Have you heard this one before?

“It’s the archer, not the arrow.”

I hear this about once or twice a year, usually corresponding with the release of the Most Wanted putter results.

Some sanctimonious soothsayer always feels compelled to add that comment to a post that literally uses real golfer data to show that the putter used absolutely makes a difference.

Maybe you don’t trust MGS testing or data. Would you agree that professional players are the ultimate “archers”? Then let’s look at a couple of examples where this new Phantom 9.5R was the difference maker for top-tier PGA Tour players.

Pros change putters and win tournaments

How many times have you heard of a professional golfer who made a putter switch and then immediately won a tournament?

The craziest putter change story has to be that of Jim Furyk buying a $39 Yes! Golf Sophia putter in a golf shop and then winning the Tour Championship and ultimately the FedEx Cup with it. The best part of that story is the shop owner did give him a discount on the putter as well.

That’s a wild, and true, story but most Tour player putter changes are not that spontaneous.

For example, let’s look at Cameron Young’s adoption and success story with the Scotty Cameron Phantom 9.5R.

Young worked with Scotty Cameron Tour Rep Brad Cloke to figure out which putter matched his stroke and feel needs. 

“He’s always wanted to feel flow in the putter. We started in face-balanced mallets for him and we’ve kind of worked our way down to a point where he’s felt comfortable enough to feel the toe flow the way he wants it and get the release of the putter that he wants.”

-Scotty Cameron Tour Rep Brad Cloke on Young’s initial move to the 9.5R.

Young moved to the Phantom 9.5R at the 2025 RBC Heritage tournament. After a few months with the putter, Young earned his first Tour win at the Wyndham Championship and he also won his Sunday singles match as a Ryder Cup rookie.

In 2026, he won two more tournaments (The Players Championship and the Cadilac Championship) and finished top three in two majors. Switching to a putter that was a better fit for him brought enormous success.

Obviously, Young was a good putter already. After all, he did make it to the Tour using a different putter.

But he finally won, and then won multiple times, after switching to the Phantom 9.5R.

Koivun switched, too, and he won even sooner

Jackson Koivun won the 3M Open a week after making the switch to the Scotty Cameron 9.5R. Again, the player worked with a Scotty Cameron tour rep, Drew Page, to figure out his best-fitting putter.

Koivun had played a Phantom 9R in college so the switch to the 9.5R wasn’t a significant change in the overall putter design.

But the neck change proved to be huge. Like in the neighborhood of $1,584,000 in prize money huge.

Turns out that putting success is actually a combination of the archer and the arrow.

(Probably the bow, too.)

Scotty Cameron Phantom 9.5R Specifications

Most of the design elements of the new Phantom 9.5R are similar to the other putters in the 2026 Scotty Cameron Phantom line. The Phantom 9.5R is the “R”ounded version of the Phantom 9 head. The “0.5” designation is how Cameron indicates the presence of a Jet (flow) neck hosel.

The hosel represents the fitting story for the putter. The Jet hosel configuration gives it more face rotation than the Phantom 9.2R and a good deal more rotation than the near face-balanced 9R.

The Phantom 9.5R features the full-face Studio Carbon Steel face insert. I think this face delivers one of the best combinations of feel and roll that Cameron has ever produced.

I am really glad they went with the full-length sight line on the Phantom 9.5R. I understand that Cameron added the short line for the Phantom 9.2R to make it more blade-like but the missing line from the rear section makes the putter look unfinished to me.

“May your sight lines always be long, and your putts always short.“

–Pythagoras

Of course, this new Cameron may not improve your putting

Obviously, there is a cautionary tale associated with the Scotty Cameron Phantom 9.5R’s Tour success story. Be forewarned that you may not putt like Cameron Young or Jackson Koivun with it.

No, I’m not saying you are a lousy putter. You may be, and if you are, I don’t need to point that out because you probably say that enough about yourself already.

(You should probably be nicer to yourself and practice just a bit more.)

What I am saying is that the Phantom 9.5R may not be the putter that fits your stroke and feel needs like it fits those of Young and Koivun.

The good news is that Scotty Cameron makes lots of putters. Most of his designs have neck variations to expand the fitting options for each head style.

One of the other Phantom models, or the 9 with a different neck, could be the golden arrow putter that you can add to your quiver.

How do you figure out which putter is the one? I’d start with some data collection. Pay attention to your miss tendencies. Are you consistent in distance but off target or vice versa? Do you always miss left or right?

I interpret any “always” data as you having a consistent putting stroke. It may not be a great putting stroke but since you are consistent, your stroke may be good enough that a putter change will make a big difference.

If you are missing the hole in all directions and distances, then maybe start with a lesson and cut back on the Zyns.

Ideally, you can find a putter professional at your home course or golf shop who can observe what you are doing with your current putter and help with the fitting and/or your stroke.

(By the way, if you are in northern California, talk to Peter Brown. You are welcome. I’ll take my 10 percent of your future winnings through Venmo.)

I know that finding the “it” putter can be overwhelming. That’s why getting a professional to help is, well, helpful. It need not be one of the Scotty Cameron tour reps helping fit you but how cool would that be.

(Yes, that putter fitting is a bucket list thing for me, too.)

Ultimately, getting professional help will save you lots of trial and error time and money. You will probably end up with a putter that actually helps you putt better.

Cautionary tale #2: Many golfers become putter collectors accidentally. 

Maybe this Phantom 9.5R will be the ticket or maybe you’ll putt better with another model. The putter matters. If it didn’t, why would companies spend so much time and money making so many different ones? It would be so much easier and more profitable for them to make just one.

The post Could The New Scotty Cameron Phantom 9.5R Mallet Be Your Golden Arrow? appeared first on MyGolfSpy.

To refresh your memory, since yesterday was a long time ago, Toulon Golf is releasing four limited-edition putters this week named after coastal California towns.

I’m going to call Paso Robles quasi-coastal but I have a bias towards this town. I’ll return to that shortly.

We hit the road in Leucadia yesterday and now we are about 300 miles north in Paso Robles. I was lobbying to stop in Santa Barbara (Go Gauchos!) or even Pismo Beach but Sean Toulon, tour guide extraordinaire, didn’t let us off the bus until Paso.

So let’s take a brief look at the city of Paso Robles and its namesake putter.

Paso Robles: Not much ocean but lots of good wine

Paso Robles is a relatively small town of 31,100. It’s on Highway 101 but on the stretch of highway where the pavement heads inland for a while.

Notable things about Paso Robles. First, Thanos and his father live there. If Josh and James Brolin are there, that probably means that a Barbara Streisand sighting is not out of the question. How fun would that be?

The ever-growing Firestone Walker Brewing Company is headquartered in Paso Robles. If you visit, you can take a tour of the brewery before settling into the tap room and restaurant. I suggest you order a pint of Wookie Jack. Thank me later.

However, beer is not really the Paso Robles thing. There are more than 200 wineries in the immediate area. That’s a lot of possible tasting rooms to choose from. I like JUSTIN Vineyards. The wine is good and the grounds are lovely.

So you won’t be surfing waves in Paso Robles. You’ll be swirling whites and reds.

The Toulon Golf Coastal California Series Paso Robles putter

No, I didn’t forget we had a putter to talk about. The Toulon Golf Coastal California Series Paso Robles putter is a classic round mallet. Just like the Leucadia, the Paso Robles is finished in a Golden Sand PVD with Ocean Blue paint fill and the face is milled with highway sign cutouts.

This 360-gram mallet has a double-bend hosel that delivers a whopping zero degrees of toe hang. This is a mallet that plays like a mallet, likely fitting players with minimal swing arc.

The Paso Robles has a bright blue sole plate. This three-piece sole plate is amazing looking and has an interesting backstory.

The machining pattern on the sole plate is similar to what you would find on a classic car dash. A fancy classic car that is, like a vintage Bentley.

Toulon wanted to get this design on the putter but the machines that make the design can do so only on flat pieces of metal.

Unfortunately, the bottom of a putter is rarely flat.

To get around this, the pattern was etched into a very thin and flat piece of metal. This plate was then molded with the other two layers to create the correct shape for the putter. 

I’m betting this took a couple of tries but the end result is quite handsome.

I bring this up because that is what limited-edition putters are all about. Toulon Golf got a little experimental with the sole plate. They eventually got the build to work for this putter but the process could end up being too cost-prohibitive to incorporate into a stock putter line.

What that means is that if you dig the look of the sole plate, you may want to pick up this putter. It’s possible the Toulon Golf Coastal California Series Paso Robles putter will be the only one to ever have one like it.

We could perhaps see it in another Coastal California Series model. Who knows?

My Paso Robles bias story

I mentioned yesterday that I had a novel experience in Paso Robles that involved the California Highway Patrol. Back in September of 1987, my roommate and I were driving on our way from Sacramento to the dorms at UC Santa Barbara.

We had all of our essentials packed into a Chevy LUV (Light Utility Vehicle) long-bed truck. It was my roommate’s truck, but we took turns driving the 400 miles to college.

I was driving when we hit Paso Robles. Paso Robles sits at the exit point for a stretch of highway affectionately called “Blood Alley”. It was at the junction of Highway 41 and Highway 46 along Blood Alley where James Dean totaled his Porsche and died.

Needless to say, the handling of the full-capicity Chevy LUV was not well suited for this stretch of road.

So we pulled off the highway into Paso Robles to get gas and to swap drivers. I pulled into a convenience store and was immediately asked to stop by a highway patrolman who was wiping gravy off his tie having just exited a restaurant.

(Yes, I’m just being petty with the gravy comment. His tie and the rest of his uniform was nice and clean.)

Long story short: he wrote me up for driving the left side of a raised barrier. I guess I went a short distance on the wrong side of the road as I entered the gas station. Having never been there before, I thought I was just pulling in to get gas.

Alas, he wasn’t as cool as Ponch or John and he wrote me a $300 ticket. Remember, that’s the 1987 version of $300. That equates to roughly 60 hours of my summer lifeguarding earnings.

I never stopped in Paso Robles again.

But you should enjoy Paso Robles, both the city and the putter

Don’t let my Paso Robles experience deter you from visiting there. Quite a few of my friends have wine memberships in Paso and it is a great mid-state destination for NorCal and SoCal folk to get together.

Plus, I bet that cop has long retired.

Grab a nice cabernet and roll some balls with the Toulon Paso Robles. This putter is a great interpretation on the classic face-balanced round mallet design. It looks good on the nose and has enough body to deliver your putts to the hole.

Enjoy your time in Paso Robles. I’m staying by the In-N-Out Burger north of Atascadero but I’ll catch up with you tomorrow before we head for the next stop in Bixby.

The Toulon Golf Coastal California Series Paso Robles is available today at ToulonGolf.com.

The post Next Stop On The Toulon California Coastal Series: Paso Robles appeared first on MyGolfSpy.

That comes with a price. B. Draddy polos are expensive, but I also think they justify that price because they offer a completely different value proposition from most other brands, and that’s because they’re made of cotton. From the fit to the overall quality, B. Draddy provides exactly what I want from a premium cotton golf polo.

Right now, that premium is a bit lower.

As part of B. Draddy’s Labor Day Sale, you can save 15% with code LABORDAY15. That may not sound earth-shattering, but B. Draddy rarely goes on sale, so any opportunity to save is a more than welcome one.

If you’ve been thinking about trying one of their polos, this is probably the time to do it. I’m especially partial to the Gibson and Murph, both of which showcase what B. Draddy does so well with cotton: soft hand feel, excellent drape and a look that works just as well away from the course as it does on it.

I think B. Draddy polos are worth their salt at full price. At 15% off, they’re even easier to recommend.

The post B. Draddy’s Labor Day Sale Is the Time to Buy One of Golf’s Best Cotton Polos appeared first on MyGolfSpy.

I went through the 2026 MyGolfSpy Most Wanted tests and pulled the distance winner and runner up from every major club category. In some cases, the longest club was also one of the best overall. In others, there was a pretty obvious tradeoff.

Every buying guide at MyGolfSpy is informed by independent testing and millions of equipment data points, helping golfers separate marketing claims from measurable performance.

Longest Driver of 2026: Callaway Quantum Max

The Quantum Max finished first for distance and was also very strong for accuracy so there isn’t much of a warning label needed here. Forgiveness wasn’t quite as strong but this was one of the better examples of getting extra distance without giving up much elsewhere.

The Quantum Triple Diamond was the distance runner up and had very similar performance overall to the Quantum Max.

Longest Driver for High Swing Speeds: Titleist GT3

The GT3 was the longest driver for golfers swinging more than 105 mph and it was also one of the more forgiving options in the test. Accuracy was not as strong for the GT3 which is where the runner-up becomes interesting.

The Callaway Quantum Max was barely behind for distance but was much stronger for accuracy and forgiveness. It finished first overall for high swing speed golfers.

Longest Driver for Mid Swing Speeds: Callaway Quantum Max

The Quantum Max shows up again here. For golfers in the 90 to 105 mph range, it combined the best distance performance with strong accuracy. Forgiveness was the one area where it fell back a bit.

The Quantum Triple Diamond Max was the runner up for distance but didn’t match the standard Quantum Max for accuracy.

Longest Driver for Slow Swing Speeds: Srixon ZXi

The Srixon ZXi was the clear distance winner for golfers swinging less than 90 mph, finishing almost four yards ahead of the next closest driver. It also performed well for accuracy so this wasn’t simply a case of chasing distance at the expense of control.

The Takomo IGNIS D1 finished second for distance and had slightly better forgiveness.

Longest Fairway Wood of 2026: TaylorMade Qi4D Tour

This is where I’d start paying closer attention to the tradeoffs. The Qi4D Tour was the longest fairway wood we tested but accuracy was one of its weaker areas. If you want it because it goes far, make sure you can keep it in play.

The Callaway Quantum Max was the distance runner-up but had some similar concerns. The standard TaylorMade Qi4D gave up less than two yards of total distance to the Tour model and was a little more balanced overall.

Longest Hybrid of 2026: Tour Edge Exotics Max

The Tour Edge Exotics Max was one of the better distance winners on this list because it was long without becoming difficult to control. It also finished third overall in the hybrid test so the distance was part of a pretty complete package.

The TaylorMade Qi4D finished second for distance but struggled badly with accuracy. If you want something nearly as long with better control, the Callaway Quantum Max OS is worth a look.

Longest Utility Iron of 2026: Titleist U•505

The U•505 was the longest utility iron and also finished first overall. Accuracy was strong, too, making this another category where the distance winner doesn’t come with many major concerns.

The Tour Edge Exotics TI Utility was the runner-up and slightly better for accuracy.

Longest Player’s Iron of 2026: Callaway Apex Ai 150

The Apex Ai 150 was the longest player’s iron but this is one where I’d want to test carefully. We saw some less predictable distance control with the Ai 150 which matters a lot more with an iron than simply squeezing out another couple of yards.

The Titleist T150 was barely behind for distance, considerably more forgiving and finished first overall in the test.

Longest Player’s Distance Iron of 2026: PING i540

The i540 earned a perfect distance score and was clearly the longest player’s distance iron we tested. The catch was forgiveness. If you’re buying an iron like this to add speed, make sure the distance stays predictable when you miss the center of the face.

The Mizuno Pro M-15 was the runner-up and gave up a few yards in exchange for better accuracy and forgiveness.

Longest Game-Improvement Iron of 2026: PXG 0311 XP GEN8

The PXG 0311 XP GEN8 was long. But this may be the best example in the entire test of why distance shouldn’t be your only consideration. Both accuracy and forgiveness were toward the bottom of the category.

The Callaway Quantum Max was the runner-up and was much more balanced, even if it didn’t quite match the PXG for outright distance.

Longest Super Game-Improvement Iron of 2026: PING G740

The G740 dominated the distance portion of the super game-improvement test but struggled a bit with accuracy. The Callaway Quantum Max OS finished second for distance and was considerably better for accuracy while also finishing second overall.

What the longest clubs of 2026 tell us

Some of these clubs prove you can chase distance without giving up much. Others show exactly why we keep telling you not to buy based on yardage alone.

The post The Longest Golf Clubs of 2026 appeared first on MyGolfSpy.

That reputation is well earned but Mizuno’s biggest equipment story of 2026 has nothing to do with irons. The Mizuno JPX ONE finished first overall in both MyGolfSpy’s hybrid and fairway wood testing.

That’s an impressive sweep for any manufacturer.

The way Mizuno won may be the most interesting part. Neither JPX ONE was the longest club in its category. Instead, Mizuno produced two clubs that combined accuracy, forgiveness and dependable distance better than the rest of their respective fields.

Every buying guide at MyGolfSpy is informed by independent testing and millions of equipment data points, helping golfers separate marketing claims from measurable performance.

How the Mizuno JPX ONE hybrid won

Accuracy carries the most weight in MyGolfSpy hybrid testing and that is where the JPX ONE separated itself.

It earned a 9.8 accuracy score, the best in the test. In the underlying data, it also produced the smallest shot area and the highest percentage of playable shots.

Its 1,675-square-yard shot area was approximately 15 percent smaller than the average in the raw test data. Nearly 96 percent of its shots were considered playable.

Its 168.76-yard average carry placed it around the middle of the group. Ball speed was competitive but not class-leading.

The JPX ONE is not necessarily a hybrid that will produce a dramatic distance jump. It is a hybrid designed to make your long-game distances and misses more predictable. It was one of the higher-spinning hybrids tested. If you already generate a lot of spin, it may not be the best fit.

The fairway wood won differently

The Mizuno JPX ONE fairway wood did not finish first in any individual scoring category.

Instead, it put together the most complete overall performance.

Its 9.2 accuracy score ranked second as did its 9.4 forgiveness score. That combination was enough to overcome an 8.5 distance score and push Mizuno into the top overall position.

The raw numbers show just how much consistency drove the result.

The JPX ONE produced the best proximity number in the test at 36.3 yards, almost nine yards better than the average of the 20 fairway woods in the data.

Its shot area was approximately 18 percent smaller than the field average. More than 91 percent of its shots were considered playable.

Once again, distance was not the standout trait. The Mizuno averaged 202.58 yards of carry, 12th in the field, and 214.14 yards of total distance, ranking 14th.

This is not the fairway wood for a golfer who only wants the longest option. It is for the golfer who wants to know where the ball is going and how far it will carry.

The technology connecting both wins

The JPX ONE hybrid and fairway wood share several important design elements.

Both use Mizuno’s improved CORTECH Chamber. Mizuno widened the internal gap between the chamber and the body toward the heel and toe. The goal is to allow more face deformation away from the center without sacrificing center-face performance.

The design goal lines up with what we saw: average overall distance accompanied by tighter shot patterns and more playable misses.

Both clubs also have Mizuno’s new Speed Bevel sole. The shaping is intended to improve turf interaction, create cleaner contact and maintain more consistent ball speed from different lies.

That is particularly relevant for hybrids and fairway woods. These clubs are often hit from uneven lies, light rough and directly off the turf. A sole that moves through the ground more efficiently could help limit the distance loss caused by contact low on the face.

The overall objective for the clubs is similar: preserve speed, improve launch and produce more consistent results when contact is less than perfect.

Who should try the JPX ONE hybrid and fairway wood?

The JPX ONE hybrid and fairway wood are best suited to golfers who want dependable long-game clubs rather than the absolute longest options available.

The hybrid makes sense for players who struggle with the consistency of their longer irons. It launched easily, kept a high percentage of shots playable and produced the tightest dispersion in the test.

I’ve spent some time with the JPX ONE hybrid on the course. The look, feel and ease of use stood out immediately.

The fairway wood should appeal to golfers who have enough speed but struggle to produce predictable results from the top of the bag. It may not give you the longest carry number during a fitting but its combination of accuracy and forgiveness could make it more useful on the course.

Golfers who naturally create a lot of spin should test both carefully. Players who prioritize maximum distance above everything else will also find longer options in each category.

What about the JPX ONE driver?

The JPX ONE driver did not complete the sweep.

The standard JPX ONE finished 27th out of 42 drivers in our 2026 driver testing. It earned an 8.4 overall score with an 8.8 for accuracy, 8.2 for distance and 8.4 for forgiveness.

The more compact JPX ONE Select finished 41st with an 8.0 overall score.

So Mizuno has not completely taken over the metalwood category. The driver still has some catching up to do, particularly in overall distance and performance balance.

However, winning both the hybrid and fairway wood tests is more than one isolated result.

If you thought Mizuno was just in the iron game, it’s time to reconsider.

The post Mizuno Just Pulled Off The Most Unexpected Equipment Sweep Of 2026 appeared first on MyGolfSpy.

Sometimes, though, the problem starts before you even swing the club back.

I love finding setup mistakes like this because you can fix them without spending the entire downswing thinking about rerouting the club or dropping your hands into a certain position. Make a change to your pre-shot routine, get yourself into a better position and you can still swing freely.

The mistake can happen as you walk into the ball

A common mistake is walking into the shot and gradually getting your body closed to the target.

It makes sense how it happens.

You approach the ball from the side, get your feet into position and look up at the target. The problem is that you may already be aimed too far to the right.

Your brain still knows where the target is.

Now your body is set up in one direction while you’re trying to send the golf ball somewhere else. That can encourage the club to work back across the ball on the downswing.

A better way to walk into the shot is to stay a little more open at first. Set the clubface toward your target and then build your stance around it, going from open to square rather than walking in closed and trying to correct it from there.

Checking your feet isn’t enough

Golfers will sometimes put a club across their toes, see that their feet look pretty good and assume everything is square. Your feet can be fine while your shoulders are aimed somewhere completely different.

In the video above, Chris Ryan demonstrates a setup where the toe line looks relatively square but the shoulders are aimed well left. His point is that checking the feet alone doesn’t give you the full picture.

Take a look at your toes, knees, hips, forearms and shoulders. Even reaching with your trail hand to put it on the club can change your shoulder alignment without you realizing it.

Staying loose is not the same as letting your setup creep

I think this is where a lot of golfers get themselves into trouble without realizing it.

You get over the ball, take one more look at the target and then one foot creeps a little. Maybe the other one follows. You look again and make another tiny adjustment. None of these movements feels significant but, by the time you’re ready to swing, the setup you started with isn’t necessarily the setup you have anymore.

Your toe line can change, your shoulders can change and even your ball position can shift relative to your stance.

There is nothing wrong with staying loose over the ball. Waggle the club, keep a little movement in your feet and don’t feel like you have to stand there completely frozen. The issue is when those little movements start changing your alignment.

If you realize you’re aimed incorrectly, don’t keep creeping your feet around until it looks better. Step away and reset. It’s much easier to rebuild the setup.

A simple way to get your alignment right

Stand behind the ball first and establish your target line. Find something small on that line a few feet in front of the ball and use it as an intermediate target.

From there:

• Aim the clubface at the intermediate target first.
• Build your stance around the clubface.
• Check that your upper and lower body are working on the same lines.
• If something feels significantly off, back away instead of shuffling into a new position.

A target that’s two feet in front of you is much easier to aim at than one that’s 150 or 250 yards away.

If you’ve been working hard to stop coming over the top, don’t assume the next fix has to happen during the swing. Make sure your setup isn’t encouraging the move before the club ever starts back. Put an alignment stick down on the range and see if your aim is causing your over-the-top move.

The post The Setup Mistake That Can Cause An Over-the-Top Swing appeared first on MyGolfSpy.

St. Louis took my lunch money. I was 0-for-5.

Scottie missed the top five by five strokes, Fleetwood narrowly avoided finishing dead last, Sam Burns was nowhere near the top five after Round 1 and there wasn’t a hole in one. Last but not least, my Hail Mary pick was a bust.

With one event remaining, it’s time to get right. Here are my five favorite bets for the Tour Championship.

If I fail you this week, I’m taking a break from writing betting pieces. #you’rewelcome

Scottie Scheffler & Sam Burns: Top-10 Finish (+150)

Scheffler and Burns are coming off mediocre weeks in St. Louis but both finished inside the top 10 at East Lake in 2025.

When you combine that course history with their 2026 results, it’s hard not to trust this pair to finish inside the top 10 again.

Wyndham Clark: Top-5 Finish (+300)

Wyndham Clark has won three times in 2026.

He followed his first win with a third-place finish. After his second, he finished tied for fifth. Historically, when Wyndham gets hot, he stays hot.

I like him to finish inside the top five at East Lake.

Chris Gotterup: Leader After Round One (+1900)

Chris Gotterup is one of the PGA Tour’s better first-round players.

His opening-round scoring average of 69 ranks inside the top 15 on Tour. While I don’t see Gotterup winning the 2026 Tour Championship at East Lake, I do think he’s a solid first-round leader bet.

Alternatively, don’t be afraid to take Matt Fitzpatrick (+1800), Gary Woodland (+2200) or Hideki Matsuyama (+2200), as each also averages 69 in the opening round.

Hail Mary: Matt Fitzpatrick, Sam Burns & Cam Young For A Top-10 Finish (+761)

There’s no such thing as a sure bet but consistency is a good thing to factor in when making a parlay.

Matt Fitzpatrick and Cam Young have eight top-10 finishes apiece while Sam Burns has six. This three-leg parlay is obviously less likely to hit than the other picks in this article but it’s worth a shot if you’re a fan of Hail Mary-style betting.

Outright Winner: Scottie Scheffler (+310)

It’s a cop-out to pick Scottie to win but it’s hard not to.

According to Golf Digest and Bookies.com, if you bet $100 on him for every single tournament, you would have staked $7,900 and won roughly $13,000, profiting $5,205 overall. That’s a 65.9 ROI.

It’s a toss up but, analytically speaking, there’s no better player to bet on.

Top Photo Caption: Chris Gotterup is looking to get off to a hot start. (GETTY IMAGES/Kevin C. Cox)

The post My 5 Favorite Bets For The Tour Championship appeared first on MyGolfSpy.

Each limited-edition putter in the collection is a new Toulon design possessing enough unique character and pizazz to pique the interest of golfers who enjoy perusing and collecting limited-edition putters. Who doesn’t enjoy a bit of putter perusal?

What is even more fun is that the release includes a suspenseful geography lesson!

A dreamy drive along the California coast on Highways 1 and 101 inspired the putters in the Coastal California Series. The putters are named after the cities you drive through as you travel north from San Diego to the San Francisco Bay area.

We are starting in Leucadia, moving on to Paso Robles, continuing through Bixby, and finally parking the car in Mill Valley.

Those of you not familiar with these places will get a bit of information about the various cities as well as information about the individual putters. Yes, I am going to make you learn while you look.

Don’t panic. The information will be about fun things like local restaurants and breweries to check out. It won’t be calculus and the final exam will be open notes.

What makes this geography lesson suspenseful?

Toulon Golf has decided to unveil one of the Coastal California Series putters per day over the next four days. Like with a drive along the coast, it’s more satisfying to savor the journey and each stop than it is to race to the final destination.

(Assuming the traffic is not awful, it is still California after all.)

With that in mind, let us move on to the first city/putter: the Toulon Golf Leucadia

Our Toulon Golf trip starts in the beach town of Leucadia

As a California native, I was surprised that I had never heard of the city of Leucadia.

I was even more surprised when I figured out that I have probably been there. During one of my many visits to Carlsbad, I drove south from Carlsbad down Highway 101 to Encinitas.

Since Leucadia sits in between Carlsbad and Encinitas on that highway, I definitely drove through the town. So much for my powers of observation.

In my defense, Leucadia is a city that is not concerned about being noticed. The more I read about the city, the more I get the vibe that this town is the archetype for laid-back California surf towns.

The town motto is Keep Leucadia Funky and I love that so much.

Next time I’m down there, I’ll be spending some time checking this place out more closely, including perhaps the Belgian Quad at Duck Foot Brewery. 

However, I’m probably not looking too closely at the real estate market since median home pricing is $2 million to $3.7 million.

The Toulon Golf Leucadia putter

How about we pull over to the shoulder and talk about the Leucadia putter? The Toulon Golf Leucadia is the only blade in the Coastal California Series. I realize I just spoiled some of the surprise but since mallets dominate sales these days, having only one blade is not that surprising.

The Leucadia is a combination of the elements found in the Toulon Golf San Diego and Santa Monica blade putters. That makes geographical sense to me with Leucadia being located between those other two cities.

The Leucadia is a tri-soled blade with a smooth edged plumber’s neck. This neck creates 45 degrees of toe hang, perfectly suited for classic Anser-style blade putters.

The Leucadia contains a number of design elements that will continue throughout the Coastal California Series. First of all, it’s hard to overlook the bright Golden Sand PVD finish. Toulon combined this finish with their “Ocean Blue” paint to evoke images of the sand meeting the sea.

All of the Coastal California Series putters are milled from 316L stainless steel. This steel is known for its corrosion resistance and strength. The faces all feature a new milling pattern. The shield-like cut outs were inspired by California highway signs.

Tomorrow, we head north to Paso Robles

Enjoy your night in Leucadia but maybe not too much since we have 316 miles to cover tomorrow to get to Paso Robles. Right now, we are looking at about six hours of driving. You could save an hour by taking I-5 but then you’d never see the ocean and you could accidentally end up in Bakersfield.

Paso Robles is a city I’ve been to numerous times including one visit highlighted by a really annoying interaction with the California Highway Patrol. Maybe I’ll share that story along with all the details about the new Toulon Golf Coastal California Series Paso Robles tomorrow.

Until then, what do you think about the Toulon Golf Leucadia? Do you have any fun stories to share about visiting there? If you live there, can you feel the overwhelming intensity of my envy?

See you tomorrow in Paso.

For more information about the Leucadia and other Toulon Golf putters head to ToulonGolf.com.

The post Take A Coastal California Road Trip With Toulon Golf appeared first on MyGolfSpy.

PING’s Quiet Eye work lands squarely in the second category and to the company’s credit, nobody there seems particularly invested in pretending otherwise.

“Very openly, it’s a dot on a putter,” Ryan Stokke, PING’s Director of Product Design, told MyGolfSpy last December. “And it’s not super hard.”

That’s the technology. A dot on the topline, sitting forward near the leading edge, with a short line running back behind it. PING calls it Eye Q and it entered the conversation this spring on the Scottsdale TEC mallets.

The dot is, well … a dot. If PING isn’t going to oversell it, I won’t, either. The science behind why it’s there is the interesting part.

Quiet eye, quiet mind

“Quiet eye” is not a PING invention and it is not new. Kinesiologist Joan Vickers coined the term at the University of Calgary in the 1990s and the research has since spread through basketball, marksmanship, soccer and pretty much every other sport where somebody has to aim a thing at a different thing. Narrowly defined, quiet eye is the final steady fixation on a target before the movement begins. For example, the seconds (or milliseconds) before you start your putting stroke.

The interval we’re talking about is narrow and short. It’s the last beat before your brain sends the signal to go, not your entire pre-putt routine. What a growing trove of data suggests is that the best in the world at pretty much anything hold that final gaze longer and hold it steadier than the rest of us. For the best golfers in the world, that’s two to three seconds in the final gaze before pulling the trigger. Higher handicaps land closer to one.

The mechanism, as PING explains it, is bandwidth.

“Your mind can only do so much processing,” Stokke says. “When you can move it to the next type of processing more quickly and adapt it to that next step, it allows you in sport to actually execute that task better.”

The obvious version of that is the 16th tee at the WM Phoenix Open where thousands of people are actively working to occupy the part of your brain you’d rather have thinking about the shot. Quiet eye is about the same drain coming from a place you’d never think to look. Eyes that can’t find somewhere to settle burn the same processing power the crowd does and they burn it on an empty practice green with nobody within a hundred yards. A putter can’t do anything about the crowd. It can do something about the eyes.

I suppose if you’re looking for the cool feature of Eye Q it’s that it doesn’t require your active participation. There’s no drill, no count, no cue to remember while standing over the ball. The premise is that you buy the putter, go play golf, and never once consciously think about the dot.

PING found the research through a sales rep in Florida who was working with an academic in the golf space. That was more than a decade ago and the company has been picking the topic up and putting it back down ever since. Erik Henrikson, PING’s Director of Golf Science, frames the engineering problem like this: quiet eye is trainable, and coaches have trained it, but training takes work.

“The question for us as an equipment manufacturer is, can we induce that behavior without having to have somebody go through a bunch of training?” he says. “Are there certain putter designs or things we could do on putters that would create this behavior, lower cognitive load, and help somebody putt better just by changing their alignment aid rather than overhauling their training regimen?”

Quantifying Quiet Eye

To know whether something works, you have to measure it. In the case of PING’s Quiet Eye, the measurement tool is a pair of Tobii eye-tracking glasses. One of the biggest commercial uses for this hardware is in retail research where brands pay to learn which shelf your eyes hit first and how long they stay there. PING is basically running a shelf-placement study on a putter alignment feature.

The glasses capture two things: saccades and fixations. A saccade is a shift in gaze, the jump from one point to another, for example when your eyes dart from your putter to the hole and back again. A fixation is what happens when your eyes hold within a set threshold of distance and time. There are also micro-saccades happening constantly underneath all of it, fast enough that you have no idea they’re occurring.

“You’d be like, what are you looking at when you putt? Well, I look at the ball,” Henrikson says. “And then when you put the eye-tracking glasses on, there’s all these micro-saccades that happen. You don’t realize it’s happening. But it still loads your cognitive ability to execute whatever task it is you’re trying to execute.”

The research also gives you a rough map of where elite putters focus. The consensus is the space between the leading edge of the putter and the front of the ball. Not the hole. Not the back of the ball. That narrow gap.

How PING ended up with a dot

PING started by building a pile of putters with different alignment aids and putting them in front of eye trackers. “We did a bunch of these different alignment line designs, not really knowing what we were trying to do, but just trying to figure out, OK, let’s just shotgun approach it and see if one stands out,” Henrikson says.

One stood out. It was a thick line with dots set into it and it produced a dramatically tighter gaze pattern than anything else in the group. That result was slightly annoying because the line was the thing PING thought it was testing. A plain line had people scanning up and down its length. A two-ball design had gaze scattered everywhere. But with a dot in the mix, the eye stopped hunting.

“Even though it had a long line, that dot, whatever it did, anchored the gaze,” Henrikson says, before immediately correcting himself. “I’m instructed to not use the word ‘anchor’. Such a negative connotation in golf. We’re trying to use ‘tether.’”

From there it was variations on a theme: segmented lines, a dot on the top rail of an Anser, gaps punched into a line. One of the practical headaches is that a dot up front and a line behind it don’t always read as one piece. Depending on where your eyes sit over the ball, the two may not appear aligned which isn’t a problem you have with a line by itself.

Then the whole experiment stalled, for the most PING reason imaginable. Engineers could see the gaze behavior change. What they couldn’t definitively show was that the gaze behavior mattered when it came to making putts.

“With drivers and irons and everything else, we’ve gotten really good at measuring performance differences and going, yes, this is better,” Henrikson says. “With putters, we’ve really struggled being an engineering company and making all our decisions based on engineering results. We were like, we can’t measure somebody being better with that than not so we’re not gonna do it.”

And so PING sat on it for a bit, although it’s worth noting Karsten Solheim was putting dots on putters in the 1960s, which means PING spent the better part of 60 years getting around to explaining something it (and a good bit of the rest of the putter industry) had already built.

A lack of focus

The flip side of tethering the gaze is everything else on a putter that scatters it and this is where PING has quietly been leveraging eye tracking for years.

PING’s metallic holographic shaft label was an early research casualty. We’ve told this story before but the summary version is that in an early eye-tracking study, PING noticed that golfers’ eyes were unexpectedly breaking focus and shifting to a point high on the shaft. It turned out that the shaft label (common to many putters) was causing golfers to lose focus on the impact zone. To solve the issue, PING shrank and relocated the label. “Out of sight, out of mind”, I suppose.

And then there’s the Sydney, a PING mallet with a bold red alignment aid running from the face to the back of the head. It gets brought up as a cautionary tale by PING’s own engineers. “You look at that putter and you’re just like, whoa,” Henrikson says. “Of course it was all over the shop.”

The approach extends past putters. When PING pulled the turbulators off its fairway woods and hybrids and replaced them with crown dots, the company wasn’t thinking about gaze behavior. Going back and looking at it afterward, they found similar behavior to the putter work.

Which brings me to the thing in my own bag. After sitting through PING’s December presentation, I went looking for a putter with a single dot on the top rail. On the design I landed on, one dot wasn’t an option so what I ended up with has three of them clustered together. My reasoning at the time was airtight: if one dot is quiet, three has to be silent.

Henrikson’s read on multiple dots is that spacing decides it. Three dots far enough apart can work fine. Three dots close enough together to read as one busy cluster may be adding cognitive load rather than removing it. There’s no test data on my particular putter but the principle isn’t complicated: if there’s something to look at, you’re probably going to look at it, even when doing so works against you.

What the testing shows and what it doesn’t

PING revisited the Quiet Eye concept about two years ago. Its ability to measure had improved so the company decided to give it another shot and see if they could land on a real answer. PING now runs the test sequence in stages: flat indoor putts first to strip variables out, then an adjustable green with break and varied distances, then outdoors on a built course in head-to-head competition. Stokke says they’ve run the test with three separate player groups and each time Eye Q led to fewer putts.

That said, a dot on a putter is not a panacea. On the gaze metrics, 67 percent of testers showed a measurable improvement. Two out of three ended up with a tighter dispersion heat map and longer dwell time. The other third showed nothing of consequence. And, not surprisingly, the players who benefit most are the ones who need the most help. Better putters have already trained a quieter eye without anyone asking them to, exactly where the original research came from.

The summary reads like this: you might not see a reduction but you’re not going to get worse. Henrikson backs that up. Finding somebody who putts worse with it is rare. The realistic outcomes are better or the same.

In an industry driven by claims, I suppose that’s modest. It’s not a driver face story where it’s not unusual to see 20 out of 20 players pick up ball speed but it’s something quantifiable and real in a category that’s typically short on empirical data.

One interesting non-empirical data point: through PLD, PING’s custom putter program, more than a third of orders were going out the door with some kind of top-rail alignment feature before Eye Q existed as a product. A dot, an ellipse, a short line. Nobody was wearing eye-tracking glasses during those fittings. Golfers and fitters seemed to be landing there on their own.

To an extent, PING’s Eye Q is built around something many golfers have gravitated to anyway. The difference is there’s now data to support the choice.

Three putters, one pair of glasses

At PING headquarters in July, I stepped through the Eye Q demo. Glasses on and calibrated to my putting posture, I hit three putts with each of three putters to a target 10 feet away. Blank head first, then a full-length line, then Scottsdale TEC.

For me, the blank putter was awful. Not awful as in I missed. Awful as in I have never felt so lost with a putter in my hands (and that’s saying something). There was no visual cue anywhere and I spent the whole time hunting for something to look at before finally giving up and staring at the number on the ball. The playback of the eye-tracking video matched the feeling exactly. My gaze was clustered but jittery right where a fixation should be. With nothing to anchor (sorry, tether) my gaze, my eyes raced up and down a putter with no concrete point to focus on.

The line was better and that came through in the video playback. My gaze came back from the hole and traced the length of the line before settling. The dot version produced a single long fixation before the stroke and it wasn’t like I was trying harder to focus.

That’s the design working and it’s also the problem PING has selling it. You can’t explain a subconscious feature to somebody without making them conscious of it.

“The point isn’t for you to get up there and cognitively go, ‘stare at the dot, stare at the dot,’” Henrikson says. “It’s meant to be a subconscious like, ‘OK, it’s there, and I know it’s gonna help me.’ This whole thing’s a subconscious behavior anyway.”

But the putter comparison wasn’t the part that got me. If you had asked me a month ago whether I have a putting routine, I’d have told you no. I would have said there was no standard way I set the putter down. No consistent rehearsal. Nothing I could have described to you.

The glasses said otherwise. Once I’m over the ball, I do the same thing every single time. Long fixation, shift to the hole, shift back, go. Same sequence, same order, three putts in a row, across three different putters. I had no idea. What changed between the putters wasn’t the pattern; it was the intensity of the gaze inside it which is another way of saying the focus.

There’s a detail from one of PING’s internal test reports that stuck with me. A player hit six putts and ran the same routine on five of them. The one she missed was the one where the order of her routine changed.

Does it have to be a dot?

All of this got me wondering: to get the benefits of Eye Q, does the alignment aid have to be a dot? According to PING, not necessarily.

On the heat maps, a dot edges out a short line. You still get some jitter with a line, even a short one on the top rail. But when PING compared a dot against a full-length line on the metric that actually pays, putts made, the difference didn’t reach significance.

So the honest version is that the dot looks better in the gaze data but looks like a wash in the outcome data. Hold onto that distinction. It’s the difference between a mechanism PING can see and a result everyone (PING included) can bank on.

PING has tried plenty of other alignment features. The list includes segmented lines, a gap punched into a line so it reads almost as a square, a full-length black line with a white dot set into it, pills, two alignment lines with a dot dropped between them. The concept travels. If you set up better with two lines, you can have two lines and still experience the desired tether. The line helps you align the putter. The dot keeps you focused.

Worth a brief mention since it shares the same product line: Eye Q is one of two stories powering the Scottsdale TEC family, the other being onset. PING’s position is that onset does most of the useful work people credit to zero torque, and that running the shaft through the center of gravity costs you something real. That bit of torque you feel in your hands is the head telling you where the face is pointed and taking it away leaves you without an important cue. Having just been through a putter fitting that confirmed I have a strong arc and very active hands, that tracks. Zero-torque putters go right for me, every time, and after three rounds I knew exactly where it was going which is the worst possible thing to know standing over a putt. That’s a longer conversation for another day.

Better or the same

The data collected during my demo suggested I putted a bit better with the dot. I don’t think three putts on a flat indoor 10-footer are incontrovertibly conclusive and neither does PING which is why the company spent a decade refusing to market a dot on a putter until it could measure what the dot was actually doing.

What I came away with was a picture of my own putting I didn’t have going in. There’s a routine in there I would have sworn didn’t exist, running the same way every time, and a putter’s job in that sequence is smaller and more specific than the marketing around alignment aids would have you believe. It isn’t aiming you. It’s giving your eyes a place to stop hunting for the second before you pull the trigger.

And then there’s the claim itself. Almost nothing in golf equipment is free. Every gain is a trade and most of the time the sales pitch conveniently omits what you’re giving up. PING’s pitch here is that the golfers who need it most get the most, some of you won’t see a thing, and essentially nobody gets worse.

That’s not the boldest marketing claim you’ll ever hear. It’s just true, which should be plenty good enough.

PING Eye Q technology is available on all Scottsdale TEC putters.

The post When is A Dot More Than A Dot? Inside PING’s Quiet Eye Research appeared first on MyGolfSpy.

Moments like these don’t come along very often. Golf isn’t known for controversial advertising. I mean, it’s golf.

Football had Colin Kaepernick’s NIKE commercial after his national anthem protest, basketball had Charles Barkley telling the world he was not a role model, soccer had Thierry Henry promoting Gillette razors right after a controversial handball in the World Cup.

Golf has … Tiger’s commercial using Earl Woods’ voice following the scandal?

Anything remotely noteworthy in golf advertising has usually involved Tiger or Rory McIlroy. For the vast majority of golf ads, I couldn’t tell you a single memorable thing about them.

That is what made this recent Good Good/Callaway ad so unexpectedly terrible.

How did this commercial get approved?

Let’s be honest: Good Good and Callaway have serious egg on their face here.

The ad for the new special-edition Good Good Callaway Quantum driver shows Good Good’s Garrett Clark running full speed and absolutely trucking a woman, Alexis Miestowski, as she falls to the ground with a whelp. Miestowski is a member of Good Good Girls and voluntarily went along with this, apparently.

Clark then towers over her to say, “Do not touch my new driver” as Miestowski smiles (for those interested, the ad continues as one member of the group seems to have a mental breakdown and becomes obsessed with the driver. I watched it a few times and still don’t understand the plot).

I don’t even know where to start here.

Everyone involved thought this was a good idea? Hey, let’s show a dude hitting a woman and being an asshole towards her. That will definitely appeal to our base of brain-dead idiots.

Throughout the past year, we’ve been highlighting how big of a brand Good Good has become. They have helped revive the Big Break. They are sponsoring a PGA Tour event. Their merch/equipment business is impressive. They came out with Good Good Girls, an attempt to diversify their audience (yikes).

It would be one thing if a small outfit took a stab at a bizarre commercial like this but we’re talking about a legitimate company here!

You can blame this on the creators within Good Good (they deserve it) but there are a ton of real adults involved here at Good Good and Callaway. Business people, marketing experts, knowledgeable industry types …

This commercial made it through several layers of planning and production. They had to come up with the idea, schedule filming, shoot it, edit it and decide on timing for publish. Nobody stopped to say, “Hey, this idea is not the one”?

The kicker is that it’s not even remotely funny. It’s totally incoherent. I can’t even grasp the concept of what they were trying to do.

Good Good is now backpedaling with corporate speak

Shortly after the ad was released, the backlash started. As the justified vitriol came their way, Good Good pulled the ad and released a statement.

“We posted a video to our socials that ultimately depicted actions that are not aligned with our values as a brand. We have since taken that content down, and sincerely apologize. Good Good has always stood for making the game of golf more inclusive for all, and we will continue to ensure that is our mission moving forward.”

This statement honestly upset me more than the initial video.

This video absolutely 100 percent aligns with your values. You had dozens of moments to abort and you didn’t. This wasn’t some reactionary error; this is the kind of sophomoric humor you think resonates with your audience because it resonates with you.

At the very least, the idea was remarkably dumb.

This statement is vapid and corporate beyond measure. No contrition. No understanding of why it was wrong. Basically they are apologizing for the backlash.

Callaway later released an even shorter and more inane statement: “We are disappointed by the content that was posted, and are appreciative of Good Good for addressing this. We look forward to working together to ensure a more inclusive space in golf.”

Wow, Callaway. So you took zero accountability for this? It’s a Callaway driver. Nobody on your side saw the ad before it was posted? That’s what Golf Digest reported (“Good Good reportedly retained creative control of its content in its partnership with Callaway, while the company would gain access to Good Good’s social media presence, which now numbers more than four million followers”).

If that’s the case, Callaway is guilty of negligence. You are fully trusting Good Good on all content decisions involving your brand? Not sure that’s a great call.

Some people will call my opinion an overreaction. That I’m being soft. I’m sure politics will somehow get shoehorned into this.

Stop it. This is arguably the most influential golf brand for young people. Women’s golf participation is booming. The golf world should all be in agreement that this kind of content isn’t acceptable.

If we can’t agree on that, we probably wouldn’t be friends.

Top Photo Caption: Garrett Clark starred in a controversial Good Good ad this past week. (GETTY IMAGES/Kevin C. Cox)

The post Good Good And Callaway Humiliated Themselves With Bizarre Ad appeared first on MyGolfSpy.