In some ways, The Players Championship is a big week for the equipment manufacturers. Whether or not the event is really golf's fifth major, the top players in the world are at the TPC Sawgrass and many are looking for tweaks to their equipment.
But with all the changes to the event -- different greens, different date -- come changes for the tour vans. The most obvious is location.
Instead of sitting to the right of the driving range, as in the past, drivers were instructed to park another 100 yards right, making them tougher to reach.
More subtly, the change from March to May means the pros are not making the same large-scale changes. Instead, they're looking for specific fixes to issues, and not making as many changes to what's in their bags.
If players do have room in their contracts and desire in their hearts to tinker, it is often with the putter. To that end, Scotty Cameron was on site in the Titleist tour van last week.
See more at www.scottycameron.com/articles/details.asp?id=168 and at www.titleistblog.com.
PUTTER LIKE A PAPER CLIP: Ever use a putter so much that the hosel was about to break?
Probably not many golfers have. But Chris DiMarco is a loyal guy, and he had stayed true to his Ping Anser F putter for eight, almost nine, years before he decided it just wasn't holding up.
"The one that I wouldn't … thought I'd never switch from, it had gotten … the hosel had gotten really weak," DiMarco said. "It's just like you take a paper clip and you bend it back and forth, eventually it's going to break, and that's about where it's at.
"If I tapped down spike marks, it was changing it. I'd go the next week and it would be off a degree here or there, where it was open in the loft."
Not surprisingly, DiMarco said that he found having the same loft and lie to his putter every round was helping him on the greens. He had just 28 putts in the first round at Sawgrass.
That wasn't the first time DiMarco cited a bent putter as a problem for his game. Coming back from the British Open last year, his Anser got bent, and he didn't notice the problem for almost two weeks.
DiMarco's new putter isn't terribly different from his old one -- a Redwood Anser. It's 35.75 inches long with 3 degrees of loft and a PP58 grip.
BEAR SUGGESTS PERSIMMON: Observers just can't compare the game he played with Tiger Woods' game, Jack Nicklaus said before The Players got underway last week. But, he noted, the equipment the two used in their primes aren't as radically different as many would think.
"The more similarity Tiger plays as close to the same equipment I played as anybody," Nicklaus said. "He plays a set of forged blades and it's basically the same equipment."
There's another piece of equipment that Woods might benefit from, Nicklaus explained.
"Maybe he'd be better off with a wood driver sometimes -- that's not bad," he said. "Sometimes the drivers go so far -- the wood driver didn't go much farther. You could keep them in play much easier."
HOLDING UP A 2-IRON: WIth more and more players switching to hybrids and ditching the long irons, a 2-iron is getting to be a rare club.
Especially on the LPGA Tour.
But if you want to see one, take a look in Laura Davies' bag. Hers isn't going any where, any time soon.
"It seems like everybody has these rescue clubs or 19-woods and 21- woods," said Davies at the Michelob Ultra Open at Kingsmill last week. "I like the old-fashioned game. There's nothing better than striking a really good long iron."
But even Davies doesn't carry a 1-iron.
"No," she said. "Driver, 2- iron and 3, 4, 5, right down to the wedges."
ODDS AND ENDS: Greg Owen decided against a 2-iron, replacing his with a TaylorMade Rescue TP 19 degree hybrid bent to 17.5 to lower the flight. The club's got a steel X-100 shaft. ... Fred Funk tried TaylorMade's r7 TP irons and put a set with 4 through pitching wedge in play ... Peter Lonard performed well for three days at the Stadium Course with his new TaylorMade rac Black wedges in 54 and 60 degrees. He took out his Titleist wedges last week and gave the new ones a spin. ... Henrik Stenson put new Srixon i701 Tour irons in play last week. The irons have a milled face and minimal offset, and rumor has it they will be on the market around August.
