These were the most popular putters and grips from the last PGA Tour season.
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At the end of every season, when all the year-end stats are officially in the books, Nick Kumpis of Smartline Putting beings his annual tradition: He goes through each of the winners from the year and sees, quite simply, the basics of what each of them are doing. How they grip the club, the putter they’re using.
It always provides an interesting look at what’s popular on tour, so let’s take a look his posts this year.
As you can see, when it comes the style of grip, almost 80 percent of tour winners — and nine of the top 10 in SG: Putting from last season — use a conventional, reverse overlap grip. This involves placing your trail hand below your lead hand, with the index finger of your lead hand resting on top of the pinky and ring finger of your trail hand. The claw grip is conspicuously absent this yea, and arm-lock putting isn’t represented as much, either.
“Only one arm lock with Bryson DeChambeau not winning this year,” he writes. “Always interesting to see what the best players are doing. Would have thought the alternate grips would keep increasing but not this year. Traditional grip still the King.”
A place where the tour is more evenly divided, however, is in the type of putter they use. As Kumpis outlines, the winners were relatively evenly split between blade, mallet and wingback style putters. Indeed, if you consider the latter two styles the same, they come out ahead.
“If you combine the mallet and wingback that type would have more wins with 31 total,” Kumpis writes. “So mallet type putters had more wins last year versus blade putter. Might do one more with brand of putter from the winners.
Luke Kerr-Dineen is the Game Improvement Editor at GOLF Magazine and GOLF.com. In his role he oversees the brand’s game improvement content spanning instruction, equipment, health and fitness, across all of GOLF’s multimedia platforms.
An alumni of the International Junior Golf Academy and the University of South Carolina–Beaufort golf team, where he helped them to No. 1 in the national NAIA rankings, Luke moved to New York in 2012 to pursue his Masters degree in Journalism from Columbia University. His work has also appeared in USA Today, Golf Digest, Newsweek and The Daily Beast.
