RIDGELAND, S.C. – The world No. 1 and reigning PGA Tour Player of the Year plans to insert a new putter in the bag this week at the CJ Cup at Congaree Golf Club.
Scottie Scheffler, who had been using a Scotty Cameron Newport 2 model, will be rolling his rock with a Cameron T-5.5 Proto mallet this week.
“I typically don’t like changing equipment at all, but I’ve been using it now for probably two, three weeks,” Scheffler said. “Late in the year I putted what felt like to me pretty poorly, I was really streaky. I was trying a few different things and that’s not really a way to improve when you’re kind of, felt like I was kind of blindly throwing darts just trying to find something. Sometimes I was lining the ball up, sometimes I wasn’t.”
Scheffler actually enjoyed his best putting year statistically last season. He improved from 117th in Strokes Gained: Putting (-.0.53) his rookie season in 2019-20 to 107th (+0.23) in 2020-21 to 58th last season (+.202). But when asked to name the last tournament he putted up to his high standard, he mentioned the Masters, where he won his first major despite a four-putt at 18.
“Obviously the results there were good,” he said. “My memory for stuff like that isn’t really good, I have a very short memory, so the Masters is obviously one that sticks out in my head. I’m sure there’s a few throughout the year where I putted pretty good.”
Scheffler’s putter went cold in the final round of the Tour Championship – he shot 74 and squandered the lead – in his last start and he struggled so much so at the Presidents Cup that he was seen putting under floodlights on Saturday night and getting tips from U.S. Assistant Captain Steve Stricker, who is regarded as an outstanding putter and trusted as a second set of eyes by no less than Tiger Woods.
“Sometimes it’s good to have a kind of different voice in your head,” Scheffler said. “Randy (Smith) and I have been working together for so long that it was kind of nice just to hear some different thoughts on how Steve approached putting, because I definitely was frustrated with how I was rolling it at the Presidents Cup. I wasn’t hitting my lines, I couldn’t get comfortable over the ball. If it was a stroke-play tournament, I would have been fine, I still would have been able to play good, but with it being match play, you’ve got to make those putts toward the end of the matches and I wasn’t able to do that. It was very helpful kind of picking his brain and just kind of learning from him.”
Scottie Scheffler appears to be making a putter change this week.
Rockin’ a Scotty Cameron T-5.5 Proto mallet.
via @GolfWRX pic.twitter.com/nFlEFBantD
— Rick Gehman (@RickRunGood) October 19, 2022
How did Scheffler settle on this particular model, which has done wonders for Max Homa, who has made it his gamer of late?
“I remember in junior golf I used kind of a mallet type putter head and I think it was the putter I used when I won the U.S. Junior and I won the (Sage Valley) Junior Invitational, which at the time were kind of like the two biggest junior tournaments. I grabbed this putter that I had at home that I tested a while ago. I set it up and I was like, man, this thing’s really easy to line up, I don’t feel I really have to work a lot to line the ball up correctly,” Scheffler explained. “I fooled around with that model, figured out what I liked and didn’t like and I talked to the guys at Titleist and they were able to get a putter to me in like a day from California. I kept using this one. For me it’s just really easy to line up, I feel like I’m more consistent with it. I feel like my ceiling’s still the same. I can get hot with the putter and make a ton of putts, but I felt like my floor was a little too low last year, so hopefully this will be one of those deals that will kind of raise the floor.”
To be determined if the sky is the limit for Scottie’s new Scotty.