A follow up question: Does anybody here wear soft spikes because they offer a playing advantage over metals?
I do. They're much easier to walk in.
When I was a kid I remember playing one year in spikes, and then the next year we went to plastic spikes. This is at Lake View CC in North East, PA. Three things stand out from that year:
- My feet and ankles and knees weren't nearly as "tired" at the end of a round as they were with metal spikes. Whether that was because of the weight, or how "hard" they made the soles (less cushioning), or a combination of those and other factors, I don't know. I just know I could play a lot more golf, even at age 16 or so, with the plastic spikes. 36-hole days became 54-hole days.
Ahhhh, the wasted time of youth… - I had to be a lot more careful walking up wooden steps that had just received a light sprinkling of water.
- The greens looked 10x better than the year before. The change was dramatic and instantaneous.
So, that's not really for a "playing advantage" as it is "I got to play more." These days I prefer spikeless shoes entirely. I don't have to muck about with cleaning them, and the times I lose traction in a year are countable on my fingers… and they're situations (like hardpan) where I might not have much traction anyway.
I realize it puts me in the radical fringe of superintendents, but I am unconvinced that metal spikes are necessarily deterimental to putting surfaces. I have been greenkeeping since the '70's, before soft spikes came in, and I have yet to see any difference in putting surfaces due to type of shoe spikes. My suspicion is that the soft spike hysteria has been promulgated as a conspiracy between club managers who want to reduce wear and tear on hard surfaces around the clubhouse, and some marketing people and manufacturers who wanted a new market to exploit. Along the way, they managed to brianwash not only the golfing public but 99% of superintendents that sof spikes are indispensable for the health of the greens. Many of those same superintendents then run spiking machines across the same greens to open holes the same way metal spikes would.
Wow.
Aren't the tines on a machine going much deeper into the turf, down below the thatch, and well below the root layer? The spikes on a golf shoe don't penetrate that deep.
And, though it's just anecdotal, the difference from one year to the next with the only real difference being the institution of a metal spike ban was eye-opening.