PREVIEW: Nike Golf Vapor Fly Clubs

Earlier today Nike Golf sent out a press release announcing all the bells and whistles that go along with their new Vapor Fly golf club line. After reading through the release, however, I can't help but feel like we've heard this stuff before. The full release, written in a nifty and truly unique "review-type" blog format, can be found here: http://news.nike.com/news/vapor-fly-clubs

If you clicked on the above link and read all the way through, you probably noticed a few things about the new Nike Golf Vapor Fly series:

1. The clubs are all sorts of crazy colored
2. There're promises of more distance yielded from special tech
3. Adjustability is still tantamount throughout the clubhead
4. Did I mention they're all sorts of weird colors?

Let's be honest with each other. Any new club release comes packaged with promises of more distance, lower centers of gravity, higher moments of inertia (you know, important factors average golfers really care about) and stupid amounts of adjustable doohickies that you shouldn't tinker too much with in the first place.

So what is there to be excited about with the new Nike Golf Vapor Fly clubs? You know, besides the colors?

At first blush (because that's all the info we have right now), each new driver in the Vapor Fly series sounds like they'll be super-lightweight. Sprinkled among words and copyrighted terms like "FlexLoft 2.0", "HyperFlight Face", "compression" and others you'll find mention of heightened swing speeds, dropped spin rates and -- of course -- more distance. There's even a mention of "energy transfer," which is just in time for the new Star Wars movie.

What does all of this mean to the average player? Probably not much.

Look, I get it; golf equipment companies need to appeal to the largest market demographic who read sites like this one: 18-35 year old males. I'm guessing that's where the color options and fancy tech come into play. A good number of older readers, those over 50, are also interested because they have the deepest wallets and (presumably) more free time to play golf. That's where the lightweight-distance-compression stuff comes in.

But based on what Nike sent out in their latest press release, I'm not seeing anything that hasn't been done in different packages from other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

Regardless, I'm willing to give Nike the benefit of the doubt at least until I have a chance to test the new Vapor Fly clubs out. Whether or not they'll have qualities that set them apart from other brands in an ever-narrowing quality gap remains to be seen.