In this episode, PGA Tour Rep Mike Sposa discusses the specs of Jim Furyk‘s new RAZR Fit Xtreme Fairway Wood and Chris Kirk‘s new X Hot 3Deep.

Want to hear about something in particular? Let us know.

For more information on these golf balls, please visit our golf balls home page or our 2013 Golf Digest Golf Ball Hot List Post. And head in to your favorite golf store to take advantage of our $29.99 offer!

I can’t remember a time in the last five years where I’ve worked on my golf game more than I have in the last two months. But going through major swing changes takes commitment, consistency, dedication, conviction, sticktoittiveness, hanginthereability, dontquityoufreakingwussitude, yourfatherthinksyou’reafailureivity, and all kinds of other made up words. And I’m in. All in.

So to recap, I’ve been transitioning from a very flat, no leverage, laid off, instruction editors from Golf Digest cover their eyes and hide their children swing, to a more upright, deeper, hinged, powerful, clear-off-the-mantle-because-room-is-needed-for-Green Jackets-US Open Trophies-Claret Jugs, and Wannamakers.

The US Open trophy will look good in Harry’s office.

My constant companion has been a large, heavy foam wedge, that will now and forever hereafter be named “Jackson.” Those of you who recall my previous naming of this wedge with an alliterative superlative should know that in the end I felt the name was too impersonal for what has become such a key partner in my journey to golf awesomeness.

I needed a human name. A name with certain bigness. Undeniable magnitude and grandiosity and with a salute to the greatness of the past. So I changed the name of the Wedge to ‘Wedginald Jackson’ or just ‘Jackson’ for short.

Jackson is meant to help me get steeper away from and back into the ball at impact. When used correctly, directly in front of Jackson, where the ball had been, will be the most beautiful, divots you’ve ever seen in your life. And when you haven’t been taking too many divots recently, nothing looks more beautiful that a nice divot.

Beautiful.

Seriously, if you offered me the chance to have framed pictures from the last ten Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues or of the divots from my last two lessons, the divots would have won hands down. Of course anybody hearing that revelation would also know that I would need to get special permission to hang them in my padded room in the asylum, but that’s another story…

So heading into lesson 3 with TheMan, I was really excited to show the progress I had been making and make even further giant leaps towards my rightful place at the World Golf Hall of Fame. I had just come back from playing a few rounds of golf versus my arch nemesis, the perfectly coiffed Senor Hashtag Chad Coleman, where I had taken him very unceremoniously to the South Carolina Low Country woodshed. My game was on the brink…or so I thought…

“Ok, let’s take a look…”

TheMan always delivers the same five-word knock out punch to begin the festivities.

I took a couple of swings that felt fairly representative of the game I had been rocking the past several weeks since our last lesson. Hit a couple of high wedges. Felt pretty solid. Nothing spectacular, but not terrible. Perfectly serviceable.

“Harry, we have to get that club more up and not so laid off. Here, let me show you what that looks like.” TheMan had been taking a couple of iPad videos. Uh, oh. Video don’t lie.

What I saw made me nauseous. My set up looked great. Posture and stance were good. Backswing the first 8 inches was textbook. But then what happened would make a courtroom gallery ghasp. The club lifted away from my body, my body stopped rotating, and the club turned behind me and got flat and laid off.

What. The. (Expletive deleted)! Noooooooooooooooooooo!!!!! What had happened? That couldn’t be me in the video. I mean, it looked kind of like me. Same XBomb hat and Del Mar golf shoes. The guy in the video was a little fatter than I am, in my opinion. And his swing was definitely un-Tour like. Ugh.

“Okay, we’ve got to fix this. We need you to turn steeper to get those arms steeper and higher, and we need you to get that left wrist more cocked. Has to happen. You’ve got no chance until we start doing that.”

But how, Sensei?

“I want you to feel that steep and deep sensation with your arms and I want you to feel that you’re really getting the club across the line at the top with your hands and wrists. It will feel a lot steeper and across the line, but you need to do this to get the club in the right place.”

And so for an hour in an unusually warm 85 degree day at the ECPC, I sweated my way through shot after shot of steep and deep arm and shoulder takeaway, and a totally open and across the line feeling at the top. It felt totally Couplesian. In fact, that was the mental image I was after. Steep and across the line at the top with a wide open club face.

When I could do it, the ball came out like a rocket with a nice divot. When I was flat, it was absolutely no bueno. Fat or thin all the time. Ugh to the power of Lee.

Don’t scuff them, Harry!

And so here I am, now working again on getting the club higher and more set at the top. I’m practicing at home swinging the club while I stand with my back to a wall. If I take it away flat without the turn, I will bang my beautiful X Hot Iron into the wall. If I do it correctly, the wall goes unscathed and I get it into the right position.

When I fail, it has a two-pronged penalty: 1) I will scuff my gorgeous iron 2) I will get yelled at by my wife who very stubbornly thinks that the condition of our walls is more important than fixing my golf swing. And I can do this drill inside since my wife has insisted that Jackson stay outdoors or in my car (she doesn’t fully appreciate the journey, evidently).

More work. More effort. More time spent with my best friend Jackson. Halfway through the lesson series but I feel like the train is back on the rails.

Along with his HEX Chrome+ Ball, Bae used a Callaway Driver, Callaway Fairway Wood, an X Hot Pro Hybrid (18°), RAZR X Muscleback Irons and an Odyssey Tour Milled #1 Putter. He led the field in putting average, hit 73.6% of greens and averaged 308.5 yards per drive. Bae did all of this while facing high winds all week, especially on Sunday afternoon.

“The course was really tough,” Bae said after closing out his two-shot win. “The winds were very strong. I did very well this week.” The Callaway staffer and his HEX Chrome+ Ball stepped up under pressure on 16, 17 and 18. On the 16th, Bae hit a beautiful low wedge shot that spun to five feet from the cup, and he knocked in the birdie putt to take a one-shot lead.

Then on the par-3 17th, he played his tee shot through the wind and over the water to 20 feet below the hole. Finally on the brutal par-4 18th, he found the fairway, hit a solid second shot into the green and two-putted to clinch the win. With his beautiful swing and the way he deftly controlled his game down the stretch, this should be his first of many victories on Tour.

Bae’s win highlighted another big week for the HEX Chrome+ family of golf balls, which was Callaway’s #1 Golf Ball at the HP Byron Nelson Championship. Gary Woodland, Stuart Appleby and Tommy Gainey all used it as well, and Phil Mickelson is currently playing it on Tour. HEX Chrome+ also received a gold medal in Golf Digest’s 2013 Golf Ball Hot List.

For more on HEX Chrome+ and all of our golf balls, please visit our golf balls home page. And for more on Sang-Moon Bae and all of our staffers, please visit our Callaway Tour Page.

We really like this one, and we hope you do too.

For more on our X Hot Family, please visit our golf equipment home page.

We know it’s that time of year where we can tee it up for 36 holes, practice all afternoon, or play until sundown. The calendar and the forecast are in our favor, for most people around the country anyway, and it certainly feels good.

If you’re reading this right now chances are you’re sitting in an office or at your house. You’ve taken the time to visit our website and click on this article, so you’re obviously thinking about golf.

And since you can’t pull the clubs out right now, we’ve got a few awesome pictures to get you motivated and excited for your next afternoon 9 or medium bucket. You’re welcome.

Anyone Up For A Quick 18? 

Our social media guru @hashtagchad snapped this photo last weekend when he played with a few members on our Marketing #ZooCrew Team. If this isn’t the perfect way to spend a free afternoon, we’d like to know what is.

The course wasn’t packed so they got around in less than four hours. Without getting too hokey, this picture sums up what golf’s all about. No cell phones, no email; just you, the course, and a few good friends. That’s a hard combination to beat.

RAZR Fit Xtreme Looks Good In The Sun 

Chad also got an up close shot of the RAZR Fit Xtreme Driver and the new HEX Chrome+ Golf Ball during one of his rounds. Again, this is what San Diego County looks like in the middle of May.

Not a cloud in the sky and perfect conditions to play at any time of the day. Right now everyone who’s dealing with tough weather is rolling their eyes. Hang in there, guys! Golf season’s coming and it’s coming on strong!

For more great Callaway pictures and news, please visit our Facebook and Twitter pages. And if you’re looking to pick up new equipment for the season, please visit our shop page.

Are you playing at all this weekend? Where at? Tell us in the comments section.

Ladies and gentleman, we’re excited to present the X Hot Long Drive Team!

Here’s a look at the roster:

The X Hot Long Drive Team joins 2-time RE/MAX World Long Drive Champion Jamie Sadlowski as Callaway Ambassadors. They all play and promote Callaway clubs, balls, and sport the Callaway X Hot staff bag and cap, which gives us an even stronger presence at the biggest long drive events.

As part of the partnership, LDA is also selling Callaway X Hot Pro LD Drivers, which is a long driver version of our X Hot Driver. The X Hot Pro LD Driver head weighs approximately 199 grams and features Speed Frame Face Technology that increases ball speed, saves weight and optimizes stiffness and stress distribution across the face for more efficient energy transfer. Spoiler alert: these drivers are really long!

This year, the RE/MAX World Long Drive Championship Finals will be televised October 30 on the Golf Channel in a live two-hour finale. The sport will also make its network television debut on NBC later this year. As the exclusive club sponsor, Callaway will be prominently featured during the events.

We’ll keep you updated throughout the year on the X Hot Long Drive Team. And of course, we’ve got you covered with all the latest news for our X Team on our X Team page.

Yes, you read that right, it’s been put in play 2.5 times as much as our second most popular option. As our Tour Team explains, Callaway Staff Pros have turned to X Hot Pro again and again for its combination of distance and versatility.

“The contrast of head and face color is very appealing at the address position,” says our Callaway PGA Tour Rep Mike Sposa. “They are very easy to hit high, soft shots.” If you look at the equipment surveys at Tour events, hybrids have become a must-have for Pros who need an accurate, easy-to-hit club from virtually any lie. They’re a dynamic option for our staffers, and any golfer for that matter.

“The faces are hotter, the sole’s designed for versatility, and they’re just all around great performers,” says Luke Williams, our Sr. Global Director of Wood and Irons, when talking about X Hot and X Hot Pro Hybrids.

“We’ve got a wide range of lofts to cover anyone’s needs…(but) you don’t have to be an actual Pro to play the X Hot Pro model…It’s a rocket. It’s a bomber.”

Both models are configured for distance, with a Speed Frame Face for faster ball speeds and Modern Warbird Sole for versatility from everywhere.

Matt Haneline, our Associate Marketing Manager, has seen how well X Hot Hybrids perform during custom fittings. “The ball launches off the club super high, which for what you’re trying to use this club for, hitting it into greens, hitting it out of the rough, being able to have something with very little loft on it that launches it high, is great,” Haneline says. “And with the ball speeds, the launch conditions, the ball comes off the face super hot with very little spin.”

We’re not surprised that X Hot Pro is our #1 Hybrid on the PGA Tour, especially after X Hot was voted the category performance leader for hybrids in the 2013 Golf Digest Hot List. X Hot earned a 5-star rating for performance and, as you may have guessed, was recognized for its distance and versatility.

We had plenty of great Hot List quotes to choose from, and this one really summed it up well. “I tried to mis-hit a few,” said one panelist. “But either there’s a huge sweet spot, or I just couldn’t miss. I’m thinking it’s the sweet spot.”

For more on X Hot and X Hot Pro Hybrids, and the rest of the X Hot Family, please visit our golf equipment home page.

For all of our latest tips, please visit our videos page.

We hope you like it! Let us know what think of the commercial or if you’ve played the ball in the comments section.

Fore more on HEX Chrome+, please visit our golf balls home page.