12 Piece

Being an avid historian of the game and its weapons of grass destruction, this is a fun post to answer!!!

As you know, investment casting did not enter the golf business until the later 1960s and into the early 70s. So all of the 50's and 60's era (and before) irons were all forged from carbon steel. Anyway, in the 50's it was still very common to see very long hosels on blade irons with the blade length being in the area of 3-5mm shorter than what you see on many of the forged blades of today. This had the effect of pushing the CG well into the heel side of the blade.

Also, iron soles were not radiused from front to back hardly at all back then. So there was a pretty high tendency for less skilled golfers to battle with hitting the ball fat more often than they should have. Also most of these 50's blades were still pretty short in the blade height compared to what you see today - that evolved into a little taller blade through the 60's though, so shallow blades was more of a 40's and 50's thing. This actually put the CG a little lower.

So when golfers look at modern blades and think that they have not changed all that much, their focus is primarily on the BACK design of the "muscle" - which in fact has NOT changed that much. But in these other areas I mentioned, the modern blades are MUCH better for playability than the old ones.

That being said, the modern blades are still NOT for the avg to less skilled player at all because of their very low MOI. Typically if you take a muscleback 5-iron today, you are looking at an MOI of about 1100 g-cm2 - a shallow cavity back forging will be around 2000, and a larger game improvement DEEP cavity back iron will be in the area of 2800-3000 g-cm2.

I am probably going to sound like a broken record on this, but I think one very strong reason that the average golfer handicap has not changed in 50 yrs has to do with the fact that the vast, vast majority of golfers have always bought their clubs in standard form, off the rack with NO heed for any aspect of custom fitting to THEIR swing and manner of play. I'd be willing to make a bet that if somehow we could pass a magic wand over say, even just 1/3 of all golfers to have them custom fit by a GOOD clubmaker, you would see the avg handicap move down.

I do believe that - even though I also freely admit that most golfers are 1) not that athletically inclined, 2) do not receive accurate instruction on the swing, 3) do not take the time to really work on the right changes to improve their swing.

TOM