In the world of golf equipment, wedges are the most homogeneous club from manufacturer to manufacturer. While they have evolved, they still share a fair amount of DNA with Gene Sarazen’s OG sand wedge. A straighter leading edge here, a sole grind there, maybe a bit more weight at the top of the blade to lower the flight. Most wedges share a very similar template.
Tour Edge Exotics Wingman Wedges
The new Tour Edge Exotics Wingman wedges are trying to do something new. And when I say “new”, I mean they are looking to the past for inspiration, creating a wedge with a distinct design trait favored by some of the best golfers of all time.
Modern golfers are indoctrinated to dislike offset. From a young age, we’re told offset causes a hook. In reality, offset is, according to Tom Wishon, a means to help trajectory. “The more offset, the farther the head’s center of gravity is back from the shaft. And the farther the CG is back from the shaft, the higher the trajectory will be for any given loft on the face. In this case, more offset can help increase the height of the shot for golfers who have a difficult time getting the ball well up in the air to fly.”
But there is another school of thought: having offset in the short irons is the way to keep your hands ahead of the clubface at impact, helping to compress the ball and generate more spin.
For a long time, Japanese irons would come with reverse offset, with more in the short irons than the long irons. To the modern golfer, this looks ungainly and awkward but it was a way of keeping the hands in front of the clubface for a cleaner strike.
Working with Berhnard Langer
Tour Edge has developed the Exotics Wingman Wedge with the help of Bernhard Langer, known for his pickiness when it comes to golf clubs. His golf bag is a hodgepodge of random clubs but in the best possible way. Each club is there because it is the best for that particular job. With his wedges, he wanted that offset look he’d always loved.
“I am always looking for a forged wedge with the right amount of offset and eventually started to ask the R&D team at Tour Edge what they thought they could come up with,” said Langer. “What came back has astounded me with its performance. I put one prototype right into play the week I tested it because I could just tell that the design was just plain easier to hit and far more consistent than my other wedges.”
Wingman Wedge Offset
The Wingman wedge has a three-millimeter constant offset. To put that into perspective, t a PING Glide 4.0 52 wedge has an 0.8 mm offset, a 60-degree lob wedge is down to just 0.7 mm. To really ram the message home just how much offset these clubs have, it’s more than a TaylorMade P790 6-iron, which has 2.9 mm offset!
But enough about the unique look. The Wingman wedge is more than just an offset number. The forged head features deep undercut pockets containing VIBRCOR TPU which helps dampen the sound and increases the MOI of the wedge for greater forgiveness.
It also allowed the designers to make the strike area 10-percent larger than a traditional wedge to help aid versatility and creativity. A five-gram weight in the center of the wedge can be adjusted for custom builds and fine-tuning swing weight.
A ‘Winged’ weight pad on the toe creates a higher center of gravity for lower launch and higher spin. It gets thicker as the loft gets higher to maintain ideal spin rates. According to Tour Edge, it slows the rate of rotation and keeps the clubface slightly open at impact which they say is preferable for pitch and lob shots.
Triple-Traction Face technology utilizes three milled areas on the face: milled grooves, milled micro-grooves in between the scoring lines and milled toe lines. They’ve thrown all the milling they can at making these wedges spin.
Finally, the wedges are available in three milled grind options. The F/S stands for firm/sweeping and, at 6°/8° bounce, is the lowest bounce option. M/N or Mid Neutral is the mid-bounce option at 10° in the middle of the bell curve. The S/D grind stands for Soft/Digger and is perfect for soft ground or a steeper attack angle, with its 12°/14°.
Stock shafts for the Tour Edge Exotics Wingman Wedges are the True Temper Dynamic Gold 115 wedge shaft.
This Tour Edge Wingman Wedge makes the perfect “wingman” to their Wingman putters. They might never be the most popular wedge on the market. But kudos to David Glod and his team at Tour Edge. While you can argue there is very little that is new in club design, rather than “revisited” and “refined”, Tour Edge are zagging with this wedge when everyone else is zigging. This is how you get people, who may not have before, to try your product and maybe build a niche other manufacturers aren’t catering to.
The Tour Edge Wingman will be available on October 2nd, with a retail price of $140.
