Asked After the Golf, Not After the Session
A fitting feels good at the desk almost every time. What matters is what the clubs do four rounds later, which is when we ask, and which is why some of these are less flattering than a testimonial page usually is.
I brought a sheet from a fitting I paid for in Dallas two years ago and asked them to explain why my driver never did what it said. Wendell went through it column by column and showed me three numbers on it that were modelled rather than measured. That conversation alone was worth the fee, and the driver we ended up with is nine yards shorter on the screen and considerably straighter on a golf course.
My gaps were nine yards on one side and twenty-two on the other and I had no idea. Two lie bends, one shaft change through the long irons, and the map is inside four yards all the way down now. Four rounds in and I have stopped guessing between clubs on approach shots, which was the actual complaint I walked in with.
Booked a driver block and was told at the end of it that my driver was fine and my three wood was doing the damage. They charged me for the block, refused to sell me a driver, and rebooked me for a fairway wood session. I have never had a shop turn down a sale that cleanly.
The wedge block used sand from my home course. I did not know that was a thing anybody did. We changed one grind and left the other two alone, and bunker shots stopped being the part of the round I was quietly dreading.
Honest review: the block was excellent and the wait for my shafts was six weeks, which nobody enjoyed. They told me up front that the supplier was slow and offered an alternative I turned down. The clubs are right. The timeline was not their fault but it still tested my patience, so four rather than five.
Junie measured my putter and told me it was an inch and a half too long, which apparently is the most common thing she finds. Cutting it changed where my eyes sit and my start line settled down inside a fortnight. Eighty-five dollars, no new putter, problem gone.
I drove in from Wichita Falls expecting a sales pitch and got a two-hour measurement session with somebody who kept saying "that difference is inside the band, it does not count". Three of the four things I wanted to change turned out not to be worth changing. The one that was has made a genuine difference.
My son grew two inches between the block and the re-check. They re-measured, cut two clubs, adjusted the lies and charged me for the bench time only. He is fourteen and hitting the ball where he aims it for the first time since he outgrew his junior set.
Blocks That Ended With No Purchase
About one block in six finishes with the finding that the data does not justify a change. Those clients get asked for feedback on exactly the same schedule, and their answers are the ones we watch most closely, because a studio that sells nothing and satisfies nobody is not actually being honest, it is just being useless.
Two representative comments from that group are printed here rather than quietly left out. Both are from people who paid a full block fee and left with the clubs they arrived with.
"I paid a hundred and forty dollars to be told my irons were fine. Irritating for about a day, then genuinely reassuring, because I had been about to spend fourteen hundred on a new set."
"No change recommended, which I did not expect and did not love. But they showed me why on the sheet and the reasoning held up. I would go back."
Find Out What Your Own Numbers Say
Including, possibly, that the clubs in your bag are already the right ones.