What You Need To Know
- The Performance Golf AnyLie Hybrid is a USGA-approved hybrid from 4-time PGA Teacher of the Year, Adam Bazalgette, that fixes the root cause of mis-hit approach shots from ANY LIE on the golf course.
- Powered by AnyLie Technology, a group of four innovative design features invented and engineered to power the club through any lie, ensuring consistent performance and accuracy.
- The AnyLie Hybrid comes in 21° and 24°, both right and left-handed dexterities and features shaft options ranging from Ladies to Stiff and retails for $199.00.
When it comes to improving the games of recreational golfers, Performance Golf’s ethos is pretty simple: make amateurs better faster.
Through a unique blend of online instruction, training aids and products, Performance Golf is angling to be the one-stop shot for every golfer trying to shave strokes off your game. And as a golfer, you’ve likely run into their products or series in your online golf game improvement search.
Each of PG’s club offerings tackles a specific part of the game, and with the AnyLie Hybrid, they’ve declared war on difficult-to-hit long irons.
First Impressions
Out of the box, the AnyLie Hybrid is seemingly unremarkable in its uniformity with any hybrid you would find on the rack at a big box retailer. Often with these “quick fix” clubs, there’s some differentiating feature or look that will take you aback or make you wonder if you can take this club on the course without getting laughed off the tee.
Not so with the AnyLie Hyrbid.
Equipped with a good-looking leather headcover and a sleek black and blue color scheme, the club sets easily and consistently at address. With club shafts ranging from Ladies flex at 50g to Stiff at 65g, there’s a good feel to the club that fits in nicely with the rest of your set so as to not stick out, but upon further inspection, you quickly can glean what this club’s super powers are.
Buoyed by a group of four innovative design features invented and engineered to power the club through any lie, the expectations for ease of use are only amplified.
Briefly, the AnyLie’s unique features are its Speed Response Spoiler (a rear contact point keeps the club level through the ground so you won’t lose clubhead speed, dig your leading edge, or catch it thin), 4-Way Chunk Resistant Forward Sole (a wedge sole modified to achieve the longer distance and high performance of a hybrid), Fast Face with Contact Cross-Hairs (heel-to-toe curvature sits square to the target every time; cut out the scorelines in the top-middle of the face so you can frame up your ball like it’s in the crosshairs of a sniper rifle) and an AL1 Steady Strike Shaft (40-inch lightweight shaft gives you the kick and torque you need to hit high-launching shots with the right amount of spin from any lie).
On The Course
As I’ve discussed in the past, there’s a bit of ego and pride taken in hitting long irons in the hybrid age. Whether that’s a smart decision or one that is beneficial to one’s game is certainly up for debate, but perhaps the most emphatic endorsement of the AnyLie Hybrid I can give is a driving range anecdote that took place in my initial testing.
Putting the AnyLie up against my TaylorMade P790 2-iron and 3-iron, I hit a handful of shots with my trusty long irons. As usual, there were some hot-knife-through-butter beauties and, also as usual, there were some clanky floaters, the result of off-center strikes.
The lightbulb moment took place with the first swing with the AnyLie Hybrid. As someone who struggles to straighten out a long iron (a perpetual fader of the golf ball), the first strike did two things that resulted in an audible reaction.
First, the ball went straight up in the air (comparatively speaking) and had an enviable right-to-left drawer’s ball flight. I couldn’t scrape another ball over fast enough to try it again. After 15 minutes, the AnyLie Hybrid was in my bag for good.
Truth be told, it didn’t take the full 15 minutes; it was just so fun and easy to hit, there wasn’t any chance that club was going anywhere else. For what it’s worth, I had a PRGR Launch monitor out there to gauge carry distance as well, and the 21° AnyLie was right in line with my 2-iron carry distances despite boasting 4° more loft.
On the course, the club is as advertised. Fairway, rough, off the tee — and my personal favorite, out of fairway bunkers — the AnyLie shined, and made the answer to my rhetorical question above about long irons being a smart decision / beneficial to my game abundantly clear.
Takeaways
The takeaways to this review are clear as evidenced by the fact that I needed to move some stuff around in my bag to make room for the AnyLie Hybrid.
Something that has become abundantly clear to me in recent years is that good golf is boring golf, and boring golf typically means hitting fairways and greens, and hitting practical and effective recovery shots. The AnyLie Hybrid makes golf boring, and that’s about as high of a compliment as I could pay a piece of equipment.
The AnyLie Hybrid comes in 21° and 24°, both right and left-handed dexterities and features shaft options ranging from Ladies to Stiff and retails for $199.00. Visit PerformanceGolf.com to learn more about the AnyLie Hybrid and the rest of VLS Golf’s products.
