Right handed.....or wrong handed

While the presidential election draws near, everybody seems to be worrying about being left out of the equation. Plumber Joe can't cultivate his business. The rich don't want to be taxed. The poor don't want to be forgotten. All this talk has inspired me to finally speak out for the golf industry's most slighted victim......the lefty.

I remember the first few weeks I ever worked at a golf shop. I was just your resident backroom lackey; regrips and odds & ends stuff was my specialty. My first week there Taylor Made launched their new 500 series driver. As each sales guy came in to work that day, they gleefully walked into the back, unwrapped one of the new toys and headed off to hitting cage to test run this new mammoth beast of a golf club. My store received three big boxes full of drivers, with roughly forty clubs in each box. By the time I had unwrapped the last driver, I realized something....there were about 100 men’s right handed drivers, a half dozen were senior flex and about ten were ladies flex...but of course not one single lefty. I felt like the kid that passes out all the presents under the tree only to find there were none under there for him.

"Don't worry, I'm sure you'll be able to try one in three or four months." I had to hear this from just about everybody in the building (I never did like those sales guys). Little did I know that this would only foreshadow the oppression in the years to come as my game and equipment evolved.

Ok. I can wait a few months. That isn't the end of the world. I'm not necessarily a "latest and greatest" type of golfer. What I do need, however, is a driver that fits my game and swing. This is not negotiable, yet this is also where I'm currently facing my biggest problem. I can hit my irons up to the moon but my drives make the worms run and hide, which I blame mainly on playing baseball through college. In short, I need to play a driver with AT LEAST 12 degrees of loft. Here lies my problem. I'm a lefty, which means my choices are limited. Taylor Made, the current king of the big stick, doesn’t make a left handed driver greater than 10.5º. Neither does Cleveland, Titleist, or Cobra. Of course Callaway, whose flagship player Phil Mickelson is left handed, surely must have some higher loft options for lefties in the model that he plays, right? Ugh. You got to be kidding me!

Ok. Ok. I am starting to accept the loft issue. We'll just have stick with a 10.5º driver then mess around with different shafts until I find a combination that makes the club play like it has a higher loft.

Now the big issue is trying to find a suitable head to tinker with. I've hit all of the top sellers that have been suggested to me by my golfing peers, but I really wanted to leave my options open just incase there is a driver or 2 that might be flying under everybody’s radar. Coming into this past season, there were 3 drivers that I was really salivating over: the Tour Edge Exotics, MacGregor’s MT 460, and a driver that I had been waiting for almost a year to demo, the MP-600 by Mizuno.

Of course, neither Tour Edge nor MacGregor offered any left-handed drivers this past year, which I had anticipated (both companies have never really been left-hand friendly). Anyways, the driver I really wanted to demo was the MP-600 as I’ve always been a lifelong fan of Mizuno products.

I will remember the day my Mizuno sales rep brought in the prototype of the MP-600 to show us in the office for the rest of my golfing life! Could this be the driver of my dreams? Even before I had it in my hands I was already laying out our practice schedule and setting aside ample time for us to get to know each other. But I had to wait, it was just a prototype.

Then, what seemed like years to hear from Mizuno about a launch date, I received word that the MP-600s had arrived in my warehouse (I couldn’t contain my excitement). I see a couple right handed clubs trickle into my store and I ran to the phone like it was Christmas morning, calling Mizuno to see how long I would have to wait for the left-handed version, which as I mentioned, I was used to doing, no big deal. But by the time I hung up the phone, I was almost in tears. All my life dreams crushed in a single phone call. Needless to say, I am still waiting for the MP-600 Lefty Launch that will never come.

I'm still playing my original Sasquatch driver which I hit about ten feet off the ground. Don't get me wrong, I like my driver and usually hit it well, but I can't help but think of what could have been. My dad always poked fun at me, saying "I'm right handed, you're wrong handed." I now think I understand.