If you are a keen golfer the likelihood is that you want to improve your game. Golf does that to you. The roller coaster ride from elation to frustration evokes in us a hope that things will get better! It is this hope which keeps us coming back! This is why your clubs must be in top shape, and Anda Golf based in La Cala de Mijas can help you with repairs and maintenance.
Can You Buy a Better Game?
Golf club manufacturers urge us with promises of ever greater distance from the tee and irons that are easier to hit to buy new equipment every couple of seasons. The thing is, do we really need to spend this much money in order to keep our golf improving?
No.
That fact is that golf clubs, especially irons, do not wear out quickly. With some maintenance and care you can expect your irons to perform perfectly for 8 to 12 years. Drivers will serve you well for about 5 years.
Visiting a club maker and fitter and having your existing clubs retrofitted can give them a new lease of life and give you that desired extra performance.
In this interview we talk to Abbas Morsi at Anda Golf. Probably the Costa del Sols most established and highly respected club maker. We ask him what difference he can make to your game and why it makes sense to visit him while you are enjoying your golf holiday on the Costa del Sol.
S.L: How long have you been running Anda Golf?
A.M: We have been here in La Cala for 15 years now.
S.L: What made you choose La Cala?
A.M:When I first saw this business space I had a good feeling about it. We are on a service road alongside the main A7 Autovia that runs the entire length of the Costa del Sol. Every golfer heading from Malaga airport to play golf will drive right by our door! We have plenty of parking directly in front of the shop making it easy for my customers to bring their clubs in and out.
Also here in La Cala we are centrally located amongst several golf courses. Mijas Golf, La Cala Golf, Alhaurin Golf, Cerrado del Aguila and Santana Golf are just a few kilometers behind us. La Noria is on our doorstep, Cabopino Golf, Santa Maria Golf and Marbella Golf a few minutes along the road. I can count more than 20 golf courses located within a 20km radius of us!
S.L: How did you get started in Golf?
A.M: Twenty five years ago I got a job with Mr Scotts, a very well known golf shop close to Marbella. I knew nothing about golf or clubmaking. My job was to sell the clothing. Bit by bit the owner asked me to take more responsibility so I became responsible for quality control of the items that left the store including the club repairs. I would check to make sure there was no glue residue, that the grips were perfectly straight, etc. It was not long before I began to learn the club making skills myself.
S.L: What is the biggest part of your business at Anda Golf?
A.M: We sell clothing, we have thousands of new and used clubs for sale, we sell all kinds of golf accessories as well as club making and repairing.
We sell a lot of used golf clubs. Some very interesting clubs pass through here, beautiful bladed irons from 30 and 40 years ago, all kinds of drivers, woods, wedges and putters. People come to the shop and take their time waggling clubs to get a feel for them. If they like a club we can arrange for them to take it for a couple of days and try it out on the golf course before they buy it, it’s perfect!
We work with a lot of the local professionals. Many of them teach using trackman, flight scope and other launch monitors which produce data about their students swings, here at Anda Golf we use that data to build or modify the clubs for their students to get the best performance possible.
S.L: What kind of repairs do you do?
The most common is re-gripping. I order 700 grips each month to keep topped up! There is more to regripping a club than just cutting off the old one and whipping a new one on. I have a customer who came in one day, we got talking about golf, he said “I need to find a new putter, my putter just does not feel right, I am missing everything to the right” I asked him to bring it in. It was a new putter, a TaylorMade Spider, 4 months old, bought from a big sports shop.
This man is a big man with huge hands! The putter had a normal grip. When I put the putter on my regripping table I could see that it was not straight. A tiny error in putting the grip on correctly was the cause of missing to the right, the reason the club did not feel good because the grip was too small. By correctly fitting the right grip to suit him we saved him 4 shots per round!
People tend to finish their round and then jam their clubs into the back of the car, especially visitors that are unfamiliar with the width of their hire cars!! Eventually this will cause tiny fractures in the graphite, after a while these cracks spread until one day you make a swing on the tee the shaft finally breaks. I get a lot of requests for new shafts! When replacing a shaft I am very careful to make sure and replicate exactly how the club was before so that it feels the same . Nothing worse than having a new shaft fitted and then the club feels different from the others.
S.L: What can you do for visiting golfers?
Many golfers in their home countries play golf, put the clubs away and forget about them until the next weekend. When they are here enjoying golf on the Costa del Sol their golf clubs are in their sight every day! It is the perfect opportunity to come and get them checked out on one of the non-golf days. They will see immediate changes in their scoring.
If your grips are more than say 100 rounds old it can affect your grip pressure. As the grip gets harder and shinier you have to grip it harder which adds unwanted tension in the swing. With the right sized grips properly fitted you will find it much easier to make good smooth swings. Your clubs will feel and perform like new.
Often gofers find that after a period of time some of their irons do not go as far as they used to or that a couple of the irons seem to fly more or less the same distance. This type of pattern is common, it is a sign that the loft needs to be checked. Having the correct loft will give you consistent incremental distances with your irons.
Similarly, if the lie of your club does not suit you, either too upright or too flat it will cause you to hit shots consistently to the left or right. You can tell by looking at your address position. If the heel of the club is off the ground the lie is too flat for you, the shots will tend to go to the right. If your divots are deepest by the heel of the club the lie is too upright for you and the shots will typically go to the left.
Summary
Needless to say I use Anda Golf to maintain my clubs. At the beginning of the 2020 golf season Abbas changed my grips, checked the lofts of my irons and modified my driver and 3 wood to match the data I got from the launch monitor. For me it has made a real difference to my confidence. My venerable Taylormade M2 driver and Mizuno MP4 irons have played a lot of golf over the last 4 years. They still feel great because they still fit me perfectly. I am grateful to Abbas at Anda Golf for helping to keep my game in good shape. He will do the same for you too!
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