The Green Fee Today is the day! PING has finally released the long awaited i59 irons. We havent seen an update on this line from PING in about 5 years so it was about time. In 5 years equipment has changed. Lets see if PING has kept up with those changes!
The Tech
The most important piece of tech is the interior construction of the club. Rather than a fully forged face PING has created an internal structure named “Alumicore” that helps free up a ton of weight internally. PING is creating special “cores” for each iron to strategically place the weight so that MOI can be maximized. How are they maximizing MOI? The same way everyone else does… Tungsten in the toe and heel. It has the looks of a blade but thanks to all the tech under the hood it should have the forgiveness of the i210. Thats significant for the guys who prefer the looks of the a small blade head.
Another piece of tech being “introduced by PING” is the thing that caught my attention first. To explain why it caught my eye, lets go back to when Nike Golf went out of business. When Nike left the market they had a bunch of assests including patents. A lot of comapnies went sniffing around and PING ended up purchasing the patents. Now why is that important to the PING i59? A piece of tech PING is pushing is these smaller more compressed grooves which give more grooves on the face to help “regulate spin”. The small grooves was a defining feature on the VR Pro Blades. They look very similar. This isnt a bad thing they are using Nike tech, they paid for the tech and should use it. Those were some of the most popular irons ever.
The Looks
Im going to be honest, they are damn near perfect looking. The shape is great. The top line looks good. No crazy badges, No plastic (looking at you Titleist), almost the perfect iron. I do have a slight issue calling this forged but that phrase has been losing its meaning for a while in the industry.
The Elephant
PING having lost their minds decided to price these at $275 per club. A full set runs well over 2 grand. While they are nice I couldnt in good conscious recommend you run out and give these a go. Im looking at my entire bag and have a hard time coming up with $2000 worth of stuff. For $2000 we can get you a really nice set up with used clubs that are barely used.
Final Thoughts
They look great. Once I hit them I will probably be very impressed like I am by almost every PING iron. The problem I am going to run into is the price. We can get a lot done with 2000 bones. I used to call PXG expensive PING but with the pricing of PING vs some of the newest PXG items we may have to call PING “expensive PXG”