Steve Stricker withdrew from the PGA Championship last week to focus on this week’s KitchenAide Senior PGA, an event where he will be the defending champion.
He’ll be among the field of 156 golfers at Harbor Shores Resort, Benton Harbor, Michigan, which is hosting for the sixth time since 2012.
Earlier this year, Stricker, who has seven senior majors among his 17 PGA Tour Champions wins, ran into some equipment issues at TPC Sawgrass.
“I broke my driver at the Players Championship, so that’s been a little bit of a bugaboo,” he said Wednesday ahead of the Senior PGA. “Then I said, you know what? Maybe it’s a good time to change some irons, so I tested some irons, but I went back to, at Regions a couple weeks ago, I went back to the ones that I’ve been playing the last four, five years, so that seemed to be a little bit better.”
While he has the older irons in his bag, he’s sticking with the driver.
“Hitting the driver nice. It’s a new Titleist driver that I am hitting,” he said, later adding that he paired it with his older V2 shaft. “That seems to be going pretty good, so I feel like I finally got my equipment figured out.”
Our defending Champion Steve Stricker shares what happened when he tried it make the putt. pic.twitter.com/f3lkUTYioJ
— KitchenAid Senior PGA Champ (@seniorpgachamp) May 22, 2024
So aside from the new driver head, Stricker is sticking to the old tried and true, and not getting hung up on having the latest and greatest.
“I’ve got a putter that’s 23 or 24 years old, 3-wood that’s 15 years old, you know, and utility club, yeah, I just have never really, once I find something I like and I know that it works, I got confidence in, it’s hard for me to change. It’s kind of a process,” he explained.
“I tried to do it with some irons the last month or so. It’s just hard. You have one idea what the ball should do and then when you put a new club in your bag is does something different. It’s about getting used to, and sometimes I just don’t want to even take the time to get used to it just because I know that what I’ve been playing works and I like the look of it and all that kind of stuff. So it’s been hard for me to change over the years.”
Look and feel clearly have a lot to do with it.
“I put some new stuff in there I’m like, that just doesn’t feel right. Then I put my old stuff in there and I’m like, that’s the way it’s supposed to feel.
“I go back and forth, but typically end up with my old stuff back in my hands again.”