Tour News

Williams: Woods’ magic remains

Published

12 years ago

Jun 3, 2012

Tiger Woods’ career is not only a series of wins; it is a series of moments. You can hear and see them in the theater of your mind. It is amazing putts, improbable iron shots and impossible chips, all of them somehow equal parts amazing and important.

The importance of Woods’ victory at the 2012 Memorial can be measured with several different yardsticks. With his record fifth win at the event, he ties Jack Nicklaus with 73 PGA Tour victories, 10 years faster than the Golden Bear. He also joined Hunter Mahan and Jason Dufner as the multiple winners in 2012, having a posted a win at Arnold Palmer’s Bay Hill Invitational prior to this year’s Masters. Woods, one of the great front-runners in golf history, ran down third-round leaders Spencer Levin and Roy Sabbatini with three birdies in the final four holes.

Tiger credited the victory to his ball-striking, accurately commenting that he “put on a stripe-show”. The stats confirm the account; Woods hit over 75 percent of fairways and 74 percent of greens in regulation. Woods also averaged a stingy 1.75 putts puts per hole, all of which adds up to potential victory.

But even in Woods’ Bay Hill win, there was something missing. What was missing was The Moment, that one seemingly impossible shot that brings earsplitting roars from the gallery and a volley of .45 caliber fist pumps from Tiger. That moment came today on the 16^th hole, where Tiger had left his approach in thick rough behind the green. It seemed as though it would take a miracle just to keep the ball on the green; Tiger used an 80-mile per hour swing to produce a weightless lob shot that trundled down the slick slope and found the bottom of the cup. Nicklaus himself called it,” one of the greatest shots I’ve ever seen.” The crowd gave its best imitation of a Sunday gallery at Augusta, and Tiger’s bellowing was as much catharsis as celebration. It was, at last, The Moment. Tiger put the finishing touch on the win with a 8-foot birdie on the 18^th that put him two strokes clear of Sabbatini.

The difference between Tiger and his entire peer group has never been defined by words like “consistency” or “precision”, although those were certainly components of his game. The difference has been his ability to create magic, to turn trouble into triumph and potential tragedy into permanent history. From Sawgrass and Augusta to Bethpage and St. Andrews, Woods has been the author of some of the most memorable moments in all of sport. For the last 36 months, the majority of the drama that Woods produced had been off the course. Today, Woods reminded the golf world that someone wins every week on Tour, but sometimes it’s how you win that makes the world sit up and take notice. With the U.S. Open just over the horizon, Tiger Woods today sent a message that couldn’t have been clearer if it had been written in smoke lettering across the blue Ohio sky: “I’m Back!”

Click here for more discussion in the “Tour Talk” forum.

Michael Williams is the contributing editor of Newschannel8 Capital Golf Weekly and Bunkershot.com, as well as a member of the Golf Writers Association of America.

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Equipment

Spotted: Putter roundup from the 2024 3M Open

Published

2 days ago

Jul 25, 2024

Brian Knudson

Every week we spot some really cool and custom putters out on the putting green and in tour players’ bags. This week is no slouch with some really interesting and beautiful putters being tested. Let’s take a look at some of the standouts we found.

Tyler Duncan: Scotty Cameron Phantom T-11.5

The Phantom 11 is a pretty wild putter by Scotty’s standards with a multi-material design that boosts MOI for more forgiveness. Duncan’s T-11.5. takes the stock model and moves the shaft to the center of the putter head. We don’t mean a center shafted version, but the shaft is installed in the center, behind the face as well. We don’t have any official details on this T-11.5 but it looks like that setup should create a putter where the face points towards the hole or target, similar to a L.A.B. putter.

Zac Blair: Scotty Cameron 009.M Cameron & Co. “Longneck”

Blair might be in possession of the largest Scotty collection on tour! It seems like every week he has something new, and flat-out gorgeous, that he is trying out. I have seen a lot of 009.M putters over the years, but never one with a long plumbers neck on it. This 009 is a Masterful that utilizes additional CNC machine work to reduce the amount of hand polishing needed to complete the putter. The long, or tall, neck on the putter usually is used to reduce the amount of toe hang and make the putter more face balanced. The face contains a very shallow milling while the sole features a tour truck, tour only, diamonds, and the rare Circle L stamp. The Circle L was made for Scotty’s close friends who lost matches or games and was meant to poke a little fun at their misfortune.

Paul Barjon: PXG Prototype

There are a lot of putters out there that become so widely used and popular that other manufacturers will borrow some of the design cues. The Spider is one of those putters and it looks like PXG has made a prototype putter for Barjon that has some similar features. This proto has a tapered mallet shape with twin wings that come out from either side of the rear. Twin movable weights sit in each wing on the sole and the sole features a plate that is bolted in place at the corners. The top contains a single siteline and the face uses PXG’s advanced pyramid face structure.

Odyssey Ai-One Cruiser Broomstick #7

More and more long, counterbalanced, and alternative putters seem to be showing up recently. The long, or broomstick, putter is making a comeback and more than a few players have joined Adam Scott in using that style. Odyssey has thrown its hat in the broomstick arena with a new Ai-One Cruiser model. The head shape is the very familiar #7 model, but with the shaft going into the center of the club head. An Ai-One face is there to help keep ball speed consistent on off-center hits and three white lines are on top for framing ball and aligning the putter.

TaylorMade Spider Tour S Broomstick

Another option in the long putter is TaylorMade’s Spider Tour S broomstick that we saw around the putting green. The head looks to be a little larger than the standard Tour S and that makes sense with the broomstick-style putters demanding heads near or over 400g. A TPU Pure Roll insert is installed in the face and the shaft is a more traditional double-bend design, just much longer! There isn’t the True Path alignment on top, just a full darker grey finish with a single siteline. Two moveable weights are out in the wings of the putter to dial in the specific weight a player might want.

Check out the rest of our photos from the 2024 3M Open

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Tour Photo Galleries

Photos from the 2024 3M Open

Published

4 days ago

Jul 23, 2024

GolfWRX Staff

GolfWRX is on site this week at TPC Twin Cities for the 2024 3M Open for the penultimate event of the PGA Tour’s regular season.

The photos are flying in from Blaine, Minnesota. We’ve already assembled general galleries and a fresh Tony Finau WITB.

Check back throughout the week for more photos!

General Albums

WITB Albums

Pullout Albums

Chris Gotterup’s TM P-7CB irons – 2024 3M Open

See what GolfWRXers are saying in the forums.

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Equipment

Collin Morikawa’s pre-Open equipment adjustments

Published

1 week ago

Jul 18, 2024

GolfWRX Staff

Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from a piece our Andrew Tursky originally wrote for PGATour.com’s Equipment Report. Head over there for the full article.

Three years later, Morikawa has once again changed his irons to deal with the unique Scottish turf.

Morikawa has been using TaylorMade P730 blade short irons (7-PW), P7MC mid irons (5-6) and a TaylorMade “Proto” 4-iron with a cavity-back construction this year.

However, he switched into a new set of TaylorMade P7CB irons (5-PW) before finishing T4 at last week’s Genesis Scottish Open, to go along with his familiar “Proto” 4-iron. TaylorMade’s P7CB irons are the finalized versions of the “Proto” 4-iron that Morikawa has been using, except they remain unreleased to retail.

According to TaylorMade, Morikawa switched into a full set of the new P7CB irons to aid with turf interaction, just like he did prior to his 2021 Open victory.

Morikawa is honing in on his winning formula overseas.

Morikawa also has switched from his usual TaylorMade Qi10 5-wood to a lower-launching TaylorMade P790 3-iron equipped with a Project X HZRDUS 105 Hybrid shaft. The loft of the club has been bent down to 19 degrees.

TaylorMade says that Morikawa switched into the new driving iron In order to “have an option to hit something lower that will roll out in the fairways.”

Head over to PGATour.com for the full article.

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