Among the many things that have not changed in our beloved game of golf, are the ooohs and ahhhs heard from the gallery when an approach shot lands on a green and backs up 20 feet toward the cup. How do they do that?
Understand that every ball that isn’t topped (including putts) leaves the clubface with backspin. Every airborne approach shot you’ve ever hit to a green has been spinning backward when it landed. Correlating to loft, a nine iron can produce about 9,000 rpm and the driver produces about 2,500 rpm of backspin.
Here are the spin factors:
- Some balls are engineered to spin more than others. Tour players almost always choose these balls (eg. Titleist ProV1, Bridgestone Tour BX, Callaway Chrome Tour X). These balls not only are better at picking up backspin from the club, which means they will also pick up slice and hook spin better!
- For a ball to have enough spin to stop where it lands or roll backward requires an amount of spin only able to be imparted from a club swinging at higher speeds such as a full swing. The faster the swing (think tour players) the more spin.
- Partial swings are typically not traveling fast enough to impart enough spin to back up. The reason tour pros carry so many wedges is to allow them to make full swings from even short distances.
- Spin is reduced when water (eg. sprinkler, dew, rain) or grass (think taller rough) comes between the ball and clubface.
- Backspin is optimized by two factors: clubface loft and angle of attack. Increase either or both and you’ll increase your backspin.
- For full swings, increased spin will increase the aerodynamic lift and thereby increase trajectory.
“Sucking the ball back” (as the effect of backspin is sometimes referred to) is great except:
- When you land near the front edge of the green and it backs itself off the putting surface.
- When you land short of the hole and it backs further away
Bottom Line: Every shot has backspin. Don’t expect to see a lot of backspin at the range (those balls are typically low-spin balls).