Equipment Insider: Kim's hard work perfecting bag pays off

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Each week in the Equipment Insider, Adam Barr -- PGATOUR.COM's equipment columnist -- will provide breaking news, notes and analysis focused on PGA TOUR players. Adam will also appear in video segments for PGATOUR.COM.

Anthony Kim's winning bag at the Shell Houston Open was nearly wall-to-wall Nike. But like so many successful TOUR bags, the box is more than the sum of its tools.

Check out more of Adam Barr's equipment coverage at AdamBarrGolfGearGuide.com.

Video: In the Bag

What do players carry when they head out on TOUR? We take an inside look at the adjustments they make to their clubs ... and they show us other things (ball markers, training aids) that make their tools of the trade unique. Archive: In the Bag MORE IN THE BAGS Nick Watney Hunter Mahan Sergio Garcia

Take the driver, the Nike Victory Red Tour model. Traditional, yes, with a pear-shaped profile of the kind ball-workers like. Modern, yes again -- with a compression channel behind the face that returns more of the energy of impact to the ball across more of the face, Nike says. In other words, a thoroughly up-to-date, tour-level driver for a guy who has "no conservative bone in my body," which is what Kim said of himself after collecting his trophy.

But how about the way the driver works with the ball? Like a lot of youngsters, Kim is a low-loft guy: 8.5 degrees in the driver. All we hear from TOUR players these days is: "keep the spin down off the driver," "drop my spin," "I don't want it to balloon," "can we dump some RPMs there?" and the like. Less loft by itself can mean less spin ... but you need some backspin to keep the ball airborne. And while it's up there, it's going toward its target, right? Flight = good.

In Kim's case, the other big part of the equation is Nike's ONE golf ball, one of the company's better-player entries. It's a four-layer job, as many tour balls are. But this kind of ball is perhaps best viewed in two parts. The core is a rubber recipe (always secret; just ask) that takes the power of the strike and returns it as initial velocity, all while keeping the spin down, Nike says. Around the core is a polymer power transfer layer that helps conduct that strike force into the high-energy core.

The Nike Victory Red Tour model

Part two of the story on many tour balls is a pair of outer layers. Just inside the inner cover is a mantle, usually relatively hard, that feeds back some full swing info to the hands and provides the club face with something to spin off on such shots. And finally, the outer cover, usually urethane as in the Nike ONE, encourages spin on less-than-full shots, helping the ball to hold where it's told.

Kim, like most other TOUR players, worked a long time on this driver-ball tandem, turning the dials on spin and distance until the proper balance appeared and stood up to testing. These days, that kind of optimization isn't out of the reach of recreational players. It may take some trial and error -- most of us don't have tour vans following us around -- but it's worth the trouble. Ask Anthony.

Some players spent their spare moments at Houston getting ready for the Masters. Martin Kaymer was at the TaylorMade van grinding his own wedges (Retief Goosen and Sergio Garcia have been known to step up to the wheel on occasion as well.) Others are looking into higher, softer landings on Augusta greens through their long games, putting higher-lofted fairway woods or hybrids into the bag. (Justin Rose is an exception; he likes the look of long irons. But the TaylorMade staff did build him new R9 TP 3- and 4-irons with lower centers of gravity to generate a little more height.

Pat Perez isn't in the Masters, but he's working on high-soft as well, and all the way back to the tee. He had the loft in his TaylorMade Superfast driver upgraded from 8.5 degrees to 9.5. At 8.5, he found he was hitting it too low with not enough spin. Work continues on which shaft will fit best for Perez. Again, not necessarily a quick process...but as Anthony Kim found out, worth it.