It may have been a surprising sight watching the head of Rory Mcilroys 9-iron flying down the fairway of the 12th Hole at Wentworth on Thursday, but it happens more than you might think. I can remember a similar instance with a Phil Mickelson iron in a fairway bunker a few years back at the Valero Texas Open on the PGA Tour. Thankfully, on both these occasions, no spectators were in the firing line of these unexpected projectiles.
Have you ever seen this before? 🤯Rory McIlroy's club head comes off after impact...#BMWPGA | #RolexSeries pic.twitter.com/eaF51JCvBySeptember 19, 2024
As a somewhat still active club builder/repairer and PGA Professional, I always see a spike in calls about heads coming loose at around this time of year. Now this could be attributed to simply being the tail end of the playing season and people have been putting their clubs through more vigorous use. But in many cases, I have a hunch it has to do with something else.
The process of deliberately removing an iron head (or any other head for that matter), involves the use of heat, generally a blow torch or heat gun, to melt the glue holding shaft and head together, breaking the bond and making it easy to simply pull the head off.
When questioning most of the players that call me asking me to fix a head that has come flying off, I tend to find one thing in common. Most of these players leave their clubs in the trunk of their cars for relatively long periods of time.
So think about the last time you hopped into your car on a hot summer’s day, it’s almost like stepping into an oven, and without the handy use of air conditioning you might step out of the car a solid medium rare at the other end of your journey. Now then, think about your golf clubs sitting in that heat for hours on end, slowly getting hotter and hotter. In fact, if you have ever touched your irons in that scenario, you can physically feel just how hot they are, so is it any wonder that the glue inside the hosel might suffer or weaken?
To be clear here, I am not saying this is what happened to McIlroy, it is far more likely to be down to the force and speed he consistently puts into his shots, but for the general public, this is not an uncommon phenomenon.
My advice is to make sure you remove your clubs from your car at the earliest opportunity and store them in a nice cool space indoors. It might save you some money and effort, in getting an inconvenient repair, it might also save you the more expensive problem of losing a clubhead if you happen to be hitting over a penalty area at the point of failure. But even more importantly it might save you from injuring a fellow player. In short, don't leave your clubs in the trunk on a hot day!
