It’s the rarest club in golf, and this pro just won with it

Lee Trevino famously said that golfers get stuck in a storm must hold a 1-iron.

Why?

“Because even God can’t hit a 1 iron,” he said.

Over the past 30 years, amateurs and PGA Tour pros alike have taken notice because there are much easier-to-use alternatives to the long irons.

Today, the use of the 1-iron is a unicorn on the PGA Tour, replaced by 5-woods, 7-woods and hybrids. Even with the advent of hollow body iron designs and more specifically designed driving irons that have kept the 2 and 3 irons alive, the pros seem to draw the line once an iron gets harder than 17 degrees.

But not Ben An.

An won the DP World Tour and the Korean PGA Tour’s Genesis Championship over the weekend in a playoff. Victory surely will to be best remembered for driver off the deck he holed out on the 15th hole from 290 yards to 10 feet when he was teeing off with two, or his emotional holiday with his grandmother, which saw him win for the first time in their homeland.

But gearheads might have noticed something else: Not only is An one of the few pros still carrying a 1-iron, it’s also the longest club in his bag other than his driver. He has no wood, which explains why he had to hit the driver at 15.

The Titleist U505 16-degree driving iron has been in Ani’s bag since the March 2023 Valspar Championship; Adding the club to An’s arsenal was an idea cooked up by An; his swing coach, Sean Foley; and JJ Van Wezenbeeck, Titleist’s senior director of player promotions. Van Wezenbeeck said they had tried everything to find a secondary alternative off the top, from 3-woods with strong loft to fairway woods.

“We kind of had a range with Ben,” Van Wezenbeeck told GOLF.com. “He’s such an elite iron player that — the way he hits a loose wood, he’s really ready for a driver. But an iron, it really does a great job of controlling the face and compacting it. So his coach Sean Foley looked at me a little bit and said, ‘We need something.’

That’s when Van Wezenbeeck asked the couple if they were open to “something.”

Like, say, a U505 1-iron.

of The U505 isn’t the scary 1-iron blade it used to be. As Van Wezenbeeck describes it, it is an iron with more hybrid properties. It has a flat face, like an iron, but like a hybrid, it has a wide sole and low center of gravity. This low CG is aided by tungsten heel and toe weights, creating a higher MOI.

Although Van Wezenbeeck said the range at Valspar goes a bit downhill, An and Foley’s attention was drawn when they saw 265 yards from the gate. Club, with a few tweaks here and there — including a switch to 41-in Graphite Design Tour AD VF 95 X axis before the Paris Olympics – it’s been in Ani’s bag ever since.

“I hit it high enough, I’ve got enough speed, I’ve got enough spin,” An said in a Titleist YouTube video earlier this year, “so why not try to build that iron that’s got really low loft, that Can I hit it straighter off the tee? Because that’s the whole point of using the 3-wood.

“A lot of people are surprised by how high I can hit this, and it’s been a great club off the tee. I can hit it down, maybe 20, 30 feet off the ground to 120 feet off the ground.”

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Surprisingly, An’s 1-iron design isn’t just reserved for the game’s elite or those with access. The U505 1-iron is actually a retail offering from Titleist.

“In testing with Tour players they were like, Hey, this is kind of crossing that threshold for that player who really doesn’t — or has scar tissue from playing a hybrid 10 years ago when they didn’t have CG the adjustability we do today and said I’m looking for something more iron-like,” Van Wezenbeeck said. “Should we lower that to 16 degrees? And as we look at the loft progressions, we were like, ‘That’s a 1-iron.’ .