With prizemoney at the highest level of professional golf healthier than ever before, the stakes are high. One shot can make tens of thousands of dollars difference to your pay cheque that week as a PGA Tour pro. So these players need to ensure everything is perfectly in place to allow them to play their best golf, and that includes their golf clubs.
Some players like to leave that side of the game to their equipment manufacturers, but many like to tinker around and have very bespoke preferences for their clubs. Let’s take a look at some of the more unusual equipment preferences in the professional game…
Bubba’s Grips
Bubba Watson is one of the most colorful and interesting characters in the game of golf and that flamboyance even extends to some of his equipment choices. We could be very obvious here and point straight to his bright pink driver, but the more unusual choice is in his grips for us.
Watson plays one of the thickest grips in the professional game and he achieves this by utilizing an incredible amount of grip tape. Just for context, if you were to take your clubs to your local facility for re-gripping and not specify any requirements for tape layers, you would almost certainly end up with one layer of grip tape. Bubba has 12 layers under his bottom hand and 10 layers under his top hand, and that is on top of already using a gold grip from Ping that is 1/32” thicker than standard anyway.
He prefers the thicker grip as he feels it promotes less face rotation and allows him to play his preferred fade a lot more easily. To further complicate matters, he uses a ribbed grip and has it fitted about 20 degrees open to encourage that fade even more!
Steve Stricker is another player who has his grips set a little open, while Padraig Harrington has been at the other end of the scale to Watson during his career, preferring the thinnest grips possible. At times during his career, he has even had his grips blown on with an air compressor to avoid needing even one layer of tape!
Morikawa’s lie angles
Most of us reading this will have been for a custom fitting at some point during of golf careers and in that fitting, a suitable lie angle would likely have been established for irons. This is usually expressed as 2˚ flat or standard etc, and is applicable throughout the set. Not so with Collin Morikawa.
Morikawa is very much a visual player and needs every single iron to suit his eye looking down, as such he has a very unusual way of establishing his lie angle. He simply eyeballs the club down in the playing position and then asks for it to be tweaked until he likes the look. This is a very unusual practice and to our knowledge unique to Morikawa, because lie angle has a huge influence on initial launch direction so for them not to be uniform is particularly strange. Morikawa clearly values the correct visual more, however, and who can argue with one of the best iron players in the game?
Mickelson’s driver set-up/s
Phil Mickelson is a notorious tinkerer when it comes to his golf equipment. Always looking for an edge and willing to try out just about anything in search of it. But for me, he holds one of the strangest equipment records in golf… He is the only player to have won a major championship with one driver, two drivers, and even without a driver!
Alongside four other major victories where he used a more orthodox bag set-up, Mickelson famously won the 2006 Masters with two drivers. He felt that the premium on shaping the ball off the tee at Augusta warranted having both a draw and fade bias driver in the bag, and his strategy certainly paid off!
He went completely the opposite way during his 2013 Open Championship victory at Muirfield however, and due to the hard running fairways and clever bunker placements, he felt that a strong lofted, deep-faced 3-wood and an extra wedge would be the most prudent strategy. Judging by the end result, it seems he was right.
DJ’s driver topline
Dustin Johnson may be a surprise inclusion on this list to some. His casual, lackadaisical demeanor might suggest that perfecting minute details in his equipment set-up wouldn’t be a major concern. However, Johnson does have a very particular look he needs to see when looking down on his driver.
To start with, it is important to note that when ‘DJ’ first came out on tour, he hit a big slinging draw, before ultimately deciding that wasn’t going to provide him with the required accuracy and switching to the trademark power fade that we see from him today.
Since switching to the fade, DJ has required a very square sitting driver head. Despite historically many top pros preferring a slightly open look, DJ’s long-time club fitter Keith Sbarbaro says:
“A lot of good players will want them open; that was popular when I first started on Tour. But all these young guys want to see closed drivers. There are a lot of guys who play with more of a closed face than back in the day.”
However, it is the way Johnson achieves this that is interesting. On many of his previous drivers, the tour team at TaylorMade has either had to scratch some paint off where the crown meets the face to reorientate that topline to his preference, or even take to the crown with a sharpie to create the required topline.
Interestingly, this obviously has zero physical effect on the playing face angle, just the visual appearance of it, so the actual face angle will be aimed differently to the line created by DJ and his equipment team.
Langers iron set
The German legend, Bernhard Langer has one of the most interesting bags in all of golf. At one stage, he had nine different manufacturers represented in his 14 clubs, four of which were in his iron set! Instead of finding a set of irons that he liked and using them from say 4-PW, Langer sees them as individual tools that need to do a certain job for him and as such would cherry-pick clubs that looked and felt right and provide the right distance number from numerous other sets. For example, in 2020, Langer used Hogan Apex in his 4 and 5 iron, Adams Idea Pro MB in his 6 iron, Artisan MB in his 7-9 iron before switching to a TaylorMade RSI TP pitching wedge! And true to form he then snuck in two more manufacturers in his wedges with Cleveland and Vokey rounding out the set!
It may look a little like the bag of rental/loan clubs you see at your local driving range, but it is most certainly effective.
Billy Horschel's zero offset
Billy Horschel does not like offset one bit. This proved to be a bit of a problem for him as he also required fairly strong iron lofts to facilitate his optimal launch conditions, and bending irons strong in loft increases offset. For the average consumer, this is something they would simply have to put up with, however, when you have access to the smart engineers on the PGA Tour equipment trucks, no problems are unsolvable.
What Titleist did to fix Horschel's problem, was to use the previous stronger lofted head in the set as the required iron. For example, using a 4 iron head for his 5 iron and so on. However, it’s not that simple. Firstly the 3/4 degree less loft was just too strong, so they were bent slightly weaker to get them just 2 degrees stronger than the standard loft. Furthermore, additional weight needed to be added to each head to hit Horschel’s desired swing weight as heads get progressively lighter from wedges up to the long irons. Then it was simply a case of covering the old number with lead tape to avoid confusion and stamping an ‘8’ onto the 7-iron head and so on…
Rickie Fowler’s lines on driver face
The comeback kid of 2023, Rickie Fowler has a strange custom job on his Cobra Darkspeed LS driver. One of the best drivers of 2024, the Darkspeed family as a whole features a very distinctive and minimalist matt black finish that has proved very popular in the consumer market. However, Fowler felt that because the head was so uniform and there was no contrast between the face and crown, it gave him the illusion of less loft which he didn’t like. So Fowler reached for a silver sharpie and drew on some vertical face lines which he also felt helped him pick out the face angle better.
He was so pleased with his work that he wanted it to become a more permanent feature so Cobra subsequently laser etched the lines on the face.
