Gear: Cleveland RTX Full-Face wedges
Price: $159.99 each (Tour Satin) with True Temper Dynamic Gold Tour Issue Spinner shaft and Golf Pride Tour Velvet 360 grip. $179.99 each in Tour Rack raw-steel finish
Specs: Cast 8620 carbon steel heads with surface-roughening treatment.
Lofts: 50-60 degrees and 64 degrees (Tour Satin); 56-60 and 64 degrees (Tour Rack)
Available: June 11
With the release of its newest series of wedges, the RTX Full-Face, Cleveland Golf – a company synonymous with high-quality wedges – is bringing several technologies and hot trends together in one club.
For the past few seasons, wedges designed with a high-toe area, like the RTX Full-Face, have grown in popularity among both professionals and amateurs. When you open the face on tricky shots around the green, they present a larger hitting area to the ball.
But as the name implies, the higher toe area is not the only thing that makes these wedges look unique. The entire hitting surface is covered in Cleveland’s UltiZip grooves from the leading edge to the topline. Like the grooves in the original ZipCore wedges released last year, these grooves are deeper with sharper edges, and designers have packed them more tightly in the hitting area. This should ensure that more groove edges grab the ball on chips and pitch shots to help generate more spin. There are also microgrooves between the main grooves to increase surface roughness and friction to help golfers create more spin.
The wedges also undergo a heat treatment that Cleveland said will help prolong the grooves’ sharpness.
From a construction standpoint, the RTX Full-Face has a low-density material inside each head that allowed Cleveland engineers to shift weight to other parts of the head and manipulate the center of gravity. Doing that helped increase the RTX Full-Face’s stability.
The RTX Full-Face is available in a Tour Satin finish in gap wedge, sand wedge and lob wedge lofts. Cleveland also includes the RTX Full-Face in its Tour Rack program for players who want to customize the grind of the wedges. The Tour Rack version features a raw steel finish, and golfers can select from the Relief Edge grind, the Heel grind, Heel and Toe grind, S-Shaped grind or Standard Sole grind. The Tour Rack wedges all have a “T” on the hosel, signifying that they were initially intended for the Tour.