Equipment

Phil Mickelson famously won the 2006 Masters using two slightly different Callaway drivers. This week, he's trying a similar strategy.

No, Mickelson doesn't have two drivers in the bag, but close. Along with his Callaway RAZR Fit Xtreme driver, he's got what Callaway is calling the ''Phrankenwood.''

Essentially, it's a 2-wood (remember those?!), based on Callaway's X Hot fairway wood technology. Mickelson's prototype model has 8.5 degrees of loft with a 250cc head, and is outfitted with a Fubuki k 70X prototype shaft, says Scott Goryl of Callaway.

Like other X Hot fairway woods, the Phrankenwood has a stainless steel head with a Speed Frame Face Cup made of high strength Carpenter 455 stainless steel. The face cup – the front piece on the head, including the clubface – is 40 percent thinner than previous Callaway fairway wood faces, and contains a 90-percent larger sweet spot.

At his news conference at Augusta National on Tuesday, Mickelson said he began playing the X-Hot 3-wood earlier this year and was immediately impressed.

''I hit it as far as my driver,'' he said of the X Hot 3-wood. ''I couldn't believe it, it like shot off the face. It had, you know, the optimum spin that a driver would have, and I hit it as far as my driver. And if you've noticed, as I've played Doral and I've played Houston and I've played these last few weeks, I hit it off almost every tee because it's so easy to hit, and it just bores through the air and I don't have to manipulate it and it just goes so far. 

''So I asked the engineers to take that technology in that club, in our 3-wood, and just put it on steroids,'' which he joked was probably not the best way to phrase that. ''But I wanted to make it more like a driver.''

So the Phrankenwood, Mickelson explained, ''looks like a 3-wood, but it's bigger than our 3-wood. And it's almost like a small driver, but it's the 3-wood technology of our X Hot into a driver. What it's done is taken a lot of spin off of it. And if you watch, you'll see a lot of the shots off the tee that I hit have a lot more scoot on them.''

Mickelson said his practice with the club so far this week has produced exactly the results he had hoped for.

''Tee shots on 9 are getting down to the bottom of the hill, and I haven't been able to do that in years,'' he said. ''Tee shot on 10 is getting another 15 to 20 yards, giving me a club or two less than I've had in years. And the tee shot on 15 is getting down to where I have one or two clubs less, and because it comes off fast, as well as low spin, it's running, which is exactly what I wanted here.''