Gear: TaylorMade Tour Response golf balls
Specs: Three-piece ball with a cast urethane cover. Available in white, yellow and striped.
Who It’s For: Golfers who want a premium-quality ball with a softer feel and a less-than-premium price.
Price: $39.99 per dozen.
The Skinny: The Tour Response ball utilizes tour-proven technologies and features that debuted in TaylorMade’s most-premium balls over the last few seasons, along with a lower compression, to provide high-end distance off the tee and spin around the greens at a slightly-lower price.
The Deep Dive: Every year when Apple comes out with a new iPhone, the company touts improvements to the camera, the battery life and the screen quality. Those things are important to consumers, but all that new technology comes at a price. When the new phone comes out, Apple does not stop making the previous generation of iPhones, of course, and for many people, last year’s technology is still appealing, especially after it is discounted.
TaylorMade wants you to think of the Tour Response golf balls as discounted premium balls because they have been designed with many of the same features and benefits found in the company’s TP5 and TP5x balls, but you will find them for about $10 less per dozen.
While the TP5 and TP5x balls are five-piece urethane-covered balls, the Tour Response is constructed using three pieces: a core, a casing layer and a cast urethane cover.
The 2022 Tour Response has a soft core and a 70 overall compression. To give it speed, TaylorMade designed it with the same HFM casing layer found in TP5 and TP5x. The high-flex material (HFM) encases the core, and at impact, compresses like a spring before snapping back into shape. This process transfers energy into the shot more efficiently, to create more ball speed.
Tour Response also has the same Tour Flight dimple pattern found on the TP5 and TP5x. The dimples are shallower, and the walls of the dimples are steeper, which according to TaylorMade, helps the ball rise off the tee, and as the ball starts to come down, the steeper sidewalls create more lift.
The combination of more ball speed from the casing layer and improved aerodynamics from the dimples should result in the fast, high-launch/low-spin conditions needed for increased distance off the tee.
To help golfers generate more spin around the green and on approach shots, TaylorMade has given the Tour Response a soft cast urethane cover. The urethane is easily gripped by the grooves in wedges and short irons, so players can expect more control.
A $10 savings on a ball that many would consider to be a premium, urethane-covered offering sounds like a good deal, and it is, but TaylorMade is spicing up the Tour Response by not only offering it in white and yellow but also in a Striped version that offers a new twist on the Pix alignment system.
The Pix system positions the TaylorMade side stamp between a series of triangles, so as the ball rolls, a white path is created that shows the player how true his or her putting stroke was. TaylorMade calls it Clear Path. With Tour Response Stripe, the white area created by the spinning triangles is replaced by a wide, solid yellow stripe. It’s really more of an alignment aid, but the 360-degree alignment system features a 22-millimeter band all the way around the ball. It is easy to aim, but if you cut across the ball, pull it or block it, the stripe will appear to wobble.
So, in some ways, you can think of the Tour Response as a “Lite” version of the TP5 and TP5x, a three-layer version of the ball used by Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, Collin Morikawa and Rickie Fowler. The three-layer Tour Response will have a softer feel than those balls, and if you opt for the Stripe version you will get the benefit of a new alignment aid. It would not be surprising if many golfers feel the difference in performance is small enough that they will decide to save $10 and go with the Tour Response.
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