As a somewhat still competitive PGA Professional in my local region, I still watch a lot of golf on television in my spare time, and one man has dominated my screen in the past 12 months. Whether in the major championships, on Instagram, or on his extremely popular YouTube channel, Bryson DeChambeau was everywhere in 2024. Furthermore, as an equipment writer, I have always been fascinated by his attitude towards his golf clubs, and his willingness to push the boundaries and try something completely different. So much so that I even recently interviewed Tom Bailey, founder of Avoda Golf, the fledgling company that concocted the 3D-printed, curved-faced irons that Bryson rushed into play at the Masters and has stuck with ever since.
WATCH: Joe Ferguson plays a professional event with Bryson DeChambeau’s clubs!
For a while now, I had just accepted Bryson’s unorthodox approach to golf equipment – be it his 5° driver, the curved face, 5° upright, one-length irons with the thickest grips in golf, his incredibly upright armlock putter, or even his use of Epsom salts to ‘balance’ his golf balls. Then one day, I cracked. I wanted to know what it felt like to play golf with this stuff!
(Image credit: Getty Images)
After a conversation with my boss, we started to wonder whether there was some potential video content in this idea and decided to go in at the deep end. Not only would I try to build Bryson’s bag as closely as possible, but I would also commit to playing a professional event on my local PGA circuit and film the whole thing! So, I began to put some feelers out…
(Image credit: Getty Images)
After a few exchanged messages with the fantastic Leslie Bennett at Krank Golf, Bryson’s Krank Formula Fire driver and three wood heads were en route to my house, and LA Golf kindly supplied the Bryson Series shafts to go in them, so after building them up in my workshop (complete with Jumbo Max grips!), I was all set at the top of the bag. Next, using my connection with Tom at Avoda, I was quickly booked in for a fitting with UK fitter Toby Graves and walked away with a fantastic set of one-length Avoda Origin irons, which are absolutely sensational. However, this is where things started to escalate… A few days after the fitting and knowing the concept of the video, Toby called me and offered to get Bryson’s actual backup set of irons shipped to me for the video. This was getting serious.
(Image credit: Future)
Now for context, there are literally only two sets of these irons in existence (Bryson has one, and these were the other) so I was blown away by the offer and quickly accepted. We already had the SIK armlock putter in the office at Golf Monthly, and had plenty of Titleist ProV1x left-dash golf balls so it was just the wedges to go. Bryson uses one-of-one Ping Glide 4.0 wedges in his set, which proved just too difficult to get hold of, however, Avoda came up trumps again and provided me with the original wedges that were designed to go along with the iron set. These consisted of 60°, 55°, 50° and 45° wedges all built to the exact same spec as the irons, from length, swing weight, lie angle, shaft, and grip.
(Image credit: Future)
So the bag lineup was complete and it was tournament time. I paid my entry for the Devon PGA Alliance series event at UK Top 100 course Saunton Golf Club (West), and began to panic! While it was just an 18-hole winter series event on a local PGA circuit, there were still some very strong players in the field, including two-time British PGA Champion Paul Hendriksen, and two-time English PGA Champion, and ex-DP World Tour player James Ruth, so like any competitor, I was keen not to embarrass myself.
The morning of the event came and the weather was set fair for my 11.50 am tee time. Cold (to be expected in the southwest of England in January) but dry, with a gentle breeze, so I headed to the practice ground to warm up and see what I was dealing with. As I pulled out a 5° upright, 6-iron length lob wedge with a cricket bat-sized grip, the task at hand hit me like a ton of bricks.
(Image credit: Future)
I set about trying to get comfortable as quickly as I could but everything was just so alien to me. Finding a clean strike was proving very tricky, let alone figuring out the distances these irons would produce – and lest we forget, I still had a 5-degree driver and an armlock putter to get my head around at this point. I worked diligently on my FullSwing KIT launch monitor for around an hour making some small progress with the yardages which were just so colossally different from my normal numbers.
This yardage discrepancy stems from the incredibly strong lofts that Bryson employs. Just for some context here, my normal pitching wedge is 46˚, whereas his pitching wedge is 40°, and the Bryson 5-iron is 17° as opposed to my gamer 5-iron which comes in at 26°.
5-iron in the address profile.
(Image credit: Future)
On top of that, you can layer on the further complication that all of these crazy lofts are on one-length shafts, fitted with the heaviest, and thickest grips available in golf. Needless to say, I had my work cut out.
After launching a handful of surprisingly successful drivers down range to finish my warm-up session, I felt marginally less sick and headed to the putting green. The putter was rolling the ball ok, and I quickly got the pace of the excellent Saunton greens, and before I knew it, I was up on the tee…
Predictably apprehensive on the first tee – a 361-yard dog leg right par four – I hit a low-heeled 5-iron (for context Bryson’s 5-iron is 17° making it essentially a 6-iron length 2-iron!) up the right-hand side into the semi-rough, then proceeded to strike a pitching wedge that flew the best part of 170 yards to the back portion of the green, leaving a downhill sweeping right to left 45-foot putt.
(Image credit: Future)
Incredibly, I managed to stroke this putt in for an unlikely opening birdie, which proved to be the catalyst for one of the hottest starts I have made in my professional career. Nearly an hour later, I was stood on the 5th tee at 4 under par having reeled off four consecutive birdies to open the round, consisting of a 3-wood, sand wedge, 25-foot putt on hole 2, a driver, 8-iron, and two-putt birdie on the par-five 3rd and another long-range (30 feet or so) putt for a two on the 216-yard par-three 4th hole!
While starts like this are the stuff dreams are made of, they can come with their own set of psychological complications that need managing. Normally these consist of things such as the pressure to not blow such a promising start, stopping yourself ringing the pro shop to find out the course record, and numerous other irrational thoughts, but on top of those I was still feeling utter confusion as to how I was going to manage this extraordinary set of clubs round the course for the rest of the day. At this stage, I was still very much guessing with my clubbing into the greens and trying to cope with the incredibly stiff and heavy profile of the irons. For a little context here, the grips on Bryson’s clubs weigh 123 grams, where a more standard grip would be around the 50-gram mark, and the shafts are dubbed ‘Texas Rebar’ based on how stiff they play. They are the definition of hard work.
(Image credit: Future)
The mid-portion of the round was filled with much less spectacular golf, requiring several gritty up and downs from poor positions to save pars, and this par run stretched seven holes before arriving at the par five 12th, where another lengthy birdie putt got me to 5-under par for the day. Coming into the closing stretch now, I very much knew that I was in contention and would likely be leading at 5 under on what is a notoriously tough links test, so it was time to knuckle down. Unfortunately, my first bogey of the round arrived on the difficult par four 14th hole where a missed green right (very much the theme of my misses with the irons as I just could not muster the strength to square the face a lot of the time), put me in a poor spot and my 10-foot par putt just slipped by on the right edge.
Three steadying pars in a row – including a very disappointing one on 17 where a massive 360-yard drive left me just an 8-iron into the par 5 – put me on the 18th tee at 4 under par knowing I was likely leading or thereabouts. 18 on Saunton West is a 190-yard par three, protected on both sides by deep pot bunkers that need to be avoided, a task I sadly did not manage. My 8-iron (yes 8-iron from 190 yards) just fell to the right (again!) at the top of its flight and took a little kick into the front right bunker, a poor position at any time, but especially so given the circumstances.
(Image credit: Future)
As I shuffled into the bunker with my 6-iron length, 5° upright lob wedge, I wasn’t filled with the sense that an up and down was on the cards, especially as I was short-sided and the ground sloped significantly away from me immediately once the ball hit the surface. My negative feelings were compounded as what I felt was very good splash shot ran around 20 feet passed leaving a rather unpleasant downhill putt with a good three feet of break. At this point, it struck me just how quickly your expectations and mindset can shift in golf. If someone had offered me 75 the night before the tournament having never used this ridiculously unorthodox set before, I would have snapped their hand off, and here I was over a putt for 67, with the sense that I would be very disappointed if I missed and recorded a three-under 68.
Anyway, I steadied myself, read the putt, committed to my line, and put a brilliant (if I do say so myself) stroke on it, and watched as it tracked towards the left edge of the hole. For a moment it looked like it might just stay high, but it grabbed just enough of the top edge and disappeared out of sight, greeted somewhat embarrassingly by a little fist pump from yours truly. A 67, four-under par, I couldn’t quite believe it.
Disbelief turned to happiness as I handed my card in to find out (we were the last group out) that the putt I holed on the last was just enough to keep me one stroke ahead of a couple of players tied on 3 under par, and I had won the PGA tournament! This was a result beyond my wildest dreams, my objective for the day was simply to not make a complete fool of myself, and somehow, inexplicably I had ended the day the winner. I’m not a big one for self-praise generally, but I was genuinely proud of this achievement.
(Image credit: Future)
The whole day was quite remarkable, and it took so much out of me mentally. To try and work out the distances and trajectories of the irons, in particular, was so tricky and required so much concentration that I was mentally drained by the end of the day, and when you factor in trying to get to grips with a 5° driver, an armlock putter I had never used, and a ball that I had never even tried, I genuinely had a fairly strong headache sat at home that evening. It was like trying to re-learn a game that I have been learning for 30 years, and doing so on the fly. Incredibly, I putted extremely well, so much so that the SIK putter might actually end up pinching a place in my bag pending some further experimentation, and it was really the putting that did the damage in this round.
(Image credit: Future)
Long putts on three out of the first four holes set things in motion, and several other crucial par saves from between 5 and 12 feet throughout the round really allowed momentum to continue. I only actually hit the driver three times due to the nature of the golf course, but two of those were 340-yard plus drives right down the center of the fairway so that was another pleasant surprise. The real challenge of the day was the irons.
(Image credit: Future)
While they are a serious feat of design and engineering, the spec that Bryson plays is simply mind-blowing. I described them to my playing partners as more like a strength and conditioning tool you might find at the gym rather than an actual golf club, they are just so incredibly heavy in terms of their actual mass, and conversely so incredibly light in balance or swing weight (as the 123-gram grips shift the balance point so high), that finding strike was equally as hard as stopping them going 30 yards right every time. The grips were so thick that I felt as though they were slipping out of my hands at times during the swing, and it was just such an alien feeling overall.
(Image credit: Future)
Finally, chipping and pitching with what would normally be a 6-iron length golf club for me, was surprisingly easy. I’d mentally identified this as one of the potential areas where I would struggle, but I actually quite enjoyed being in a more upright posture for some of those shots.
What a day, and what a thoroughly enjoyable experiment. There was really so much I learned from piecing this bag together and playing a pro tournament. Firstly, I have been pondering just how important is dialing all your equipment in so perfectly if I can just rock up with something so far away from ‘my spec’ and win a professional event?! Secondly, I learned a lot about my ability to adapt and find an extra gear of concentration when required that frankly, I didn’t know I had. And finally, above and beyond everything else, I learned that Bryson must be strong… REALLY strong!
