It’s All About the Sweet Spot

Talking about oversized heads (no, not talking about casting instructors or magazine editors) and fast-action graphite fly rods.

Question: Why have “fast-action” fly rods dominated the market for the past 30-plus years?

Answer: Because they help non-expert anglers make longer and more accurate casts.

That’s not a criticism or complaint. It’s just a fact. And fly fishing is far from the only sport where product design has largely evolved around helping amateurs perform like professionals.

Take tennis, for example. In the 1970s and early 1980s, American Jimmy Connors made the Wilson T2000 racquet all the rage. The more he won, the more the racquet sold (ultimately over 2 million units). This, even though the T2000 had a head size of only 67 square inches, which made it powerful in the hands of a pro like Connors, but otherwise pretty difficult to master for the average recreational player.

Then Prince came along (the racquet maker, not the musician) and, by making racquets with “oversized” heads, it leveraged the advantages of a larger “sweet spot.” Current day Prince racquets have heads over 100 square inches. What that means is the average player can hit balls slightly off center and still find forgiveness via power and accuracy.

Golf is another good analogy. Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus made golf history, swinging persimmon wood drivers with heads about the same size as a man’s closed fist. They played with “blade” irons that packed a punch and ability to shape shots with ball spin–if you hit the ball just right.

But the average duffer couldn’t always do that, thus was born a generation of drivers with heads nearly the size of goldfish bowls, and irons with large faces and cavity backs–all made with space-age materials like graphite and titanium. These larger-sweet-spot irons are called “player improvement” irons, but what that really means is they’re made in a way that lets you mishit the ball and still keep it in play. Golf club manufacturers just didn’t want to call them “screwup forgiveness” irons.

Fly rods aren’t about sweet spots that can be measured in square inches, per se, rather, a fly cast is about generating line speed, then stopping the rod, and flinging a weighted/coated line, hopefully in a compact “u” shape, without doubling over itself (a tailing loop).