About Bag Notes
Bag Notes records what players actually play, and ties every claim to the published report that made it.
19,362 sourced citations, from 3,256 reports in 12 outlets, covering 312 players and 3,478 products.
Who runs it
Rory Hansen
Builds and runs Bag Notes, independently.
Rory is a golf enthusiast based in San Diego, where he lives with his family. He has long been interested in where sports, media and technology meet, and Bag Notes grew out of that: a way to answer what the best players actually use, with a source for every answer.
The one rule
Nothing appears here because it is plausible. A club, a ball or a shaft is listed against a player only when a published article says that player used it, and the link to that article sits beside the claim. If the evidence runs out, the page says so instead of filling the gap: a player with four documented items is shown with four.
How it is built
- 1
Reporting is collected, not press releases.
A crawler follows the sitemaps and feeds of established golf outlets and fetches articles about equipment. Spec sheets, manufacturer announcements and “best of” round-ups are not sources here.
- 2
Each claim is extracted and attributed.
A language model reads the article and records what it says a named player uses, together with the sentence that says it. An item it cannot tie to one player is dropped.
- 3
A second pass decides whether it counts.
Equipment merely reviewed, compared, newly launched or available to buy is rejected: the claim has to be that the player actually used it. A claim publishes straight away only when its quote names the product; anything else is held back until it is confirmed, and stays off the site if it is not.
- 4
The date is recovered from the article.
Every citation carries the publication date of the report behind it, which is what makes “currently” and “previously” meaningful rather than a guess.
Where the reporting comes from
The outlets behind the most citations, by how many of their reports are cited here.
- GOLF.com1,112 reports
- Australian Golf Digest474 reports
- Golf Monthly472 reports
- bunkered295 reports
- Today's Golfer185 reports
- Golf Digest179 reports
- GolfMagic155 reports
- National Club Golfer143 reports
- Golfweek114 reports
- The Golf News Net97 reports
- The Chiputt16 reports
- YouTube14 reports
What a person checks
Rory Hansen sets these rules and reviews claims the automatic checks hold back, alongside a second automated check. Most citations publish automatically once their quote passes those checks, so a person has not read every one before it appears. Anything reported as wrong is checked against its source and corrected or removed.
What the counts mean
A figure like “63 of 221” counts the players this site documents, not every player there is. That documented group grows as the archive does, so a brand can lose share without losing a single player. Every percentage published here is printed beside the count it came from, for that reason. The monthly readings are frozen once a month is over and never edited afterwards, so a number cited in March is still the March number in June.
Independence
Disclosure: Bag Notes participates in affiliate programs and may earn commissions from qualifying purchases made through links on this site, at no extra cost to you. Rankings are counts of cited usage and cannot be paid for.
No manufacturer, retailer or agency has any influence over what appears here or in what order, and no one has ever been offered the chance to buy a place.
Found something wrong?
This site publishes factual claims about real people, gathered at scale, so some of them will be wrong: a misattributed item, an out-of-date bag, a player listed with something they never used. Each is checked against its source and corrected or removed, and corrections take priority over everything else here.
Report a correction