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Collin Morikawa got out of an Uber outside of the hallowed walls of The Kingdom on a sunny September morning having no clue what to expect. The two-time major champion knew he was in Carlsbad to test irons but didn’t have much more detail than that. He walked onto The Kingdom’s main tee and saw a tent, a table, two laptops, two launch monitors and 11 different copies of the same exact looking irons.
“So, how is this going to work?” he asked. It was a genuine question at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, a funny one because nobody really knew the answer. There was a clear process and end goal in place, but the events to get there was completely unknown.
“It was kind of like a choose your own adventure book,” TaylorMade’s Director of Iron Product Creation Matt Bovee said. “We felt great about our plan, but it was completely up to Collin to get us to the final result.”
To get to the final result, first you have to understand Collin. This is the oral history of how TaylorMade built Collin Morikawa his custom P·7MB’s, the P·7CM’s.
Adrian Rietveld, Senior Tour Manager: “Collin is very unique to work with. He’s very different. If you look at his spec, it’s a spec some would call unorthodox. If somebody went in there and just looked at his spec and they changed even the smallest thing, he would notice that and would say, ‘There’s no reason to change that. Why have you changed that?’”
Scott Taylor, Principal Engineer Advanced Design: “Collin came out to The Kingdom a year and a half ago and when we discussed switching to new irons he said, ‘why would I switch to anything new? I love the designs of my current irons. They’re perfect for me.’”
Rietveld: “That’s so Collin. Everything he does, whether it’s woods, wedges, irons…it’s not about him asking what do I need and we give him what he needs. It’s a process. We have no idea where the process will end up, but we start the process and with his feedback and our expertise and experience together, we end off at a conclusion which is right for him. That’s the way Collin works.”
Collin Morikawa: “My irons at the time, the P·730s, were the first blade I had ever played and my baseline. I had been using them before I even turned pro, so to me my irons were exactly what I thought they should have been at the time. If there was no clear performance benefit, it made no sense to switch.”
Taylor: “No matter what we put in front of him back then, he just wasn’t going to switch. Even if we put the new cosmetic on the P·730s and it performed the same, he wanted something better. That was a tough order.”
At the 2021 Open Championship, a defining moment of this story took place. It’s really the stuff of legend in a way nobody could have predicted. No – it was not Morikawa winning his second major championship in just eight starts – it was what happened before that. Morikawa flew to the United Kingdom to tee it up at the Scottish Open heading into the years’ final major. It was his first time ever playing on links turf and the first time he would ever doubt his P·730 irons.
After missing the cut at the Scottish, Morikawa immediately picked up his phone and called Adrian Rietveld. He had a problem and he needed to find the answer.
Morikawa: “Going into The Scottish Open I felt great, my irons were feeling good, and I was as confident as I could be heading into a major. Once I started hitting shots on the links turf, I was in the middle of the fairway from 150-yards and I was hitting 9-irons to 45-feet and I couldn’t figure out why. It was unacceptable.”
Rietveld: “He called me Sunday afternoon right after he came off the course in Scotland and explained the feel that he was getting in terms of the strike and the turf interaction with the P·730s. There’s a whole bunch of options that kind of come up, but you don’t answer straight away. You just say thanks for the feedback and I’ll get back to you.”
Morikawa: “It was really bothering me. It was almost like I was making excuses to the TaylorMade guys and my caddy. I knew in the back of my mind my swing felt good, so we just worked on trying to figure out how to make that iron dig better in the turf.”
Rietveld: “I asked him, ‘What did it feel like in your 6-iron vs your 7-iron?’ He said, ‘the 6-iron was fine.’ So, we said why don’t we try the 7-iron in the P·7MC and if we’re on to something we can look at your longer irons. That was Plan A and Plan A worked. He went full P·7MCs from 5-iron to pitching wedge.”
Morikawa: “It was a shot in the dark, it really was and obviously it paid off. Rather than changing my golf swing, I was able to change irons and won The Open Championship.”
Rietveld: “Within our company that kind of opened a whole can of worms as to peeling back the layers and finding the exact reason why it worked for him.”
Bovee: “That opened this discussion of: if we were going to make a sole specifically for Collin, what type of things would we include?”
Custom irons are no stranger to the minds of TaylorMade engineers and fitters. Tiger has his P·7TW’s and Rory has his Rors Protos. This task, however, required a testing process that was unlike anything the world’s smartest golf equipment minds had been challenged with before.
Todd Chew, Senior Tour Manager: “We had a conversation with Collin and Rory at the 2021 photoshoot in Florida and asked them to describe the perfect blade iron.”
Bovee: “The feedback from Collin and Rory was different, which was exactly what we hoped. We tested with Collin on the range, in various fairway simulations, out of bunkers and some more difficult lies.”
Chew: “The matrix was partially born from that conversation and testing, which allowed us to create different variables and mix them up together.”
Bovee: “We took all the feedback we had from Collin in 2021 and continued to ideate around sole geometry specifically. We knew he liked compact blade lengths, we knew he had his preferred launch windows and liked his spin rates. It was just, how do we isolate sole geometry variables and then take him through that test?”
Taylor: “It was what we call a D.O.E. – a design of experiments. A matrix where you are only changing one thing and seeing if you can tell the difference when you test it. We created three parameters: sole width, bounce and leading-edge radius.”
Bovee: “Collin’s swing is so repeatable and he’s such a good ball striker that it represented a unique opportunity to try to not only give him what he wants but learn how sole geometries may drive other performance attributes like launch angle, left-right deviation or spin rates.”
Taylor: “We created a matrix of soles that were thinner, wider, sharper, more bounce, less bounce and said this is the matrix that we want to test that we think might provide an advantage to him. We had options with standard sole width, standard leading-edge radius, but more bounce. Then, standard sole width, standard leading-edge radius but less bounce. We ended up with 11 different 7-iron variations of the P·7MBs and machined them right here in Carlsbad.”
Bovee: “The next factor is the turf conditions, which was the factor that started this whole discovery into Collin’s sole geometry.”
Greg Manley, Director of The Kingdom: “We needed to make it the firmest, tightest grass that we could get so that the sole would interact. We had a USGA regional agronomist come out and take a look at it and help us get it there. It involved multiple applications of top dressing, verticutting, less water to get it to where he could feel the sole getting through the turf.”
Bovee: “The turf we were going to test on had to be something representative of what he was going to see week in and week out at the various venues of the PGA TOUR and at international venues like Open Championships.
Manley: “The special thing we had to do was multidirectional verticutting, which is a process that stands the grass up and cuts it. When you cut the grass in multiple directions the grass can’t lay down in one way which is what Bermuda wants to do. You follow verticutting with top dressing of sand and the sand helps that soil firm up as well. That’s probably the one application that was done a dozen or more times in that month and a half process of getting ready for Collin’s arrival.”
Rietveld: “We literally had experts in every facet of the game involved in this process and once we all did our jobs to dial it in, we just stood together as a team and listened to what the best iron player in the world had to say.”
We’re finally back to that sunny September day at The Kingdom. No expectations. No description of the process. Just Collin Morikawa and 11 different seven irons. Now the adventure begins.
Taylor: “It was a totally blind test. Matt Bovee and I were the only ones that knew what he was hitting and could react to the way he was responding to them and the way he was talking about them. We just wanted to be able to understand right away what he liked and didn’t like.”
Morikawa: “It was a little scary when they told me I was going to test 11 different irons. I had never done anything like that in my career, but I just trusted the process they laid out for me and kept thinking maybe there is something a little better that I haven’t tried.”
Bovee: “The test was kind of like a choose your own adventure book. We started with polar opposites and then we picked up what he was liking and not liking. Then, we would bring different prototypes into the mix to either validate what he was feeling in the last one or try to see if we could get him to shift.”
Rietveld: “We gave him one of the irons and he said ‘this one feels too heavy’ when comparing it to another. We put it on a scale and there was a one-gram difference. It was unreal.”
Taylor: “We’re talking about millimeters, sometimes tens of a millimeter difference in those prototypes and he was immediately able to identify differences.”
Morikawa: “It was amazing having that option to just kind of try a bunch of different irons without even knowing what they were and feeling the difference, learning the difference of the irons based on width or sole for what I need.”
Chew: “We took notes to track what his feedback was to be able to eliminate particular variables of each model in the matrix. If he liked one model, we could compare it to another and eliminate that particular variable and hone in on the variable that he liked. That happened quickly.”
Taylor: “When he was hitting a wider sole or a more blunt leading-edge, he would say it was getting stuck and it wasn’t as fast as the turf. He didn’t know why, he just felt it. We looked at the matrix and the launch monitor numbers and it made complete sense.”
Chew: “That eliminated us spending a bunch of time hitting shots with irons that weren’t going to work. It made sense that the narrower sole with a little more bounce was best for him specifically because it was a lot like the sole of the P·7MC’s he plays.”
Bovee: “He at first landed on option three and then Adrian (Rietveld) and Todd (Chew) started to look at the numbers between the two and this is where their expertise comes in. They were a little concerned that option three he was gravitating towards might be dig too much in some of the turf conditions out on tour as opposed to at The Kingdom.”
Rietveld: “That’s when we went back to option five which had a blade sole that is quite similar to the MC, but he can also get the performance of what a blade is while blending that together with the performance of what a cavity does in the long irons. He kept testing that option and it was clear that was the best of the 11.”
Taylor: “The real telling moment was when he hit his gamer against the prototype he landed on and said it was better. We went from a year or so prior where there was some skepticism and we wondered how we perfect something for someone who’s already perfect at it to now having zero doubt his version of the P·7MB would be in the bag when the time came.”
Chew: “It was a unique process from our perspective because it’s something that we don’t get to dive into very often with irons like we do with drivers or fairway woods. For irons, it was the first real in-depth test, especially for Collin, that we were able to gather so many takeaways and pieces of feedback about the process.”
Bovee: “It’s a luxury to have someone that good be your tester and it worked out not only for him, but for us for future iron designs and testing strategies we will deploy.”
Chew: “When you have guys on your staff like Collin, Rory, and Tiger, to be able to utilize their expertise and knowledge to show you what works, who else would you rather do that? Plus, now Collin joins Tiger and Rory in having their name or initials on the irons they play, which was something we know meant a lot to Collin.”
Morikawa: “It’s crazy to think my initials are on them, but it’s more about performance. There’s not a whole lot of visual change from the 730s, just small little differences in how it interacts with the turf and a little different blade width and bounce to make it more versatile around all areas of the golf course and all different types of grass. Plus, they look so good at address.”