When selcting irons, the two main considerations that come into play are: A) How do they look or feel and B) How close can I hit them to the target?
Rankmark, on the other hand, simply asked the testers to hit groups of 6 or 7 and pick the 4 best. We thought we had twenty manufacturers' clubs to begin with, however Adams decided not to submit clubs, the only ones, I might add, out of the twenty choosing not to participate. Over sixty total sets of clubs were submitted if you take into account that each manufacturer was asked to provide three different shafts (stiff, regular, & senior). A few manufacturers wanted to send six clubs, two different sets with three shaft configurations for each.
We then divided the testers into 2 groups, those with 15 or higher handicaps (average players) and those with 14 or less catagrozing them as "better players".
Average Player Choices When the average player group produced their first vote, the six they initially picked were:
* Taylormade R9 * Ping G15 * Cleveland HB3 * Callaway Diablo Forged * Nike SQ * Yonex Nanospeed 3i
In this Rankmark test, the top 4 are considered "Best of the Best". When asked to narrow it down to four it got harder.
