On the last day of this year’s golf ball test, we had a little bit of extra time to run a few smaller experiments. Near the top of our list was mud balls. We wanted to find out what happens, or at least what you should expect to happen, when mud finds its way onto your golf ball.
It also seemed like the perfect opportunity to try and answer another question we get asked all the time: Does cover damage, whether that’s from the cart path, a crisp bunker shot, a tree or anything else that leaves a mark, impact the performance of the golf ball?
The original plan was for two separate articles but it turns out that the severity of the real-world implications is driven by the extent of the damage or disruption. In general, whether it’s mud on the cover or some sort of other disruption or damage to the cover, the resulting ball flight is basically the same. Not good, but the same.
So, with that said, let’s look at what we found.
Key Takeaways
It doesn’t take much damage to have an impact
It turns out that even the kind of thing most of us would overlook can cause performance issues. Anything that alters the prescribed shape and depth of the dimples, whether that comes from filling them with mud or scraping bits of them away with a crisp wedge shot out of a bunker (or a not-so-crisp drive that hits a cart path or tree), can be problematic. When you mess with the golf ball’s aerodynamic structures (dimples), bad things can, and often will, happen.
















