Fairway walk
A wood can skip once and still walk into the next cut
Prairie crust does not forgive a shallow first kiss. The ball either dies after a short hop or it keeps a walk that your yardage book never mentioned.
Golfers treat fairway woods as “the long club that sits.” On freeze-thaw mornings in April, that can be true: ice in the thatch kills the hop. On July bake, the same head can hop, skip, and walk like a driver that forgot it had loft. We mark both days as different animals if you play both calendars.
Sole camber matters after the land more than people think, but it is not the first lever. If the first hop is already tall, a wider sole will not invent a stop. We change loft and face until the hop cluster shortens, then we talk sole if the walk is still greedy.
Prairie wind after the land is rude to a wood. The face is a wall. A gust from the northwest — the same corridor that funnels down Broadway — grabs that hop and adds feet. We write shear so a still Tuesday does not look like a different club.
Bring the 3 and the 5 if you own both. They often hop differently on this crust even when the catalog says they are a family. The tape does not care about families.