The new Tour Velvet Tour Tack from Golf Pride grips is certainly a mouthful.

Especially if you add Limited Edition to their name. Which they are. But they’re also something else.

Ever since Golf Pride opened its new Global Innovation Center in Pinehurst, North Carolina in 2020, its synthetic rubber gear heads have been working on ways to bridge what had been considered an unbridgeable grip gap:

Traction with tack.

It may sound easy, but in Grip World, those two tend to be mutually exclusive. The best you can do, it would seem, would be to give up some of one to get more of the other. Golf Pride has grips that offer relative mixes, but the new Tour Velvet Tour Tack might be the first one to gain acceptance on Tour.

And for that combination of traction and tack, we can thank Rickie Fowler.

Tour Velvet Tour Tack Golf Grips

The new Golf Pride Tour Velvet Tour Tack golf grips fall in the gray area of the Tack-Traction Continuum. Grips with tack – generally called “comfort” grips” – are on the soft end of the scale and feature a light texture pattern. Golf Pride grips such as the CP2 and the Tour Wrap perform best in dry conditions and in dry hands. But if it’s humid and your hands sweat, they can be slipperier than the greased pole at the 4th of July picnic.

At the Traction end of the Continuum are what Golf Pride calls “performance” grips. They’re firmer with more texture to control moisture when it’s wet or humid and your hands are sweaty. These include Golf Pride’s best-selling grips, the MCC family, the Tour Velvet and the full-cord Z-Grip.

The new Tour Velvet Tour Tack falls somewhere in the middle of that continuum, leaning more to the Traction side. As the name suggests, it’s your basic Tour Velvet grip, but Golf Pride has introduced a unique new dimple pattern that’s softer and, for lack of a better word, stickier than the Tour Velvet. At the same time, it still has enough traction to perform in hot, humid or wet conditions.

As mentioned, the Tour Velvet Tour Tack falls more on the Traction side of the Tack-Traction scale. The Golf Pride CPX grip, featuring a unique EXO-Diamond studded texture also offers traction and moisture control but falls on the softer side of the scale. And The Tour Wrap Microsuede is one of Golf Pride’s softest and tackiest grips, but it also has a hint of traction thanks to a secondary buffing process to rough up the texture.

Price and Availability

Golf Pride developed the Tour Velvet Tour Tack following a request by Rickie Fowler. The grip proved to be a popular one on Tour, with the likes of Keegan Bradley and Stewart Cink using it, so Golf Pride decided to let the rest of us in on it.

As mentioned, these are an official Limited Edition. They come in standard size only and are available only on Golf Pride’s website.

The Golf Pride Tour Velvet Tour Tack golf grips sell for $10.99 each. They go on sale today.

Visit GolfPride.com for details.

A New Golf Pride Study

There’s a fascinating side hustle going on at Golf Pride’s new Innovation Center down in Pinehurst. It’s obviously the home of Golf Pride’s R&D labs. But it’s also serving as a testing and study center. The company’s most recent study focused on how sunlight can affect your grips and, by extension, your performance.

Golf Pride tested 17 right-handed golfers, all low single-digit handicappers between the ages of 24 and 40. They compared hitting fitted 7-irons with fresh, new Tour Velvet grips against grips that had been aged in an accelerated UV chamber simulating 60 hours of direct sunlight exposure.

What Golf Pride found was that fresh grips increased ball speed by an average of 1.3 miles per hour (overall average was 121.6 mph) and increased carry distance by 2.3 yards (average carry was 168.6 yards).

Additionally, fresh grips also improved face impact. Heel-toe face dispersion tightened up by 11 percent, while high-low face impact improved by 10 percent. Not surprisingly, the study participants also said they felt more confident with fresh grips.

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