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NEWS FROM THE TOUR VANS
BROUGHT TO YOU BY GOLF PRIDE, THE #1 GRIP ON TOUR
Most PGA Tour players have experienced the dread of cracking a clubhead before a tournament. For Scottie Scheffler, doing so to his Nike VR Pro Ltd 3-wood – a club he has carried dating back to his time on the golf team at Highland Park High School in Dallas – nearly left him in tears.
Scheffler was on the range at Royal Oaks Country Club in Houston a few days before heading to the Sentry Tournament of Champions when the 3-wood cracked. Given that Nike has been out of the hard-goods business since August 2016, Scheffler had no replacement option. The reigning rookie of the year is also an equipment free agent, so coming up with another 3-wood required some experimenting.
“I had my wife pick up about 10 3-woods from the house that were all backups and she brought them to the range and we found something that could work for the week,” Scheffler said.
The winner of the group was a 13-degree Callaway Mavrik. During last year’s Rocket Mortgage Classic in Detroit, Scheffler had Callaway Tour rep Kellen Watson build him the club with the exact lie angle (59.5 degrees) to match the flat setup of his Nike VR Pro just in case something like this wound up happening.
That’s not to say it still didn’t hurt. When asked whether breaking the club felt like losing a dog, Scheffler agreed and then described why he will miss it.
“The way that the club set up it was really square, it was really clean, not a lot of loft so I was able to flight it down pretty easily,” Scheffler said. “It was softer than the new 3-woods, and for me that’s important. And when I wanted to hit it far, I just teed it up a little higher, hit it higher on the face. I got to know the club really well and for me I knew exactly what I needed to do with it each time.”
Justin Thomas also worked in a new club under different circumstances. He found what he wanted in a 9-degree TSi3 driver with a new Fujikura Ventus Red 6X shaft. His ball speed went from 176 mph to 179 mph and his spin dropped from 2,300 RPMs to 2,100 RPMs.
Thomas tried the TSi3 late last year at the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open, but he found his tee shots were starting left of what he is used to seeing, making it harder to move on from his previous gamer.
“I loved it as soon as I hit it, I just couldn’t find something that reacted the same as mine,” Thomas said. “I think that it’s faster, it looks better, it feels better, everything about it is better. I just didn’t hit it better than mine, my gamer. And that was the hardest part is I never really had long enough time off to kind of give it two ... whatever ... a week, two, three weeks of testing and hitting, going out and playing a bunch of rounds in different winds in different conditions, to try it.
“I feel like I finally had gotten it to where when I make the swing that I want, when I look up, it’s doing the ball flight that I feel like it should.”
At last week’s Sony Open in Hawaii, FootJoy led all brands with 63 percent of the shoe count and 41 percent of the glove count.
Sean Fairholm