wedges at once, but take a look at your most often used wedges.