BROOKLINE, Mass. — At 25, and having already won the 2020 PGA Championship and the 2021 British Open, it’s hard to criticize Collin Morikawa’s game too much. Put a 5-iron in his hands and Morikawa is money (he ranks fifth on the PGA Tour in strokes gained approach the green and was No. 1 last season), but kryptonite for this Superman is putting. Give him a putt four to eight feet from the hole and statistically, he’s one of the worst on Tour (making 66.41 percent and ranking 154th).
But so far this week at the U.S. Open, on some of the trickiest greens the players will face all season, Morikawa’s putting is holding up. It’s a big reason why he has shot 69-66 and is at the top of the leaderboard heading into the weekend. And part of that success may be due to his new putter.
In an effort to improve his putting, Morikawa made a putter change before the start of The Memorial three weeks ago, taking out his TaylorMade TP Juno and adding a TaylorMade Spider GT Rollback.
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The two putters are very different in design. Morikawa used TaylorMade’s MyTP putter program on his smartphone to design a TP Juno, a heel-toe weighted blade, with an especially long neck then had PGA Tour reps make it for him. The Spider GT Rollback, which was released in January, is a semicircular mallet that has a chassis machined using aluminum with an 80-gram tungsten ring in the back of the head. The added weight increases the moment of inertia (MOI) and makes the club more resistant to twisting on off-center hits. It should definitely be more forgiving than TaylorMade’s blade-style putters.
Morikawa’s putter also has a grooved, Pure Roll face insert. There is urethane between the insert’s aluminum bars to soften feel, but the bars point downward at a 45-degree angle to grab the ball at impact and encourage it to roll instead of skid.
Through two rounds at The Country Club, Morikawa has made birdie putts from 9, 10, 13 and 14 feet, as well as par-saving putts from 6, 8 and 9 feet.
Morikawa’s Spider GT Rollback has a short black line extending back from the topline instead of the three long lines that come on the retail version. It’s 34.75 inches in length, as 2 degrees of loft and a 71-degree lie angle. The putter is fitted with a Super Stroke Pistol GTR Tour grip.
