NEWS FROM THE TOUR VANS
BROUGHT TO YOU BY GOLF PRIDE, THE #1 GRIP ON TOUR
C.T. Pan has only one career PGA Tour win (2019 RBC Heritage), but it’s a third-place finish that the Taiwanese golfer is best known for. Pan was the unlikely player to emerge from a seven-man playoff to determine the bronze medalist at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, stealing the medal from a group that included local favorite Hideki Matsuyama, Rory McIlroy, Collin Morikawa, Paul Casey, Sebastian Muñoz and Mito Pereira.
“I can show it off now … it just means everything,” Pan said during the recent John Deere Classic. “When I was a kid, I never thought golf would be one of the sports in the Olympics, and that’s a great bonus for me.
“That’s the biggest event for my country and for myself also. And it would be really cool to play well at events that only happen once every four years.”
As the bronze medalist from the 2020 Games – postponed until 2021 because of COVID – gets ready to return to the Olympics next month in Paris, Pan is another player benefitting from switching into the new Titleist GT driver and fairway wood in his full Titleist bag.
Pan finished runner-up in the John Deere – his first top 10 since a T3 at the Mexico Open at Vidanta in February and good enough to earn a spot in this week’s Open at Royal Troon – after switching into the new GT2 (9 degrees) driver and GT3 (16.5) fairway. While the 5-foot-6-inch, 145-pound Pan will never be confused with the tour’s biggest hitters, Titleist fitters said he immediately increased speed and distance with the driver, with more consistent spin on his mis-hits.
It showed up in his stats, as he ranked second in total strokes gained and he picked up strokes off the tee (1.473, ranked 22nd in field) when he normally loses 0.058 strokes (No. 109) on average off the tee this season.
The top-end woods weren’t the only big changes Pan made. He also switched out of his Titleist T100 irons into the T150s (5-9), enabling him to launch his Pro V1x ball higher, with added distance.
Meanwhile, Rory McIlroy returned to action for the first time since his heartbreaking defeat at the U.S. Open last month. While the folks at the Genesis Scottish Open couldn’t do anything to change McIlroy’s demoralizing runner-up finish at Pinehurst, they could remind him of a better result last year at the Renaissance Club, where his back-to-back closing birdies snatched victory away from Scotland’s own Robert MacIntyre.
The club placed a plaque on the 18th fairway in the spot where McIlroy hit a scorching TaylorMade P760 2-iron to 11 feet, setting up his decisive birdie. “They spelt my name wrong first time around. It’s there now, thankfully,” he said of the plaque.
McIlroy had pulled the 2-iron out of his garage and put it into play to handle the links stretch of the summer season, something he did again last week with hopes of achieving similar success.
“Everyone talks about the 2-iron at the last, but the 5-iron [TaylorMade Rors Proto] I hit into 17 was just as good a shot, if not a little bit better,” McIlroy said last week. “Yeah, to hit two iron shots like that and to hole the putts that I needed to, yeah, it was awesome. Sort of, I felt in some ways bad that it came at the expense of Bob, but at the same time it was amazing to win a tournament that I had never won before. Yeah, good memories and good to be back.”
Scott Michaux