NEWS FROM THE TOUR VANS
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Hudson Swafford started his week at the American Express Championship rolling a few putts with the new Scotty Cameron Phantom 7.5 Tour Prototype.
By the end of the week, he rode that putter to his third PGA Tour victory.
Swafford immediately took a liking to how the heel-shafted mallet sits on the ground at address, quickly asking for his preferred Scotty Cameron Matador Mid grip to be added. He finished the week ranked second in strokes gained putting, picking up 6.4 shots over the field on the greens.
“It helped me swing (the putter head) a little bit more and I rolled it incredibly,” Swafford said. “Oh, man, I rolled it really good this week.”
It was far from the only success for Titleist in the past couple of weeks. Wyndham Clark, who recently jumped from PXG to Titleist, grabbed a top-15 finish in Palm Springs for his best result of the season. He has a full Titleist bag, including four Vokey SM9 wedges.
And then Lydia Ko, another player to leave PXG, put a 9-degree TSi3 driver in the bag for the Gainbridge LPGA at Boca Rio where she opened with a 63 and eventually won by a shot ahead of Danielle Kang.
There was also another big piece of LPGA gear news as Brooke Henderson signed a glove and ball deal with TaylorMade, following the same route Rickie Fowler has taken. Henderson has a full bag of Ping clubs but had been playing a Titleist Pro V1 prior to the switch to TaylorMade.
Putter changes seem to be a trend in the early going of 2022. We took particular interest in Francesco Molinari, a player hoping to regain the stellar form he flashed in 2018 and 2019.
The former champion golfer of the year has been a simply dreadful putter in his career, never ranking better than No. 127 in strokes gained putting for years where he played enough rounds to qualify for PGA Tour stat rankings. It’s been a rarity for Molinari to gain any strokes at all against his competition when it comes to putting, but a recent change to the Odyssey Tri-Hot 5K One could potentially change that.
Molinari finished tied for sixth at the AmEx, earning .76 strokes gained putting. That was good for 20th in the field, a vast improvement for the Italian. Molinari tends to miss putts to the right when he gets under the gun, but the Tri-Hot has a more forward CG to aid in face rotation. The result is Molinari has found a tighter dispersion, allowing him to hole more putts and minimize the length of his second putts.
The putter is only 32⅜ inches, among the shorter flatsticks in the pro game.
Sean Fairholm