Just when blade putters were seemingly on the verge of extinction, Matt Fitzpatrick is single-handedly fighting the good fight to bring them back to relevance.
Fitzpatrick holed the winning 12-foot putt in his playoff against Scottie Scheffler at the RBC Heritage with his longtime Bettinardi BB1 Flow putter, the same blade he’s used for all four of his PGA Tour wins.
But at the end of last season, Fitzpatrick decided to go with the major trend of professional golf and switch into a new Bettinardi BB48 prototype mid-mallet. He won with that wand at the DP World Tour Championship and used it for his first four starts of the PGA Tour season in 2026.
That prototype featured a double-bend shaft, but the same unique C-groove face milling as his gamer.
But Fitzpatrick lost strokes putting in all four of those events, so he switched back to the blade that won him the 2022 U.S. Open and immediately finished second at the Players Championship before winning the following week at the Valspar.
Since going back to the BB1, Fitzpatrick has gained strokes on the greens in all four events and now has two wins, a runner-up and a T18 at the Masters. The two victories are the only two this season on the PGA Tour with a blade putter and the first two since last year’s 3M Open, when Kurt Kitayama won with a Scotty Cameron Newport 2 Tour Prototype.
Fitzpatrick’s putter features the unique C-Groove face and is essentially a replica of the Yes! Golf Tracy II, he used in college, that Bettinardi took 30 prototypes to meet the 2013 U.S. Amateur champ’s exacting eye. It’s crafted from Bettinardi’s unique Double Aged Stainless Steel (DASS), typically used in their Tour putters.
Matt Fitzpatrick’s putter specs
Bettinardi DASS BB1 Flow prototype
Length: 34″
Loft: 2.5˚
Lie: 72˚
Face: C-Groove
Neck: Flow
Bettinardi 2026 BB1 Savannah Blue PVD Putter
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ALSO AVAILABLE AT: PGA TOUR Superstore
That wasn’t the only positive news for blade fans this week. Justin Thomas, who has become one of the poster boys for the mallet movement among users of Scotty Cameron’s Phantom series, switched from his Phantom 5.5 to his Newport 2 GSS putter midway through the tournament last week.
Thomas was losing more than 6.5 strokes on the greens through the first two rounds (76-75) of his title defense at Harbour Town. He then brought the blade out for the weekend and quietly picked up 1.676 strokes putting, a more than eight-shot improvement as he finished with 70-66.
Turns out, reports of the demise of blade putters on the PGA Tour were greatly exaggerated.
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