Equipment: Mediate's open-minded recipe 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.

It was in an equipment trailer early this season, watching him sort his own grips, that I realized the central secret of Rocco Mediate's immense success at being Rocco Mediate.

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"See the cords?" he said, holding up a grip for a moment before putting it in the "acceptable" pile. "That will feel great under my hands. Just great. Really, really great." He picked up another which looked, to my untrained eye, nearly identical. After examining it for a nanosecond, he put it in the "unacceptable" pile.

"Not that one."

Easygoing Intense, that's what Mediate has mastered. An attitude that seems to say "whatever" but is really hyper-competitive; a blend of skill and experience that would be a 98 if it were a bottle of wine; a fully developed knowledge that golf is important, but a good marinara sauce is crucial -- these things have come together to make one of the PGA TOUR's most popular players.

The Rocco Recipe has led to an approach to equipment that is not necessarily unconventional, but definitely open-minded. A mutual parting from the Callaway Golf staff, a rare thing in midseason, left Mediate time to do some of the corporate outings he had had to turn down before. It also left him free to freelance his equipment, and that led to some interesting results at the Frys.com Open, which Mediate won Sunday despite five bogeys in the rainy final round.

Speaking of rarity: four eagles for the week might not seem so amazing, until you take into account that Mediate is 47 and a short-knocker. You can't forget that, because Rocco himself will remind you frequently. Four hole-out eagles, one a day, almost as if he was trying to be fair to all the galleries? That's pure Mediate.

The big one came with a pitching wedge on the 71st hole, the drivable par-4 17th at CordeValle. In his internal computer, which works like it was co-programmed by Yogi Berra and Don Rickles, Mediate strategized.

In My Bag: Rocco Mediate

Driver: Adams Speedline FAST 10, 8.5 degrees Fairway wood: Fourteen Golf, 3W Hybrids: Adams Idea a7, 17 degrees, Idea Pro Black, 20 degrees Irons: Titleist AP2, 4-PW Wedges: Titleist Bob Vokey (52, 58 degrees) Putter: Scotty Cameron Ball: Titleist Pro V1

Air flow around the head is the key to Adams Golf's FAST 10 driver.

"Then 17, I couldn't reach," Mediate told the press afterwards. "It was 280, 285 or so? Something like that? It was like 277 to front. I cannot carry 277. Maybe in 95 degrees when I was 35, but it doesn't work now.

"So I just hit a nice 5-iron and I had a perfect yardage, 116. Alex [Prugh] marked his ball, because it looked like it was right in front of the hole. You never know. What if my balls hits and hits his ball and doesn't go in or whatever?

"So he walked up, I waited, and it was one of shots Mr. Trevino showed me, a little cut wedge, a flat little wedge. It worked."

The ball went in for Mediate's daily hole-out eagle, giving him the cushion he needed to make a confident pass at a five-footer for par on 18. That prevented a three-way playoff with Prugh and Bo Van Pelt.

The club was a pitching wedge, part of the set of Titleist AP2s that Mediate now has in the bag (he carries 4-iron through pitching wedge). Wedges have become so specialized that more attention gets paid these days to the 50-something-degree lofted models, the gap and sand that stand apart from the iron set. But the PW is something of a workhorse, required to behave as part of the iron team on the full swing, yet still offer surgical skills for more subtle approaches inside 100 yards.

At 116 yards on 17, Mediate was right on that dividing line. Here, the more subtle features of the AP2 may have been helpful: Titleist based this model on research that showed that better players want good feel as much as less-skilled players, instead of performance at the expense of feel. Titleist achieved this by designing together a clubhead body of soft, 1025 carbon steel with a tungsten-nickel sole (down-low heft for solid feel and dependable trajectory), plus an aluminum-elastomer cavity plate that helps tune both the feel and the sound.

Mediate pledged to his caddie, Matthew Achatz, that he wouldn't miss any fairways coming down the stretch. Indeed, he hit 80 percent of them all week (third in the field), getting him into position to work so well with his irons. The driver he did it with is the Adams Speedline FAST 10, the latest in Adams' commitment to aerodynamic driver design. The clubhead, designed to display a traditional shape, nonetheless incorporates body shaping that reduces drag by 10 percent, Adams engineers say. This maintains, or even increases, clubhead speed, leading to longer drives. The high MOI (moment of inertia, or resistance to twisting) head also keeps things accurate.

The Speedline drivers focus on aerodynamics as a result of research with long drive competitors. Those data show that large-head, modern design drivers lose three to four percent of their clubhead speed, Adams says, while traditional shapes that are optimized for better airflow preserve speed into the ball.