Ro! Ro!

Norwegian Viktor Hovland took down world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler on the first playoff hole during a Monday finish at the Travelers Championship to earn his eighth PGA Tour title, and did it after an incredible turnaround in driving performance, thanks to a change in setup off the tee.

Heading into the Travelers, Hovland ranked 104th on Tour in Strokes Gained: Off the Tee, the first time he’s been outside the top-100 in the stat since earning his card. But a memorable week at TPC River Highlands saw the 28-year-old lead the field off the tee en route to victory, switching into the Ping G440 LST just a few weeks prior.

During the season, Hovland has worked with Ping Tour reps testing the newer G440 LST and also the K head, to take advantage of the better speed and spin consistency on the head, but would fall back to his reliable Ping G425 LST driver, which he had gamed in all but one of his PGA Tour wins up until Monday.

“I tried out the new 440 last year because it is faster,” Hovland said at the start of the season at the WM Phoenix Open. “The spin consistency off the face is a joke. If I hit it off the heel or the toe with a 425, the spin discrepancy is very large. Like if I hit it off the toe, I can spin it under 2000. If I hit it off the heel, I can maybe get up to 3000. Versus the 440, it’s very tight. It goes from maybe 2000 to 2600, so a huge gap.

“However, the problem is it launches a little bit higher for me. And for some reason, just with the setup that I’ve tested with, it tends to go a bit more to the right. Right now, with my golf swing, when I get stuck, my miss is already a high right miss. If I hit this driver, it’s just getting exenuated.”

Despite this, Hovland and the team kept trying to find an answer, experimenting with the team with hotmelt forward to get the desired launch he was looking for.

“With the extra spin he was getting, we knew we needed to go a little further and lighten the back weight a little bit, get that center of gravity moved just a touch forward to help reduce the spin,” Ping tour rep Spender Rothluebber told GolfWRX. “It’s something we’ve done with a lot of players, but in this case we had to go a little further. To both get the trajectory down, as well as the spin.”

After more testing and three weeks off after the PGA Championship, Hovland turned up in Canada for the Canadian Open without his security blanket, making a pretty drastic call to leave the G425 across the border. That week, Hovland went on to finish third in the tournament, third in driving accuracy, and positive in SG: Off the tee.

The change in head and spin consistency wasn’t the only helping factor for Hovland off the tee. He’s also moved to Fujikura’s Ventus TR Black 6 X with VeloCore+, and away from the legacy Fujikura Speeder 661 TR X that he has played for much of his career, in an attempt to reduce spin even further.

Hovland’s win was the first victory for the new Ventus Black with enhanced VeloCore+ technology which is created to deliver extra stability and improved energy transfer, with lower launch and spin rates.

See below for Hovland’s full driver setup:

Driver: Ping G440 LST 9.0 @ 7.6 degrees
Ping adapter: Flat Standard
CG Shifter: 29 grams neutral
Hot Melt: 5 grams forward
Shaft: Fujikura Ventus TR Black 6X with VeloCore+
Length: 45.75 inches
Tip: 1 inch
Swingweight: D5+

The biggest news of the week from TPC River Highlands never actually happened.

Jordan Spieth surprised many when he was spotted testing out a different putter early in the week at the Travelers Championship, a drastic change from his TP Mills Trad II blade, and instead putting a L.A.B. Golf VZN.1i through a vigorous testing process.

The bombshell appearance of the zero-torque mallet is actually something that Spieth hinted at just a couple of weeks ago in a Golf on CBS interview.

“In the last off-season, I got L.A.B. fitted, I tried a number of different mallets,” Spieth said. “I was essentially like what is going to be the best for me and the way I stroke it and my hands move?

“… It’s just I wanted to take care of the commitment side of it before the season started and say okay I feel I have checked the boxes here and I feel good about this.”

The L.A.B. VZN.1i, with an “optically optimized” head shape featuring parallel and perpendicular crown lines to help with aiming, was one of a couple putters Spieth tested from Monday to Wednesday in Cromwell, Connecticut, including a Scotty Cameron Phantom 5, which was also center-shafted. Spieth also received a second VZN putter just before his Wednesday morning pro-am, half an inch shorter and a degree less upright than the first he had tested. It also featured a slightly different feeling insert.

Despite playing that putter for 9 holes in the morning, Spieth was spotted later that day strenuously working through his putting drills, this time with the gamer TP Mills blade in his hands. It ultimately stayed in the bag for one more week. Or day. You never know with PGA Tour pros.

RKT launch from Srixon

No time for a U.S. Open hangover. (Even if you enjoyed some “grape” like the champion!) Just hours after the final putt dropped at Shinnecock, Srixon tour-launched its new lineup of drivers.

On-site at the Travelers, GolfWRX’s Tour Photographer Greg Moore captured the first look at the Srixon ZXi RKT driver lineup.

Four head models were found on the Tour truck and also in the bags of many Srixon staffers on the grounds at TPC River Highlands: a core RKT model, an LS+ version, a Max head, and an LS+ head, which was not included in the Srixon media release and what we believe to be a Tour-only model.

Check out more on the drivers here, and also a custom prototype built for Hideki Matsuyama here.

Custom Camerons for Fowler and Spaun

Who doesn’t love some custom Scotty Cameron putters? Well, two special creations ended up in play this week at the Travelers.

Rickie Fowler, who switched into a custom Scotty Cameron GoLo with a center shaft to start the year, decided to game an Xperimental Phantom 11+ for the first time. It’s a putter that Fowler has had for a while now and travels with to events week in, week out. It’s definitely one of the larger mallets we’ve seen on Tour, but remember, Fowler played a L.A.B. Golf DF2.1 just last year.

Fowler’s putter switch comes during his best season on the greens since 2019. In that year, he was still using his “Rickie” Scotty Cameron Circle T Newport 2.

J.J. Spaun’s switch was potentially more surprising. Spaun, who won earlier in the year with the L.A.B DF3, is now gaming a Scotty Cameron Phantom 9R head with a custom flow neck and copper finish.

What’s also interesting is that the custom putter uses an aluminum insert, which is lighter than the standard Studio Carbon Steel found in the putter head. With that, the mass saved from the insert can be distributed farther back in the putter to increase the head’s MOI. Spaun had also been using an Aluminum in the L.A.B. Golf OZ.1i HS he had tried for a few weeks, starting at the Charles Schwab Challenge.

Spaun opened the tournament with a 4-under 66, and it was just the fourth round he had gained strokes on the greens since the start of the PGA Championship.

Check out full pictures of the putter here.

Has Fitzpatrick found a replacement for his cracked driver?

It’s not often that a player who has won twice already this season is still searching for which driver to use. But for Matt Fitzpatrick, he’s on his third of the season. The World No. 4 was spotted using a 9-degree Ping G430 LST head, with the actual loft at 8.2 degrees.

“Just getting comfortable with that and I had, you know, felt like I practiced well these first three days as well, and just managed to find something that I felt was working a bit better,” Fitzpatrick said after the first round, in which he missed just one fairway

Fitzpatrick ranks 46th on Tour in Strokes Gained: Off-the-tee, and he opened the Travelers with a 6-under 64 to sit one back of the lead held by Eric Cole. So why did he switch? … His gamer bit the dust.

“Well, I think the long and short of it is basically in, I played obviously very well up until Zurich,” Fitzpatrick said. “My driver cracked on the Wednesday of Truist. Then, if you look at my off the tee from then, it’s quite telling that obviously there was something in that driver that was helping me out, and I struggled to find one since.”

Fitzpatrick did multiple testing sessions with Titleist to find a replacement. During that time, he even played two different drivers at the Memorial Tournament, gaming both the GTS2 driver and then another GT3 head.

“Just for whatever reason, there hasn’t been one that’s kind of managed to suit my eye, I guess, and kind of match my swing intentions,” Fitzpatrick went on to add. “I think swing may have changed a little bit from January to that time as well, so maybe I was kind of making the previous one work well for me, and the new one’s not having that effect.”

So step up the 2023 Ping G430 LST, the low-spin, low-launch option from the ever-popular G430 lineup, which saw success in the hands of last year’s champion Keegan Bradley.

“Everyone has tendencies, and not to bore everyone, but my tendency is like I like clubs or a driver with the CG closer to the heel,” Fitzpatrick said about getting fit for a new driver.

“… The detail is really important and it’s important to try to get that right as best you can. Everyone is different. Their habits, how they move the club, how they react to different clubs,” he explained. “I tried one in Canada and it was exactly… neutral, neutral, neutral and I hit it 50 yards right. That’s just the way I react. I think people think that guys just get a driver and it’s just going to go straight and away you go. There’s obviously a lot more to it than that.”

You can check out Fitzpatrick’s full driver specs below:

Actual Loft: 8.2
Hosel setting: Dot (Standard)
CG Shifter: Heel (17g)
Added weight: 3g heel
Shaft: Mitsubishi Tensei CK Orange 65TX
Length: 45.75 inches
Tipping: 1 inch
Swingweight: D7+

Rose returns to Axis1

Justin Rose returned to the Axis1 family, gaming the SP – Axiom putter, which GolfWRX first captured earlier this year at The Players. The SP – Axiom features Axis1’s Stroke Profile adjustability, a process that allows players to change the adjustable sole weights to compensate for push or pull tendencies.

The Axis1 wasn’t the only putter Rose tested during a lengthy session on Wednesday at TPC River Highlands, which included both a TaylorMade Spider Tour F single-bend, Tour X, and a different Scotty Cameron Phantom 5 to his previous game, which included a softer Studio Carbon Steel insert.

Rose’s SP – Axiom features perimeter-weighted of CNC-milled tungsten on the face that delivers 5,500+ MOI, and helps reduce twisting on off-center hits. In an opening 5-under 65 at the Travelers, Rose gained over two shots on the field on the greens ranking ninth in SG: Putting. 

Odds and Ends

Brandt Snedeker, who used the same putter for most of a 20-year period, made his second switch of the season, this time moving into the TaylorMade Spider Tour V head. He won the Myrtle Beach Classic earlier this year after changing to the TaylorMade Spider Tour X after using an Odyssey Rossie White Hot XG for most of his career. With the new flatstick, Snedeker said he “felt like my speed control was better with it.” Odyssey tour-launched the new TRTL putter line at the Travelers, with Nicolai Højgaard putting one in play for competition. Fowler tested out a new prototype UST Recoil Dart XDC 120x but didn’t put them in play.

See all of our photos from the Travelers here.

In this week’s episode of Inside the Ropes, Alistair Cameron reports from the Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands. First up, it’s a look at Srixon’s new ZXi RKT drivers, followed by a look at Jordan Spieth’s putter testing. Also featured is Ping’s Kenton Oates discussing Wyndham Clark’s putter, and much more!