NEWS FROM THE TOUR VANS
BROUGHT TO YOU BY GOLF PRIDE, THE #1 GRIP ON TOUR
Daniel Berger is back from the purgatory of a back injury that cost him a year-and-a-half of recovery and stacked up seasons of irrelevance after once ranking as high as No. 12 in the world in 2020. What’s not back are the vintage set of 14-year-old TaylorMade Tour Preferred MC irons he’s relied upon for most of his career.
Berger reached the end of his comeback season in 2024 and decided it was finally time to start testing with his coach, Jeff Leishman, to determine if he needed to move into the modern era with new irons.
As good as his old TaylorMades still performed – he wrapped up 2024 with a runner-up finish in the RSM Classic at Sea Island, Georgia – Berger couldn’t deny the difference the new Ping Blueprint S irons made during testing, especially with the long irons. So he opted to commit to playing them for the first month of the 2025 PGA Tour season starting at the Sony Open in Hawaii.
“I made it a point last year, at the end of the year, that I wanted to test clubs for the first time in a long time,” Berger told GolfWRX.com two weeks ago at Torrey Pines before the Genesis Invitational. “My coach came down and got sent a bunch of irons, and everything was pretty similar from pitching wedge to 7-iron in the five different sets that I tried.
“And then once I got to 6, 5, 4, the Pings tested the best (for) peak height, consistent spin. And so I put them in the bag and tried to keep them in the bag for at least a month to really give them a chance because sometimes you put a set in, you hit a couple of bad shots and you want to go back to your old set. So I just made it a point to really stick with them, and I love them, so they’ll be in the bag for a while.”
His instinct to remain patient paid off. Despite a pair of missed cuts at the Sony and Farmers Insurance Open wrapped around a T21 in the American Express, Berger stuck with his plan. At TPC Scottsdale, Berger challenged to win before settling for a runner-up finish. That earned him a trip back to Torrey Pines where he’d missed the cut two weeks before but this time finished 12th in the signature Genesis Invitational.
Heading into the Florida swing, where the old Berger frequently thrived, he ranked 34th in strokes gained on approaches to the green – an improvement from 62nd in 2024, his first full season back after his back injury sidelined him in 2022. He’s also on the cusp (No. 52) of cracking into the OWGR top 50 and getting back into majors like the Masters after falling as far as 658th in the world last March.
Safe to say Berger isn’t going back to his 2011 Tour Preferred MCs and he’ll stick with the Blueprint S, which feature a forged cavity back, thin top lines and minimal offset from address.
“It wasn’t that tough to let the other ones go once I saw how much better the Ping irons were, you know?” Berger told GolfWRX.com. “It was like, the peak height on a 4-iron with my TaylorMade irons was like 90 feet, which is nothing. No stopping power into a par-5 or a long par-3. And then when I tested the Pings it was like 125 feet, so just a massive difference in ability to stop a ball on a par-4 or a par-5 that’s long, so really it was a pretty easy decision.”
Since the Ping Blueprint S launched in 2024, Berger won’t have to worry about searching online markets for matching sets to hoard like he did his old TaylorMades.
Ahead of his opening-round 59 at PGA National that bore no claws or fangs, Jake Knapp made a couple of big changes at both ends of his bag, deploying a TaylorMade Qi35 driver while swapping out his usual TaylorMade Spider putter for a Scotty Cameron Phantom 9.2 Circle T mallet. He picked up more than two strokes on the field both off the tee and on the greens.
His new Cameron putter features a plumber’s neck design with more toe hang than his old double-bend shaft Spider.
“It was more like strategic based on how I feel like my misses have been lately with the putter,” Knapp said. “I don’t think I’ve been putting terribly, just something feel-wise that I just felt like I needed to feel something different.
“I’ve always stayed with the same head shape for the most part, and then I just change between that plumber’s neck and then a double bend, so a little bit of toe hang versus face balanced,” he said. “But yeah, just something that kind of felt right for me and worked on it the last couple days, and it worked pretty well today.”
Add Viktor Hovland to the list of players tinkering with his putter. Hovland has used a Ping custom PLD DS-72 putter for all six of his PGA Tour victories, but as his strokes gained putting plummeted to 123rd on tour this season, he finally made a switch at Torrey Pines.
After testing out several new Ping models, Hovland went with a PLD Oslo “Onset” putter with a center-shaft in the Genesis Invitational. Whether it remains in his bag when the Norwegian starts his Florida swing is another story, as Hovland lost almost a stroke-and-a-half on the greens at Torrey (falling to 134th on the season) and missed the cut.
Scott Michaux