You get up in the morning and are ready to play some golf at one of your local courses. Then it dawns on you about one of your clubs slipping out of your hands the last time you played. You didn’t regrip the golf club, don’t have a new grip handy, but know you will need to use this club this round. In this last ditch effort to fix this, let’s learn how to make golf grips tacky again.
How To Make Golf Grips Tacky
I think we should assume you don’t have a golf specific product on hand and maybe you’ve searched the internet, landed on this page, and want me to get to the point. From my experience, golf grips tend to get slick and lose their tackiness mainly from the oils in our hands. So hopefully you will have a few household items around that can help to make the grip not slide in your hands. If you don’t have the second one mentioned here, just go with the first.
Warm Water and Dish Soap
Put some dish soap and warm water in a bowl. Warm or hotter (not scalding) works best. Get it nice and sudsy. Now dip a clean towel in the water soap mixture and start to rub one golf grip at a time. Give it about 20-30 seconds of rubbing. Then use another clean towel to dry the grips. Give your grips a few minutes to be towel dried as well as allow to dry in the open air.
Bring Out The Sandpaper
Find some 100 to 150 grit sandpaper. I don’t like to go below 100 grit and anything above 200 grit might take too much scrubbing on your part. You can either use a sheet of sandpaper or a sanding block. My recommendation… call it a pro tip… is to put some gloves on. Otherwise, you might be roughing up your hands and not the grips. Take the sandpaper and rub in one direction along the grip up to the butt of the grip. Turn the club slightly as you rub. Give it a good 30 seconds of rubbing a single grip.
You can see how dirty this grip is in the picture below. This grip will go through the full cleaning with warm sudsy water, will be towel dried, and then moderately sanded with the sanding block (120 grit) below. No, it won’t be tacky like some grips are when first used but it will not be as slick and hard to hold on to as it is currently.
That Was Easy Peasy
Well, there you have it. Not much to it. Now obviously if your grips are peeling off rubber or 20 years old you may not have much luck with this method. For that I recommend you change out your grips. This can be a DIY or many times your local sporting goods store or golf store will change these out at a certain dollar amount per grip. I recently picked up some new golf grips that can be seen below for a very good price. The re-gripping will be a DIY for me but I’ve known of friends who pay in excess of $100 to $150 to get new grips for their golf clubs. So yes, the bottom line is use the methods in this post to keep your grips in tip top shape for as long as possible.
Simple Preventive Measures
Don’t keep your golf clubs in your car. The up and down humidity, temperature changes, and lack of ventilation is not good for your golf clubs in general.
Not only wash the golf clubs which includes the irons, hybrids, and driver but also wash the grips from time to time with warm soap and water. This will help to alleviate any situations where you are scrambling to make a golf grip usable for your next outing.
Final Thoughts
Let’s say you want to have a product that is made for golfers and is easy to use. This first item wraps around your existing golf grip and has some cool designs and colors to choose from. Again, like literally takes two to three minutes per grip. It is called Alien Pros Golf Grip Wrapping Tapes.
If you want something that is even easier, take a look at Golf Tac Grip Enhancer. You simply spray it on the grip and allow it to dry.
There are other products on the market, ie which you spray on your hands including this one with a cool name – Grip & Rip Golf Grip Spray – but I haven’t given it a try.