The five-layer TaylorMade TP5 for 2024. (David Dusek/Golfweek)
Price: $54.99 per dozen
Specs: Five-piece, urethane-covered golf ball available in white, yellow and Pix patterns.
Who It’s For: Golfers who want an elite combination of distance off the tee and with long irons, plus greenside spin and a softer feel. For the sake of comparison in this story, we will use the TP5 as the baseline ball. Like previous TP5 balls, the 2024 model is a five-piece ball, with a rubber core encased in three mantle layers that are under a urethane cover. Each mantle layer is progressively firmer, with the softest mantle closest to the core and the hardest directly under the cover. The urethane cover is designed to be easily grabbed by the grooves of wedges and short irons, to enhance greenside spin and control on approach shots, chips and pitch shots. The most interesting thing about the updated TP5 is TaylorMade claims that this ball sounds and feels like a lower-compression ball but behaves like a firm ball. Feel is subjective, but many golfers prefer a soft feel at impact, but soft-feeling balls can be slower. Firm-feeling golf balls are usually faster, but golfers often find the harder sensation off-putting. In the 2024 TP5, TaylorMade added a material it calls Speed Wrap to the rubber to the core that changes the way the ball sounds when you hit it. It’s a deeper, softer sound, and with sound and feel being closely linked, golfers should hear, and by extension, feel, a softer sensation at impact while the TP5 retains its compression of 83. The 2024 TP5 should feel softer than the previous version, and softer than the 2024 TP5x because it has a lower overall compression. The TP5 may be slightly slower than TP5x with woods and long irons, and generate a lower launch angle, too, but the TP5 is designed to create slightly more spin than the TP5x with wedges.