Nike CRUSH is a great all-around budget ball

Let me be perfectly blunt about my golf game of late: It really does not matter what type of ball I play.

If I’m hitting it well, I can play an yellowed wound water-ball and still bomb, gouge, and score. If I’m not, well, I lose a half-dozen or more $6 balls, adding financial injury to insult.

I have a strong suspicion that I am not alone in this candid admission of my on-course foibles and fallibility. (In fact, there may be some of you out there reading this with a quivering lower lip and tears streaming down your cheeks, staring into your own cracked image in the mirror of an LCD screen.)

For all of us who are willing to admit that we will play just as well whether we spend $60 a dozen or $20 a dozen on balls, but at the same time want to feel like we are doing all we can to help those vanishingly rare good days be as good as possible, let me suggest the Nike CRUSH.

Team Swoosh’s new ball ($30/doz.) is a 2-piece ionomer with a softer, high-energy core and a thinner cover. On a just-completed swing down to the Dallas area, I played the CRUSH, and was very impressed. My short game was solid, and I putted lights-out.

Sadly, off the tee I was abysmal. (Somewhere, there is a pitbull in the back yard of a McMansion that is chewing on a Nike CRUSH.)

On the bright side, at just $30 per dozen, losing a few CRUSHes a round won’t force you to switch to bowling. (Although I must add that the 209 I rolled one night at a Shenanigan’s outside Big D did make me briefly consider it…)