NEWS FROM THE TOUR VANS
BROUGHT TO YOU BY GOLF PRIDE, THE #1 GRIP ON TOUR
Justin Rose is 45 years old, though you wouldn’t know it watching him blast drives beyond two men 11 years his junior – fellow Englishman Tommy Fleetwood in regulation and fellow U.S. Open champion J.J. Spaun in the playoff at the FedEx St. Jude Championship.
Rose’s impressive winning charge in Memphis got a boost from a new Callaway Paradym Ai Smoke Triple Diamond Max driver that he’d only used for one range session on Tuesday ahead of the tournament. He didn’t even play a practice round with it, having withdrawn from the Wednesday pro-am feeling under the weather.
The oldest man in the playoffs ranked 18th in driving distance at TPC Southwind at 312-yard average. His longest of the week was 338 yards. Most notably, he deployed it on the 18th hole four consecutive times in regulation and the three-hole playoff despite the water requiring a 310-yard carry at the corner of the dogleg left.
“I’ve never really played that hole the way I played it today. Never hit driver off that hole,” Rose said. “I’ve never been able to cover the left side. For some reason I’ve been hitting it quite far this week and the wind was just perfect. It was down from the right-hand side, and it meant I could just cover the left-hand side. I felt like it was playing perfect for me today with the driver. If I held the driver up a little bit, I probably wasn’t going to run out, and if I turned the driver over, I was going to make the carry, which obviously that angle that I was able to create to the back left pin was very advantageous.”
Johnny Thompson, the tour content manager for Callaway, told Golf magazine that Rose picked up 4 mph of ball speed during testing and that the driver’s left bias removed a right miss. Rose hit 180 mph in clubhead speed on the 18th hole.
While Rose’s changes paid off, some setup tweaks by Tony Finau did not achieve the desired result of advancing to this week’s BMW Championship. Starting the FedEx St. Jude Championship at No. 60, Finau shot 9-over par on the weekend to finish ahead of only three players and fall to 66th in points and out of the playoffs.
In July, Finau took aim at reducing spin by changing his Ping G440 driver shaft setup to a Fujikura Ventus Black 7X shaft and in Memphis opted to play the same Titleist Pro V1x Double Dot prototype golf ball that Cameron Young used to win the Wyndham Championship.
“I did try the Double Dot, it’s incredible, and it’s going into play right away,” Finau told GolfWRX ahead of the FedEx St. Jude. “It had a little bit of higher launch and lower spin for me, which is a perfect combo. Especially for me at the moment, I seemed to, over the last couple months, just to be spinning my driver a little more than I would like, and I made a shaft change about a month ago and that’s helped, but the spin numbers are still a little high. I switched to this ball, and it’s a couple hundred RPMs lower, so without changing equipment, that’s a great thing.”
Finau also toyed around with a new Ping Ally Blue 4 mallet putter, a departure from the Ping PLD Anser 2D blade-style putter he’s used for years.
“I’ve been using a blade for over five years straight … just thought it was time for a change,” Finau told GolfWRX. “Wanted to go and look into a mallet, and the Ping (reps) helped me get into this one.”
He ranked 54th in the field of 69 in strokes gained putting in Memphis, so we’ll see what Finau comes back with after some time off to experiment.
Scott Michaux