Time to Step Up Your Grips: An Inside Look at Golf Pride Grips

There’s a 90 percent chance your golf clubs need new grips.

At least, that’s Andy Erikson’s ballpark estimate, and as Golf Pride Grips’ Director of Global Product Innovation, he pays more attention to people's grips than most. Part of the problem, as Andy explains, is just that: golfer’s simply don’t pay much attention to their grips.

“For most consumers, golf grips are not top of mind. We know that,” he said. “A lot of people do not even view the golf grip as a piece of performance equipment.”

But if golfers don’t think much about their grips, why is Golf Pride – with it’s new 35,000+ square-foot headquarters next to Pinehurst No. 8 – investing so much into creating a portfolio of performance golf grips that fit every type of golfer?

“Because for those individuals that are interested in performance, it does matter. Size matters, model matters, reminder grips matter,” Erikson said.

If you’re among the roughly 90 percent, give or take, of players using worn grips, the wrong-size grips, or various grip types from one club to the next, you could benefit from paying a little more attention to your grips.

To quantify just that, Golf Pride had golfers hit 7-irons on a Trackman with slightly worn grips. Then they swapped out the club for one with a fresh grip and saw an average gain of two yards of carry distance.

“That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Erikson said.

That’s why Golf Pride is innovating the golf grip, even when golfers aren’t thinking about their grips.

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How much innovation can really go into golf grips? Aren’t they all pretty much the same?

Take a quick look at Golf Pride’s CPX grip and you’ll see that golf grips can actually be quite different from one another.

“The CPX is the first time anybody that I can remember has done what we call exotexture. It’s not texture in, it’s texture out. It’s texture you can feel in your hands. It’s not the absence of material, it’s actually like those little pillows of material we’re putting in your hands,” Erikson explained.

The CPX might look unlike any golf grip you’ve ever seen, but it would be a lie to say it’s unlike any grip you’ve ever seen. In fact, the inspiration for the CPX came from bike grips.

“That nugget of inspiration went back to my BMX days and just bike handles in general.”

The CPX is Golf Pride’s softest performance grip with that mountain bike grip pattern that Golf Pride dubbed its EXO Diamond-Quilted pattern, designed for comfort.

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The MCC Plus 4 is the youngest sibling in Golf Pride’s popular MCC collection, the MultiCompound hybrid grip. The Plus 4 is an MCC grip that replicates four wraps of tape on the lower hand. The MCC collection itself, a hybrid of cord and rubber, has been around almost 20 years, but that doesn’t stop Golf Pride from improving it behind the scenes.

“We've done lots of different things that have been invisible to the consumer on material development to make it more durable, to make it feel better, to dial in the tolerances on the weight,” Erikson explained. 

One place Erikson and Golf Pride get inspiration for improvements is on tour, using lessons from what Erikson calls “extreme users” to guide innovation. 

They noticed that on tour, about 90 percent of professional golfers played some sort of non-standard grip. Some stretch the grip as thin as possible to squeeze every once of feel out of every shot. Others would add layer after layer of tape to the bottom half of the grip in an effort to quiet the lower hand.

“Why make them put four wraps of tape underneath the lower hand? Why don't we just do that for them with material? That's how we arrived at the evolution from MCC to MCC Plus 4.”