Ten years ago Nike Golf revolutionized the golf ball industry with its introduction of the Tour Accuracy, the first solid core golf ball, which sent wound golf ball manufacturers scrambling to find competitive golf ball technologies. When Tiger committed to playing this new ball in 2000, it confirmed the success of the solid core golf ball and indicated that the technology would be the benchmark for golf ball design in the future. Well, it looks like history might be about to repeat itself.
Last week on Twitter I heard a mention of a new prototype golf ball from Nike Golf — the PROTOTYPE RZN ball — presumably released at its equipment and sales meetings last month in Fort Worth. Nike Golf has given some of its reps sleeves of this ball to test out and give their opinions and feedback. In this post yesterday on Golfwrx.com we saw the first information about and pictures of this new ball, the pics are in the gallery below (courtesy of Golfwrx.com).
According to the post, this new ball features a new material — resin (hence the prototype name) injected into the core — the first time in the 10-year history of the solid core ball that a material other than rubber would be used for the core of a solid core production golf ball. The new material reportedly makes the core lighter, which allows more weight to be moved to the perimeter of the ball, increasing MOI, and thus ball speed and directional forgiveness. Supposedly the ball feels lighter, and the cover feels softer, presumably for increased feel around the greens. The claim is also that the ball spins less with the driver and more with the wedges.
The first entry in the post mentions these are the three key features of the new ball:
- Faster ball speed: 3 mph faster on average
- Highest MOI ever for a golf ball: more forgiving and tighter shot dispersion
- Steeper Spin Slope (relationship of driver spin to wedge spin): 150 rpm less driver spin and 300 rpm more wedge spin than the Nike One Tour (an already high spinning ball)
Of course none of this information is official or straight from Nike Golf. The official name for this ball is supposed to be revealed in November, with ball hitting retail shelves in February. As soon as we get any official information on this new ball from Nike Golf we’ll surely bring it to you here on NG Nation. I personally can’t wait to see and test out this new ball. A question I have is will this new ball be offered in addition to the ONE Tour and Tour D models, or in place of one or both? Sounds like we’ll have to wait until November to find out.
For now, check out the comments on the new PROTOTYPE RZN ball in the Golfwrx.com forum at the link below, and see what people are saying about this revolutionary new golf ball design.
All photos courtesy of Golfwrx.com.
Check out the forum post about the PROTOTYPE RZN on Golfwrx.com >>
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