It’s a feeling all too many of us have encountered on the golf course; Nico Echavarria was running out of golf balls.
Luckily for Echavarria, who earned his debut PGA Tour win at the Puerto Rico Open last year, he wasn’t playing a PGA Tour event at the time. Instead, he was playing a practice round last month with friend and fellow PGA Tour pro Tyson Alexander when he got himself into the relatable situation.
What’s unrelatable is that his solution to running out of golf balls played a part in him winning on the PGA Tour less than a month later.
Alexander started hearing word the week prior at the Procore Championship about Titleist’s new 2025 Pro V1 and Pro V1x golf balls, a sentimental release of the Tour’s most popular golf ball as it marks 25 years since its introduction. Alexander asked Titleist for a few sleeves of the new Pro V1x to test at home.
When Echavarria needed some pellets, Alexander offered him the prototypes.
“I didn’t grab balls from my house, and he had some extra and they were the new ones, and I just tried it out,” Echavarria told Titleist last week at the Shriners Children’s Open.
It didn’t take him long before he started liking what he was seeing with the new ball.
Titleist is keeping technical details of the new golf balls under wraps for now, but the Tour adoption has been swift. A handful of pros put the 2025 Pro V1 and Pro V1x in play at the Procore while Echavarria put the ’25 Pro V1x in play in his next start after his round with Alexander at the Sanderson Farms Championship. He missed the cut that week but kept the ball in play in Utah at the Black Desert Championship where he finished T11.
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“[The ‘25 Pro V1x was] maybe just the hair faster and something a touch spinner around the greens is what I felt,” Echavarria said. “It worked very well last week [at the Black Desert Championship] with altitude. I’ve struggled hitting my numbers in altitude and this was very good how the numbers were.”
At Titleist’s official PGA Tour launch of the new golf balls at the Shriners, 23 players immediately switched to one of the models. Five more players added the new balls to their bags this week in Japan at the Zozo, but the ball got its first win with Echavarria, who held off Justin Thomas with a final-round 67 to win by one shot.
A win that might not have happened, had Echavarria not run out of golf balls last month when he was practicing with Alexander. To his credit, Alexander also put the new Pro V1x in play, doing so at the Shriners.
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