Cleveland RTX 6 ZipCore Review

Wedges are graded on spin and on whether that spin survives conditions, and the second half is where the RTX 6 earns its place. The ZipCore insert inside the hosel is made of much lighter material than the steel around it, which frees mass to be pushed out to the perimeter and raises stability on a toe strike by roughly a fifth over the previous model. That is a real gain in a club category where forgiveness is usually an afterthought.

The face is the other half of the story. Cleveland cuts the grooves close to the legal limit and adds a milled pattern between them, and the effect shows up most in wet grass and morning dew, where most wedges surrender spin first and this one holds on. From a clean dry lie it spins with the best of them rather than beyond them, which is the honest way to put it. Feel is superb, a soft thud that tells you exactly where on the face you struck it, and the shaping is classier than Cleveland's price position suggests.

It is not the deepest grind menu in golf, and the groove edges will not stay sharp as long as the most expensive wedges do. At a hundred and seventy dollars a club it undercuts the tour benchmarks, though by ten or twenty rather than the gulf Cleveland's reputation implies. The value case rests on the forgiveness and the wet weather spin rather than on the receipt, and for most golfers that still settles the argument.