Is This the Callaway Driver You’ve Been Waiting For?

In the midst of the new release chaos that is December through January in the golf equipment world, Callaway kept one card close to the vest. Actually, there are almost certainly more cards, but the point of today’s story is that Elyte Triple Diamond Max has found its way onto the USGA’s conforming driver list.

What we know

As is the way with the USGA list, details are sparse. All we can say for sure is that the Elyte Triple Diamond Max shares the front-to-back weighting system of the Elyte Triple Diamond and, like everything else in the Elyte metalwood family, it has a 10X Ai face.

Slightly unusual for the USGA list, the first appearance of the Elyte TD Max is limited to the left-handed version.

Hmm emoji.

With Elyte, Callaway dropped “Max” from the naming convention for its middle of the market driver. This makes the new addition particularly interesting as it reintroduces the suffix for what appears to be a tweener offering.

Where it (probably) fits

Last season’s Paradym Ai Smoke Triple Diamond was a smashing success. The name used an excessive amount of letters, but also suggested best of both worlds performance and it became the rare driver that was sometimes out of stock.

Within the Elyte line, the Triple Diamond is Callaway’s most playable TD ever, so there’s theoretically less room to fill between the low spin TD and the versatile suffix-less Elyte. It will be interesting to see how this one squeezes into the lineup.

I suspect we’re looking at a 460cc profile with performance that falls between the stock Elyte and current Triple Diamond. Whether that’s a higher spinning, more forgiving take on TD or something more like the stock Elyte with front-to-back trajectory control weighting is currently unknown.

It’s going to sell

That said, I suspect it will do just fine given the enthusiastic response to last season’s model. The Elyte Triple Diamond Max will likely be a hit when it lands at retail.

To reiterate, the Elyte TD Max isn’t particularly surprising (even if the USGA currently only has the LH model). Given the success of last year’s model, this always seemed like a foregone conclusion. With that, the only gripe I have is that it wasn’t released with the rest of the family.

Such is the way in the golf equipment world, where there’s always a need to have something fresh in your lineup, even if the “stale” stuff is just a few months old.

The last one was pretty good

If you don’t want to wait for the Elyte TD Max, or you’re looking to save some money, the sneaky popular Paradym Ai Smoke Triple Diamond Max is available now for $399 – roughy $200 less than anything in the Elyte lineup.

Have your say

Are you excited about the Elyte TD Max? Are you frustrated that it wasn’t announced with everything else? Or, perhaps, a little bit of both?