20-05-2025
Changing to a TaylorMade Spider Tour X L-Neck turned Scottie Scheffler's putting around
Changing to a TaylorMade Spider Tour X L-Neck turned Scottie Scheffler's putting around Not long ago, the world's No. 1 player was putting terribly. But after switching to a mallet for a non-obvious reason, things turned around.
Scottie Scheffler had one of the most dominant seasons the PGA Tour has ever seen last year, and he just won the 2025 PGA Championship on Sunday, so you can be forgiven if you forgot that poor putting may have cost him several more wins back in 2023 and that switching putters early last year might have been the best equipment adjustment the Texan has ever made.
In the second half of 2023, Scheffler benched the Scotty Cameron blade-style putter he had been using and tried several different flatsticks, including prototype TaylorMade Spider Tour putters designed with milled faces at the end of the PGA Tour season. None of them stayed around long, and Scheffler finished that year with a blade made by the Olson Putter Company, a boutique brand purchased by TaylorMade in 2024.
Then, before the start of the 2024 Arnold Palmer Invitational, Scheffler switched back into a TaylorMade Spider with an L-Neck hosel and won, leading the field in Strokes Gained: Putting. The next week, he won again at the Players Championship, finishing 37th in Strokes Gained: Putting.
As you can see in the chart below, while Scheffler's ballstriking has remained elite, his putting has dramatically improved.
Shop Scottie Scheffler's putter
Understandably, when most golfers think about why a mallet putter could help them on the greens, they think about forgiveness and stability, and for good reason. Mallets tend to have more perimeter weighting than traditional blades, so they resist twisting on off-center strikes more effectively. But for Scheffler, the Spider mallet provided something else he needed.
"The goal, honestly, was to give him better alignment," said Andrew Oldknow, TaylorMade's director of product creation for putters, in a recent chat with Golfweek. "While centering the ball with the alignment system, we were actually trying to get that thing to perform just like a blade."
Looking back to the testing period when Scheffler was thinking about making changes, Oldknow said, "At the time, he loved the performance of his blade, he just felt like he didn't have enough alignment out of it. True Path worked really well for him in terms of centering the ball. One of his biggest issues is that he doesn't always hit the ball center face."
By removing weight from the back of the Spider Tour X head and repositioning it forward, then adding an L-Neck hosel to create the same level of toe hang Scheffler's blade putters had created, TaylorMade was able to give the world's No. 1 player a putter with enhanced alignment that swings like the blade putters he had used all his life.
The combination has now helped Scheffler win two majors, a Players Championship and a Tour Championship in 15 months.
Shop Scottie Scheffler's putter
