Morikawa’s new Olson putter headlines gear changes at Travelers

Collin Morikawa has tried numerous other putters over the past several years, but he always seems to gravitate back toward his trusty TaylorMade TP Soto, a putter he used to win the 2023 Zozo Championship.

This week, a new flatstick is entering the chat.

At the Travelers Championship this week, Morikawa has put into play a brand new Olson Tour Matrix 1.0 Round putter.

Many gearheads know Logan Olson as the next bright star in the putter design space, who has gained recognition for his one-off creations, craft batch releases, and just over a year ago, crafting the putter Scottie Scheffler used to win the 2023 Hero World Challenge.

Olson has since come under the TaylorMade umbrella, and the first big fruit of that acquisition has been the Olson Tour Matrix, which debuted at the Charles Schwab Challenge last month. Thorbjørn Olesen has been using a similar Olson Tour Matrix 1.0.

With the matrix, TaylorMade putter rep James Holley now has a modular fitting system that allows him to create a blade putter with two face options (grooves or fly mill) and three width options (1.0, 1.25, 1.5), along with an array of alignment aids and weights, right on the practice green, without changing any other specs.

“I can have a putter built up his length, his grip on it, and then I can just change out that back, give him one and a quarter, so a little bit wider,” Holley told GOLF at the Travelers. “It’s gonna be a little heavier. 
If I want to make that one the same swing weight, change the weights out. So just makes it easy to switch stuff back and forth.”

Morikawa, one of the premier ball-strikers in the game and the No. 4 player in the world, is not new to the Olson name, having tried out a custom Olson prototype last year.

The interesting difference is that last year’s prototype had a grooved insert, as does his Soto, while the putter Morikawa tested and ultimately gamed this week at TPC River Highlands has a fly-milled face.

It’s also not the first putter swap of the year for Morikawa, who has lost strokes on the greens this year and ranks 110th on Tour in the category. For two tournaments in April, Morikawa tried a Spider Tour V, the most forward CG mallet in the TaylorMade lineup, but that putter only lasted six rounds in the bag.

Holley said they weren’t trying to re-invite Morikawa’s putting. Holley and Morikawa’s putting coach, Stephen Sweeney, used Vertex Golf motion sensors to look at Morikawa’s stroke dynamics and didn’t see much to change. They were really just trying to match sound, feel and optics to what Morikawa liked.

Holley said they went with a rounded bumper shape and sight dot to match the Olson, but the fly mill face feels just a little firmer, which Morikawa preferred.

With the new wand, Morikawa’s results were serviceable on the greens, as he took 31 putts and gained .126 strokes as part of an opening 67 at TPC River Highlands.

Combining zero torque and arm lock

The zero torque (or whatever you want to call it) movement on the PGA Tour is about to hit a fever pitch after J.J. Spaun captured the first major championship at the U.S. Open with the putter type.

After losing strokes on the greens his last three events, perhaps that’s what led Matthieu Pavon to try out Ping’s prototype concept of the technology, the PLD Ally Blue Onset 5 putter.

It wasn’t a radical departure for Pavon, who has played a center shafted putter most of his career, but this putter is different for a couple of reasons. For starters, Ping’s version isn’t really a zero torque putter in what’s become the traditional sense because the toe does not point up when balanced. Instead, it actually has about 5 degrees of toe hang (hence the “5” in the name).

Corey Conners is using a similar prototype, the Ally Blue Onset 15, which, as you can guess from the different nomenclature, features 15 degrees of toe hang.

The putter still falls into a similar category as other “zero torque” options since it has the shaft placed behind the face of the putter, creating onset (again, hence the name).

But where it differs is Pavon’s wand is one of the first onset putters on the PGA Tour to combine the technology with an armlock configuration.

“He’s kind of dabbled with face balanced, mallets versus blades, and then now he’s trying the Onset. For him, he actually visually liked it, and wanted to try armlock,” said Ping Player Development Manager Dylan Goodwin. “Going with the arm lock. It’s just, it takes a lot of the variables out of play and a stroke. No manipulation of shaft lean as well, so he feels like speed is very, very consistent.”

With the shaft being behind the putter face, Goodwin said Pavon was also able to align himself better.

Adam Scott keeps on testing

Adam Scott hard-stepping the shafts in his Miura AS-1 irons led to his best ball-striking performance of the season as he gained 1.009 strokes on approach at the U.S. Open, the first time he’s been positive in the category since the Valspar Championship in March.

But, golf’s ultimate tinkerer was at it again this week at the Travelers Championship.

While the AS-1/TC-202 combo set Scott debuted at the U.S. Open looked to be intact, we spotted a Callaway Golf Apex MB Prototype 5-iron in Scott’s bag.

Scott has two sets of irons, the AS-1s and the Titleist 681.AS, that were custom-designed specifically for him, but that won’t stop him trying anything to get an edge.

Tommy Fleetwood’s mini change led to another

Tommy Fleetwood switched into the new TaylorMade R7 Quad Mini driver this week after a memorable two-year run with the BRNR Mini. A shaft change to the Fujikura Ventus TR Blue 6-X was the catalyst leading to the swap.

But that also led Fleetwood and TaylorMade’s Adrian Rietveld to try something else.

Fleetwood was playing the Ventus Red Velocore+ 6-X in his mini driver to match the same shaft he switched into his Qi35 driver to start this season. So when they landed on switching back into the TR Blue in his mini driver, they also wanted to try it in the big stick.

Fleetwood did some testing on the range Wednesday and then took the new shaft setup out on the course for his nine-hole pro-am, which seemed to go well because it was in the bag Thursday for the opening round.

Clearly something worked right away with both the driver and mini because Fleetwood missed just two fairways Thursday at TPC River Highlands and gained 1.247 strokes off the tee (T4 in the field) on his way to an opening-round 66.

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