NEWS FROM THE TOUR VANS
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The big story out of Viktor Hovland’s victory at the Valspar Championship – a win which seemed to surprise even him – was Hovland’s ongoing work with swing instructor Grant Waite.
"He’s definitely put his heart and soul into looking at all the different golf swings that I’ve sent him,” Hovland said of Waite. “It’s challenging because I have a very unique pattern and it’s unconventional and I would say most coaches probably would like to make my swing more conventional and hopefully try to fix the problem. But that’s not really how my golf swing works. And I really trust Grant, because … he sees it and knows what kind of matchups need to be there for it to work. So, yeah, it was obviously a good first week together, so hopefully just build on that.”
But the smaller story that keyed Hovland’s win was his putter. The Norwegian flirted and even danced with some different Ping putters as he tried to snap out of his funk, but when the slump broke at Innisbrook Resort it was with the same tied-and-true Ping custom PLD DS-72 with which he’d won each of his previous six PGA Tour titles.
Hovland used a Ping PLD Oslo “Onset” putter with a center shaft at the Genesis Invitational, but it didn’t prove helpful as he lost almost a stroke and a half on the greens at Torrey Pines and missed the cut. While he still ranked 120th for the season in strokes gained putting following his victory, he was second in the field at Innisbrook in that key category.
Australian Karl Vilips is among the young PGA Tour University graduates quickly establishing themselves. The 23-year-old recently won the PGA Tour’s opposite-field event in Puerto Rico in just his third start as a rookie. He had similar rapid success last year on the Korn Ferry Tour, winning his fourth start.
The Stanford alum already signed a deal to wear the Sun Day Red apparel line created by fellow Cardinal Tiger Woods. On the equipment front, Vilips is completely decked out in TaylorMade down to the TP5x ball largely because that was the brand his fellow Aussie Jason Day used to use while Vilips was growing into the game. Vilips and Day both use the same coach, Colin Swatton.
Vilips used a TaylorMade Itsy Bitsy Spider Red putter with a short slant neck as an amateur because he saw Day win with one. Vilips now uses a new TaylorMade Spider Tour X with a plumber’s neck. He also eschews a long iron in favor of a 21-degree TaylorMade Qi10 7-wood.
“I’ve never been a long-iron guy necessarily, I just kind of find them hard to hit; hard to launch in the air on par-5s,” Vilips told GolfWRX. “So I used a 3-hybrid for a long time, but that wasn’t getting enough spin for me. ... I just wanted something in the bag that could launch pretty high and fill that gap between my (TaylorMade P770) 4-iron and my 3-wood, because there’s a pretty large gap.”
Vilips made the switch to the TaylorMade Qi35 for both his driver (9 degrees) and 3-wood (15 degrees), gaining 3 mph of ball speed while getting the lower spin and extra forgiveness he was looking for.
“First time hitting the Qi35, we just wanted something that was a bit lower spinning and forgiving, and we found exactly that,” Vilips told GolfWRX. “The driver’s been great. … It doesn’t fall out of the sky even though it’s low spinning. I’m able to send it if I need to, and that’s when it goes a mile, when it’s low spinning and high launching. I get those ones that can carry me 320 yards.”
Scott Michaux