Wedge (golf) - Sand Wedge

A sand wedge is a type of golf club with a specialized design intended to help the player play the ball from soft lies such as sand bunkers. It has a loft of about 56°, and about 10° of "bounce".

Gene Sarazen won the 1932 British and US Open tournaments with a new club he had invented that was specialized for sand play. He is hailed as the inventor of the modern sand wedge, which he developed by taking a niblick (9-iron), soldering additional metal underneath the leading edge to create a wide, heavy sole on the club, and then experimenting with the angle that the sole made to level ground. The resulting club had a wedge-shaped profile, and offered better loft to escape from deep or sloped bunkers (unlike the older low-lofted "jigger" traditionally used for bunker shots), while not "digging in" to the soft sand like a lofted iron such as the niblick would normally do.

The modern sand wedge still uses the ideas of high mass, high loft, and bounce angle, but the modern sand wedge clubhead has much higher mass than earlier designs, up to 40oz (2.5 lb, 1.13 kg), to drive the clubhead through the firmer sand found in many courses. There can also be differences in shaft length; while some sand wedges follow the systematic progression of shorter shaft lengths for higher lofts, many sand wedges are longer than the adjacent lofted wedges. This encourages the player to hit sand wedge shots "fat" (the club hits the ground before the ball), which on a firm lie is generally bad, but in the case of a ball embedded or buried in soft bunker sand this will get the clubhead all the way under the ball to lift it out. The resulting plume of sand from such a shot was made famous by Sarazen as the "explosion shot" and is a common sight in televised golf events.

As its name suggests, a sand wedge is used most often to extract the ball from a bunker. However, the features which make it useful for this purpose are advantageous in other soft lies such as thick rough, soggy ground or mud. While the high angle of bounce can make it difficult to use on firm lies (the sole will raise the leading edge of the club which can result in the player hitting the ball edge-on, a so-called "thin" shot), it can be used much as any other "short iron" would; with a "full swing", a skilled golfer can typically hit a sand wedge between 80 and 100 yards, and with a chip shot, a sand wedge can produce short "lobs" of 20–60 yards.