20-05-2025
Are YOU playing an illegal driver, new Titleist irons, Scottie Scheffler's hot putter
Are YOU playing an illegal driver, new Titleist irons, Scottie Scheffler's hot putter Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy's drivers were deemed non-conforming. Could you be playing an illegal driver? Plus new Titleist irons hit the tour.
Among the storylines that people will remember when they look back at the 2025 PGA Championship at Quail Hollow -- along with Scottie Scheffler's win, Jon Rahm's collapse, and mud balls -- is the curfuffle surrounding driver testing that forced both Scheffler and Rory McIlroy to remove their gamers and go with new driver heads 48 hours before the season's second major.
Both pros use a TaylorMade Qi10 driver that has an adjustable hosel, which makes removing one head and attaching another a process that can be completed in less than a minute. Both pros have access to back-up drivers, and with the USGA conducting the tests on drives on Tuesday, TaylorMade and other equipment makers still had their tour vans on site at Quail Hollow, with each 18-wheeler packed with gear. So, you might think, what's the big deal about popping a new 8-degree head on for Scottoie and a new 9-degree head on for Rory?
The reality varies by player, but two things are at work in situations like this:
Tiny differences - A PGA Tour van like TaylorMade's double-decker truck has drawers filled with driver heads, iron heads, shafts, grips and every piece of gear you can imagine, and everything is measured precisely and labeled. A driver head marked 9 degrees could have a sticker on it saying "8.9" or "9.15" to indicate the tour-van-measured loft. Recreational golfers can't feel those microscopic differences and the clubs would perform identically in the hands of nearly every golfer, but pros like Scheffler and McIlroy are among the most elite golfers in the world. They can feel tiny differences, and when you are playing for millions of dollars, those differences can matter. Brands works very, very hard to create back-up drivers and equipment that are identical to a clubs pros use, but there can be tony differences between one driver and another. Which leads to ... Trust - Two weeks ago, Scheffler won the CJ Cup Byron Nelson with a score of 31 under. He hit 40 or 56 fairways (T-4 for the week) and averaged 304 yards per tee shot. Last season, using the same driver he had in the bag that week (and that was deemed non-conforming at the PGA Championship) he finished second in Strokes Gained: Off the Tee. Scottie had developed a lot of trust in that club, just as Rory, who finished fourth last year in Strokes Gained: Off the Tee and is leading the PGA Tour in that category this season, trusted the Qi10 he had in the bag. The backup drivers both players used might have matched the gamers Scheffler and McIlroy had to stop using, but trust is earned and any doubt can lead to a dip in performance.
Scheffler won his third major championship using a backup driver, while McIlroy did not perform up to his lofty standards with the new driver. Was it Rory, the club, a combination of both? He wasn't talking, so we'll never really know.
