NEWS FROM THE TOUR VANS
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New York native Cameron Young heads to the U.S. Open this week on Long Island with a new driver in play.
Young, who won the Players and Cadillac championships already this year, switched from his 11-degree Titleist GT3 into a 10-degree Titleist GTS3 head before the Memorial Tournament. Young is the 65th tour player to switch to a GTS driver, but at No. 3 in the world is the first top-10 player to make the move.
“Cameron’s one of those players that’s always looking for opportunities to get better,” JJ Van Wezenbeeck, Titleist’s senior director of player promotions, told GolfWRX. “He had been one of the early testers of GTS. Finally had some time at home after having such a great run to spend a little time with it, and we were able to kind of find a GTS3 in a 10-degree as opposed to the GT3 11-degree in D1 [swingweight]. Able to get really good spin stability, really good ball speeds and kind of find the sweet spot he’s looking for as we move into the summer months and his speeds start to creep up as the temperatures rise.”
Cameron Young goes with less loft in his new Titleist GTS3 driver setup.
Joe Robbins, Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
Young also reportedly tweaked his iron set, soft-stepping his Dynamic Gold X7 shafts to be able to hit off-speed shots more effectively. Soft-stepping is a club-building technique used to make a golf shaft play slightly more flexible than its standard designated flex by installing a shaft designed for a longer club into a shorter clubhead and then trimming it at the butt end to proper length.
Rory McIlroy tried out a minor tweak of his own to his driver at the Memorial, using a slightly heavier Fujikura Ventus Black 7X shaft instead of the 6X he’s used most of the year including his repeat win at the Masters. He also switched from two 11-gram weights to 13-gram weights in the back of his TaylorMade Qi4D driver to stabilize the new shaft, which weighs about 10 grams more.
Justin Rose is still working the kinks out with his new McLaren Golf Series 1 irons, switching to a completely raw set of Series 1s at the Memorial with slightly less offset (half a millimeter) on the mid-irons.
Tommy Fleetwood was gifted two custom TaylorMade Spider Tour putters at Muirfield Village featuring laser-etched alignment lines on the top line that replicate the hand-drawn Sharpie marks that Fleetwood had on his putter when he won the FedEx Cup at East Lake last year as well as a laser-engraved logo of the FedEx Cup on the sole plate.
Fleetwood actually put a Spider Tour X model into play at Memorial. “The main reason Tommy switched to the X was the slightly more forward CG and the alignment benefits of the true path,” James Holley, TaylorMade’s tour rep, told GolfWRX. “He started lining up the clear path on his TP5 Pix more often and although the True Path is blacked out, the ‘shadow’ of the true path matched up nicely to that.”
Memorial winner J.T. Poston recently joined the growing list of TaylorMade Spider converters, using the recently released torched Tour X model at Colonial before winning with it at Muirfield Village.
Adam Scott, who will be making his 100th consecutive major championship start this week in the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills, is back using the L.A.B. DF3 putter head that he contended with last year at Oakmont.
Scott Michaux
