While Tommy Fleetwood is still widely regarded as one of the best players without a PGA Tour win, 2024 was another successful year for the Englishman. He picked up a win on the DP World Tour, where he ranks fifth this seaaon, and made the PGA Tour’s Tour Championship for the second-straight season after missing out three years in a row.
But the world’s 10th-ranked player saw a bit of a dip in his putting on the PGA Tour this season. During his resurgent 2023 campaign, Fleetwood was tied for 14th on the PGA Tour in Strokes Gained: Putting, gaining nearly a half shot per round, the best mark of his career, but not too much of an outlier from 2022 and 2020 when he averaged around .4 Strokes Gained on the greens and was in the top 30 on Tour.
But this past season, Fleetwood dropped to T87th in putting, gaining just .04 strokes per round, his second worst mark since 2018, when he joined the Tour.
While Fleetwood has tried different putters here and there, he’s mostly stuck with an Odyssey White Hot Pro #3 blade for most of his career, including in his win in Dubai earlier this season.
But, it looks as though Fleetwood is making a pretty big departure from his status quo as he was pictured with a new prototype TaylorMade putter in Abu Dhabi this week ahead of the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship.
Fleetwood has been on TaylorMade’s gear staff since 2021, but the seven-time DP World Tour winner hasn’t yet gamed a putter from the OEM. He revealed the putter was something he had been testing at home during the break between this week and his previous start at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship a month ago.
“It is a new TaylorMade putter that I’ve been working with at home,” he said Wednesday. “And yeah, like the guys at TaylorMade, they have done an amazing job like we spoke about, designing something like a little bit different.
“It’s felt really, really good. It was the perfect time for me to be practicing with something. It’s sort of difficult these days. I love testing like my equipment and testing things that are new and different, but it’s so difficult with the way the schedule is. The tournaments are packed in so close to each other, and there’s never not a big event or not an important event it seems.”
TaylorMade is mostly keeping details on the new putter close to the vest, but a spokesperson for the OEM said the new putter “has the characteristics of his previous gamer but utilizes the technological benefits of Pure Roll insert and Truss.”
Pure Roll is TaylorMade’s insert technology while Truss may be something only savvy gearheads recall. TaylorMade released its Truss line of putters in 2020 which featured a unique neck design to create multiple contact points along the topline to reduce head twisting at impact.
