Brett Kowalczyk

Editor of Fairway Shelf

About

Commercial real estate broker based in Scottsdale. Ran seriously for fifteen years, tracking weekly mileage the way some people track a project budget. A knee injury in 2020 ended that. The surgeon gave me a short list of things I could still do, and golf was on it. Hadn't played seriously since my late twenties, and hadn't been very good at it then, so I started over from near zero.

The obsessive-tracking part of my brain found a new set of numbers fast. A spiral-bound notebook went into the glove box within the first month. Every round gets an entry: course, date, temperature, which ball, any gear change since the previous outing. Six years later, the log runs long. It caught that a push cart I was happy with in March was rattling loose by mid-July. It caught that a putter I was ready to throw out at week three became the one I used for two full seasons. The notebook noticed both.

Behind the house, three miles from Papago Golf Course, there's a climate-controlled garage where the actual gear work happens. A pegboard wall holds grips sorted by diameter from thinnest to jumbo. A white cinder-block wall carries a running round-count tally in black paint marker. A rolling steel cart holds whatever bag, shoes, or gloves are currently under test. The single west-facing casement window lets in flat bleaching sun from about 2 p.m. on, which is usually after I'm back from the morning round and into writing notes.

Six years of playing two to three times a week means rotating through a lot of gear. Over a dozen bags, push carts, and putter setups, at minimum. Some I still use. More I returned. A few went to Goodwill after the notebook made the verdict clear. My Wednesday rounds are almost always with Hank Viteri, who reads every equipment catalog cover to cover and almost never actually changes anything. He plays better under pressure than his handicap suggests and knows where every water spigot is on every public course in the valley. The contrast between his research-without-commitment style and my test-everything approach has been useful for keeping my own writing honest.

What I can tell you from all of this is how a grip holds up after sixty rounds in Phoenix heat, or why traction on a spikeless shoe degrades noticeably on hardpan side-slopes by round forty-five. Swing mechanics, shaft flex, and club fitting are outside what I can speak to with any real authority. The rounds are real. The notebook is specific.

Articles by Brett Kowalczyk

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