GREENSBORO, N.C. – Lucas Glover was at the end of his rope.
The yips, the involuntary wrist spasms that occur most commonly when golfers are trying to putt, had plagued Glover for the better part of a decade. But thanks to a long putter and a different putting grip, he has regained his confidence on the greens and he holed enough putts on Sunday to win the Wyndham Championship and earn his fifth career PGA Tour title.
Glover closed with a 2-under 68 at Sedgefield Country Club and finished with a 72-hole total of 20-under 260, one stroke better than Russell Henley and Ben An.
Glover, the winner of the 2009 U.S. Open, had tried just about everything, including putting with his eyes closed. The stats tell the ugly story. In the 2020-21 season, Glover missed 24 putts from 3 feet and in (863 for 887), a miss rate of 2.71 percent that ranked 196th on Tour. In 2021-22, he missed 27 shorties (193rd). The 43-year-old was struggling so mightily this season – already 26 misses from short range through July – that he considered a switch to putting left-handed or with a long putter.
“I just tried the long putter first,” he said. “I got to a point with putting, I needed a whole new — basically a whole new brain function, a whole new method. … I had two weeks off before Memorial and just ordered [a new putter] and taught myself how to use it and been kind of sticking to that.” He added, “It’s been fun to teach myself something in the game I’ve been doing for literally 40 years.”
Last month, at the Rocket Mortgage Classic, Glover added a broomstick putter to his bag, an L.A.B. Mezz.1 Max with a mallet head and ranked fifth in Strokes Gained: Putting and registered his first top-10 finish of the season.
“It’s been all the difference in the world,” said Glover, who ranked 15th in SG: Putting this week. “Making all your tap-ins is nice. Yeah, just I feel good with it. When my speed’s good, I seem to make a lot of putts, so it’s been really good.”
Glover ranked 167th in the FedEx Cup heading into the RBC Canadian Open in June, but reeled off three straight top 10s — a T-4 at Rocket Mortgage Classic, a T-6 at John Deere Classic and a T-5 at the Barbasol Championship — and after a missed cut last week, he climbed back in the trophy hunt at Sedgefield CC, where he made his 19th career start, the most of any player since 2004, after rounds of 66-64-62. Beginning the week at No. 112 in the FedEx Cup Playoffs, he needed to finish no worse than a two-way tie for second to make the playoffs and did better than that, vaulting to No. 49 in the season-long points race.
In the final round, Glover, who shared the 54-hole lead with Billy Horschel, got off to an inauspicious start with a three-putt bogey from 27 feet. But he knocked his approach from 141 yards to 4 inches at the fourth and tapped it in. He drained a 7-foot birdie at No. 8 and 15-footer at No. 11 to reach 20 under. He and Henley were tied for the lead when play was suspended due to inclement weather for 2 hours and 3 minutes.
When play resumed, Henley, who has done everything but win this tournament the last four years, grabbed the lead with a 2-putt birdie at 15 but bogeyed his final three holes to shoot 69 and suffered another disappointing result.
“Felt a little jittery out there, just never got into a good sync with my swing, felt kind of rushed from the top of my swing, just didn’t do a good job of handling the restart,” Henley said.
At 18, Glover caught a lucky break when he pulled his drive left. It appeared to be headed into tree trouble but bounced off a golf cart and closer to the fairway. Glover opted to lay up and got up and down for a closing par, fittingly sinking an 8-foot putt. When it dropped, Glover held his trusty long putter and smiled with glee.
“I’ve gone back and forth through many different types of putters and styles to where I know that those don’t work, so this is where I’m at. And it’s resurrected a lot of guys’ careers and for the same reasons, whether they planned it that way or not. … When you struggle as long as I have, or had, it just happened to be what happened to be the answer.”