By Mike Jamison
Reprinted from Florida Golf News
April 2003

It happens to every golfer, highly skilled or highly handicapped. You try a friend’s brand-new driver and absolutely love it.

You know it is the club that will answer all your prayers and take your game to the next level. So you go to the local golf center, pull out the plastic and make a $500 commitment to the future of your game and your happiness.

But when you get to the driving range, something goes wrong. The club feels different, not at all like the club your friend let you hit. You’re not hitting it well at all. But how? It's the same club … identical head, shaft, and flex. So how can it feel so different to hit?

The reason lies in an explanation not known to many.

Inconsistencies in each shaft – variations in wall thickness, straightness, roundness, etc. – and the way a shaft is oriented in the clubhead affect the way that shaft performs. In short, if you take a shaft out of a clubhead and reassemble the club with that same shaft in a different orientation, that club will perform differently.

Strategic Shaft Technologies, LC, of Miami has researched and refined this phenomenon. SST founder Dick Weiss’s work over the past six years has resulted in the SST PURE shaft alignment process. This patented process uses computer analysis to identify a shaft’s irregularities and locate the shaft’s most stable orientation. Inserting the shaft with this most stable plane down the target line minimizes off-line bending and twisting and allows the shaft to perform consistently time after time.

Having all your shafts PUREd (which stands for Plane of Uniform Repeatability) results in a uniform feel from club to club within your bag. Independent testing has shown that players with PUREd clubs increase impact repeatability on the center of clubface by up to 51 percent. More center clubface hits equal longer, straighter golf shots.

"And even more importantly than longer or straighter," Weiss said, "it's more consistent. It's like a sharp butcher knife going through butter."

The best news is, the procedure can be done on all the clubs in your bag, at any point in their life. And once they are PUREd, they remain PUREd. The process takes approximately 15 minutes per club and is available through a network of licensees throughout the United States. Golfsmith offers the SST PURE process as an upgrade for $9.95 above the cost of any shaft they sell, while existing clubs can be retro-PUREd by any SST licensee for about $50, which includes labor.

This isn’t a fly-by-night, voodoo infested fad that will soon disappear from the golf improvement radar screen. No no. People whose living depends on the 18-hole numbers they post are flocking to the PUREing process. Nearly 200 tour player on the PGA, LPGA, Champions, Nationwide, European and Japanese Tours have had their clubs PUREd. That number grows weekly.

The SST PURE® Tour van has become a regular sight on the PGA Tour since 2000.

One big believer is United Sports Technologies, Inc., one of the industry¹s leading shaft manufacturers.

"UST's research and development department has evaluated numerous shaft alignment concepts over the past several years, and ultimately kept coming back to the SST PURE® technology," said Gene Simpson, UST vice president. "UST is an industry leader and people expect us to be the innovators. It makes perfect sense that we are the first shaft manufacturer to offer the SST PURE® process direct from the factory."

Want another convincing reason? Weiss and SST accomplished a feat four years ago more rare than a Tiger Woods missed cut. Their efforts moved the USGA to change a ruling.

On Feb. 9, 1999, a notice went out from Frank Thomas, then technical director of the USGA, to "Manufacturers of Golf Clubs and Golf Shafts." The Notice stated that the Implements and Ball Committee had concluded that "the process of orienting a shaft with the intent of causing it to perform as if it were symmetrical would not be inconsistent with Rule 4-1b." This ruling superseded the USGA's previous Notice of Nov. 13, 1990, which did not allow such orientation.

The PUREing process is documented by a computer-generated shaft analysis printout for each shaft, which is unique to SST and available only through SST PURE® licensees. This printout provides evidence of the PUREing process that has been completed on each shaft. This is how golfers KNOW, rather than GUESS, that their shafts have been aligned to perform to the best of their manufactured ability, as a result of the SST PURE® process. The SST printout allows golfers to see the difference before and after their shafts have been PUREd.

Do you have a favorite club in your bag, the one you reach for when you REALLY need to hit it pure? More than likely, that club¹s shaft comes closer to perfect shaft orientation than any other in your bag. Want to get that feeling with ALL the clubs in your bag? Visit www.sstpure.com. PUREing just may be the answer for you.

Mike Jamison is Executive Director of the International Network of Golf Members Association, and President of Jamison Golf Group, a golf-specialty PR, Advertising, Promotions and Group & Event Management firm in Lake Mary, Fla.