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Bryson DeChambeau is building his own golf clubs. For anyone else, that would be a shocking sentence. For DeChambeau … yeah, that sounds about right.
The winner of the two most recent LIV Golf events was spotted in South Africa tinkering with some new no-name irons. Asked what brand he was working with ahead of the Masters, DeChambeau didn’t give a name.
“It’s my own personal clubs I’m building,” he said. “With myself, yeah.”
When he won consecutive weeks in Singapore and South Africa in March, DeChambeau used his personal “Bryson DeChambeau prototype” Avoda Golf irons and new Bettinardi wedges.
Golf’s mad scientist has never been shy about taking big swings with his equipment. He admits it’s simply his nature.
Bryson DeChambeau is building his own 3D-printed irons and put at least a 5-iron in play at the Masters.
SIMON BRUTY, AUGUSTA NATIONAL
“I think it’s the willingness to always try to improve,” DeChambeau said last week. “There’s this nature that I have about myself where innovation is a habit of mine. And I really find and take pride in that ability to learn – even through failure, even through making a bad decision or a good decision – what I can get from that.
“In South Africa I was trying wedges. So I was going quite a bit down a rabbit hole there and figured a couple cool things out. Hopefully it helps this week [at Augusta]. Then I am working on irons, building irons, building a driver. So we’ll see where it goes, we’ll see where it takes me. All I could say now is, if I don’t put them in the bag, it’s my fault now.”
DeChambeau is 3D printing his irons, and he put a 5-iron into play at the Masters, using it once during his first-round 76 when he overshot the seventh green into a back bunker from 181 yards.
“Prints in eight hours. Machines, they’re three or four hours,” he said. “Then you have to cut grooves in it and do a bunch of other stuff. So you can have something within a day and a half.”
That didn’t mean he could deploy more new irons by the weekend. “It has to be USGA-conforming,” said DeChambeau, who missed the cut by two strokes at the Masters after he triple-bogeyed the 18th hole on Friday. “There’s a whole process you have to go through.”
Meanwhile, Tommy Fleetwood’s pursuit of a green jacket and his first major championship included a club you don’t hear about too often on the PGA Tour – a 9-wood.
“It’s a great 9-wood golf course,” Fleetwood said of Augusta National ahead of the Masters. “I think it’s always been – I can’t remember when I first put like a 9-wood in or a high-lofted club, but it’s a perfect like 9-wood golf course. I’ve had that in the bag for a few years.”
Fleetwood uses a TaylorMade Qi10 9-wood and he said it’s a key part of his strategy at Augusta which doesn’t include simply lashing a driver off every tee and requires more deft maneuvering with mini drivers and other assorted tools.
“The biggest thing is the 9-wood for me,” he reiterated. “If I can put myself in position on the par-5s or the fourth long par-3 … for me, I can’t really hit that high 4-iron, so 9-wood helps me a lot.”
Scott Michaux
