January is gone and February is flying by, so most professional golfers have played a few events in 2020. Many of the game’s elite players have made changes to their equipment. If history is a guide, driver changes tend to be the easiest for most pros to make, and the most permanent, while putter changes can be short-lived.
Here are a few of the equipment changes made by golf’s best players that we have spotted so far this season.
Rory McIlroy made his 2020 PGA Tour debut at the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines and arrived with a new 10.5-degree TaylorMade SIM driver and 15-degree SIM Max fairway wood.
McIlroy has been one of the game’s elite iron players for more than a decade, but at Torrey Pines he used a new 19-degree TaylorMade SIM Max rescue club, saying it was great out of thick rough and allowed him to hit the ball higher and land it softer on the greens.
Brooks Koepka made a driver change in the middle of his first event of 2020. Starting in the third round, he used a Callaway Mavrik at the Saudi International in Saudi Arabia.
Koepka also decided to take out the Scotty Cameron putter he used to win four major championships and put in a similar Scotty Cameron putter. The new putter is not new – Koepka used it in his college days at Florida State. Koepka said that aside from the cosmetics on the back, it is identical to his old putter in nearly every way.
Tiger Woods has switched into a TaylorMade SIM driver (9.0 degrees) fitted with a Mitsubishi Diamana D+ shaft
Phil Mickelson finished third in Saudi Arabia in January and third again at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am after putting a new Callaway Mavrik Sub Zero driver (9 degrees) in his bag. He also used a 13.5-degree Callaway Mavrik Sub Zero fairway wood.
Mickelson changes putters on a regular basis, and at Pebble Beach he used an Odyssey White Hot PM Blade putter that he first used in 2012.
Rickie Fowler recently switched into Cobra’s New King Speedzone driver. It is fitted with a Fujikura Ventus Blue shaft.
Fowler has used a game-improvement iron as a driving iron for years, and recently added a Speedzone 4-iron fitted with a Graphite Design shaft to his setup.
Fowler added a set of prototype Cobra muscleback blade irons to his bag in late 2019. His previous irons had a dark PVD finish, but these are chrome finished and not yet available at retail.
Sergio Garcia has been playing Ping Blueprint irons, Glide 3.0 wedges and a Ping PLD Anser putter with a Pebax insert.
Cameron Smith, the winner of the Sony Open in Hawaii, recently added four Titleist Vokey Design SM8 wedges (46, 52, 56 and 60 degrees) in the JetBlack finish.
Jon Rahm is among the TaylorMade staff players who have switched to a TaylorMade SIM driver (9 degrees), along with 15-degree and 19-degree SIM fairway woods.
Rahm has been using a copper-toned TaylorMade Spider X putter for a while, but starting at the Farmers Insurance Open he started using a chalk-white model.
