Equipment: Byrd's irons pack hole-in-one muscle

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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's bad enough if you make a hole-in-one and nobody is around to see it. Even worse: it's so dark, you can't see it yourself.

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Winning the golf tournament takes the edge off that, to be sure. The wide-open irises of the television cameras made the desert dusk look much brighter than it really was at the par-3 17th at TPC Summerlin. So Jonathan Byrd had no first-hand idea what he had done on the fourth hole of his playoff with Cameron Percy and Martin Laird. Plenty of fans were delighted to tell him, but it took a stunned Byrd a little while to take it all in. Later, he broke it down for the press.

"[F]or me it was a 6-iron, kind of back in my stance, and I tried to play more of kind of a sweeping draw into that left pin and curve it over to it. It started perfect, it turned perfect, and it was coming right down [on] the flag. I thought I hit it too good. I thought I hit it too far, and I couldn't see anything. But to hear the reaction as it went in, I was just in shock."

Byrd, a long-time Mizuno ally, uses the company's MP-62 irons, a model that provides an instructive example of how the theories of classic forged irons and cavity backs have come together in recent years. Like many Mizuno clubs that have been popular with better players, the 62 has a muscle-back design: that heel-to-toe thickness of steel along the bottom of the head that provides some of the heft that better players seek.

In My Bag: Jonathan Byrd

Driver: TaylorMade SuperFast, 10.5 degrees 3-wood: Mizuno MX-700, 15 degrees Hybrid: Mizuno CLK, 17 degrees Irons: Mizuno MP-62, 3-PW Wedges: Nike Victory Forged (56, 60 degrees) Putter: Scotty Cameron Newport Tour prototype Ball: Titleist Pro V1x

There's more muscle than meets the eye in Jonathan Byrd's irons.

But Mizuno calls its 62 a dual-muscle club. The design is more of a biceps-triceps approach, with the muscle in two layers. The outer muscle "pad," say Mizuno engineers, locates the center of gravity of the head in a way that enlarges the sweet spot -- not necessarily game-improvement low, but still where a skilled player needs it to get the flight right. The inner muscle pad performs that traditional function of providing some weight and solidity to the hit, Mizuno folks say.

And the whole muscle mechanism is surrounded by a cavity, to whose edges extra weight can be moved. That's the contribution of game-improvement theory to the modern player's club; some version of this approach has been seen in a number of models throughout the industry.

Byrd's choice of the Mizuno version enabled him to take advantage of rolled leading and trailing edges and a mid-sole that Mizuno describes as "aggressively cambered" -- that is, there's just enough sole to interact with the turf crisply, but not so much that the player feels as if he may have hit it heavy. With the customization available to players on TOUR these days, you'd think that could be carved out of anything. But you have to have a good starting point, including something pleasing to look at. Those factors likely influenced Byrd's choice.

TRAILER TALK: As the race for next season's TOUR card intensifies, so does player attention to optimizing equipment. John Daly has changed the plane of his swing a bit, so he stopped by the equipment trucks to have his irons and wedges reground for a straighter leading edge and more bounce to prevent digging. ... Sometimes, stuff just wears out. Paul Goydos asked the guys at TaylorMade to replace his TP Rescue with an FCT (Face Control Technology) 22-degree Rescue simply because the old TP had been through a lot of battles and deserves a quiet retirement. ... Pat Perez, bucking the trend, asked for a couple KBS steel shafts to be put into his 19- and 22-degree TaylorMade Rescues. Most players prefer graphite shafts in hybrids, but Pat says he wants his to feel more like his irons.