Surviving the Hot List: Season 2

What happens when you drop a golf-crazed Hollywood actor and a retired NFL player into the most grueling gig in golf? At the 2023 Hot List summit, Golf Digest's cameras followed Michael Peña and Danny Woodhead's quest to ace their new jobs as rookie club testers.

Hybrids

The best new hybrids in golf remind us of a time several golf club generations ago when an infomercial sensation billed itself as The Perfect Club. Increasingly and in all their forms today, the best new hybrids are a kind of perfection in modern golf club technology. As a collective, these designs are charged with attacking a specific and universal problem: Unhittable long irons. Regardless of whether you’re in the running for major championships or you haven’t hit a green from more than 175 yards out ever, hybrids are the game’s best equipment fix. The latest models are using thinner fast-flexing faces combined with different sizes to find the flight and the visual comfort level you prefer. Pay attention to those shapes, by the way. If you like the forgiving looks of a larger wood-like hybrid and tend to prefer a sweeping pass at the ball, you’ll want hybrids that look more like fairway woods. If your ideal hybrid looks like more of straighter faced club with a compact front to back measurement, then those sorts of hybrids match up better with a swing that tends to hit down on the ball like with an iron. Either way, the best of the new hybrids, detailed here, will offer an array of solutions, from tight tee shots and long par-three’s to modified chipping strokes around the green. Your search for hybrid perfection starts here.