What Is "Standard?" 

If you think about it, there is no standard equipment in any other sport that uses an instrument to strike a ball.  For instance, baseball bats are available in a variety of different lengths, overall weight, handle sizes, barrel sizes, etc.  Tennis rackets are likewise available in a variety of different materials, sizes, weights and shapes.  A quality tennis racket doesn't even have strings.  The racket is strung after the purchase to meet the individual skill level of the player.

The game of Golf is unique because it can be played with up to 14 different clubs in one set.  Manufacturers can't provide a multitude of options when mass marketing golf club sets, it just isn't cost effective.  So manufacturers mass produce golf clubs in standard lengths, with standard loft and lie angles, with standard swingweights, with a standard grip size, and usually with a choice of primary flex letter designations in A, R, S and X.  Doesn't the word primary leave the impression there might be secondary factors involved with respect to shaft flex?  You bet there are!

Let's analyze the standards of the golf club.  The first thing to realize is there are no "standards" within the golf industry.  Every company builds clubs to their own standards, which are different from company to company.  The three basic standards are Loft, Lie and Length.  I'm not including the shaft, other than length, here because that's a whole separate issue  Let's look a "6" Iron from five of the leading golf manufacturing companies in the chart below:

The lengths run from 37.25" to 37.5".  Not one of these irons has the same loft setting and the lie angles vary from 61 to 62.5 degrees.  Taylor Made is proud of their reputation of being "longer" than the competition.  It's fairly simple to see why their irons may provide more distance.  The 6 Iron is 37.5" long, a quarter of an inch longer than Ping and Mizuno, and the loft is 28 degrees! All things being equal, i.e., swing speed and area of impact, lower loft will compute to more distance every time! 

Companies have been lowering the loft angles on irons for years as a marketing ploy to increase sales.  The easiest way to increase distance is to decrease loft.  Once one company decreased the loft in their irons, all the other companies had to follow suit in order to be competitive.  Below is a chart depicting the "standard" for 6 Iron loft, beginning in 1960:

In essence, today's 6 Iron used to be a "4" Iron in the 1960's and a "5" in the early 1990's!  Have these "strengthening" of the loft angles accomplished anything?  Nothing, except that a 6 Iron can be hit further than 10 years ago and lots further than 30 years ago.  Well, a few other things were accomplished as well.  It's made the long irons (2, 3, 4 ) virtually impossible to hit consistently.  As a matter of fact, it's hard to find a company that even offers a 2 iron anymore.  It's also created a need for another club.  The Sand Wedge loft has not changed over the years, it's still 56 degrees because that's what's required to play out of a bunker.  The other clubs have moved down in loft, creating a distance gap from the pitching wedge to the sand wedge.  No problem, there's now a new club to fill this gap (at 52 degrees) aptly named the gap wedge.