explains – Ultra Golfing https://ultragolfing.com Golf news & updates Wed, 29 Apr 2026 03:20:10 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 https://ultragolfing.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/cropped-UG_Favicon-32x32.png explains – Ultra Golfing https://ultragolfing.com 32 32 Justin Rose explains his McLaren Golf move: ‘I’ve learned so much’ https://ultragolfing.com/justin-rose-explains-his-mclaren-golf-move-ive-learned-so-much/ https://ultragolfing.com/justin-rose-explains-his-mclaren-golf-move-ive-learned-so-much/#respond Wed, 29 Apr 2026 03:20:10 +0000 https://ultragolfing.com/justin-rose-explains-his-mclaren-golf-move-ive-learned-so-much/

As he stares down his 46th birthday this summer, Justin Rose is the oldest player in the Official World Golf Rankings top 50 — and that experience isn’t lost on him.

In fact, his past experience is part of the reason he feels so comfortable becoming an investor in McLaren Golf, the new venture of the F1 and Supercar juggernaut.

Rose was announced as the company’s first global ambassador on Monday at this week’s Cadillac Championship in Miami. On Tuesday, at a pre-tournament press conference, he was asked about the new partnership, with the brand is set to officially announce its new clubs at an event on Wednesday.

“McLaren Golf has been something that’s been on the back burner for a good number of months,” Rose said Tuesday at his pre-tournament press conference, his first comments since the announcement. “Obviously, to launch a brand out of the ground obviously has been going for a lot longer than a year. It’s something I’ve been involved with from the outset, really helping the engineering team, really testing the very first editions of the club. So yeah, I’ve been kind of working with the project for well over a year, probably.”

Rose himself brought up his past experience with making equipment changes. After spending the first 20 years of his career with TaylorMade Golf, he shocked the golf world when, at the beginning of the 2019 season and as the reigning World No. 1, he left the company to sign with Honma.

Although Rose won early that season at Torrey Pines — like he did this year — the partnership quickly soured and all of the Honma clubs were out of his bag by early 2020. Both parties exited the deal shortly thereafter.

Justin Rose and McLaren Golf.

Justin Rose becomes McLaren Golf’s first global ambassador, investor


By:

Jack Hirsh



Since then, Rose has been a gear-free agent and one who tinkers frequently from using lead tape on his driver shaft to using split brand set of irons or gaming seven-year-old fairway woods.

On Tuesday, Rose was asked if that freedom was worth giving up given how well he has played of late, winning twice on the PGA Tour since last August and finishing in the top-3 in the last two Masters.

Without being directly asked about it, Rose brought up the 2019 situation with Honma.

“From my point of view, no, I’m actually looking at what can be better. I’m looking to mitigate risk,” Rose said. “Yeah, I’ve done this once before as well in 2019, obviously, and I kind of learned a lot from that process. So I feel a bit better place now to kind of go down this path.

“I think yeah, I think there’s some best practices that we’re kind of, we’ve sort of put into development really that I think are giving me what I feel are a fantastic set of golf clubs. I’m looking at some of the performance data that I’m getting on the range and places like that and outperforming what I have.”

The main differences between 2019 and now are that Rose isn’t signing on with an established brand looking to push into a new market. McLaren is starting their golf business from scratch, and Rose has been along from the start. That’s why he’s also not just an ambassador; he’s an investor in the company.

He added that while he enjoyed his years as a free agent, he didn’t think what he was playing currently was the best thing for him, but he was able to form ideas about what exactly he needed.

“I think when you’re not with an equipment manufacturer, there’s a little bit of temptation just to bounce around anyway, there’s so many good options out there,” Rose said. “But at the same time, I’ve learned so much from being brand agnostic for a while that I kind of have my own preference list now. I feel like I’m in an environment where I can take all my preferences to one place where they can execute on that for me.”

For now, Rose confirmed the company’s initial offering will be two sets of irons, a blade and a cavity-back, which Rose was still contemplating the exact makeup of his set this week in Miami. He acknowledged that there will still be some growing pains as he puts the clubs in competition for the first time.

“Obviously, there’s going to be a refinement process,” he said. “You can test all you want, you got to get the clubs in play, and there’s going to be little mini situations out there, different lies, all sorts of things, just getting comfortable. But in the long-term, no, I don’t see there being an issue at all.”

But this will just be the beginning and he looks forward to building out a complete bag with McLaren.

“I got lots of ideas on every part of the game,” he added. “This is a good place for me to be able to put my ideas down and let the smart engineers go figure it out. But yeah, it’s a fun process to think of it all.”



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]]> https://ultragolfing.com/justin-rose-explains-his-mclaren-golf-move-ive-learned-so-much/feed/ 0 Collin Morikawa explains why he keeps testing putters at Arnold Palmer https://ultragolfing.com/collin-morikawa-explains-why-he-keeps-testing-putters-at-arnold-palmer/ https://ultragolfing.com/collin-morikawa-explains-why-he-keeps-testing-putters-at-arnold-palmer/#respond Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:58:22 +0000 https://ultragolfing.com/collin-morikawa-explains-why-he-keeps-testing-putters-at-arnold-palmer/

Fresh off his Pebble Beach win, Collin Morikawa admits the equipment tinkering never stops, especially when it comes to wedges and putters.

ORLANDO — Seventeen days ago, Collin Morikawa shot a Sunday 67 to beat Min Woo Lee and Sepp Straka by a shot and win the 2026 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. At 29, he has won two majors and played on the United States Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup teams. The win at Pebble Beach was his seventh, and heading into this week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational at the Bay Hill Club & Lodge, the former University of California star has more than $47 million in career earnings.

He also has a disease that afflicts weekend golfers around the world: He can’t stop tinkering with his gear.

Spend a few minutes listening to Morikawa talk about equipment and you quickly realize something. The obsession that drives a 12-handicap to pull three different putters out of the garage before a Saturday morning round is not all that different from the impulse that sends one of the best players in the world down a rabbit hole of testing. The stakes are higher, the tools are better and the feedback is more precise, but the instinct is the same.

“Yeah, I’m the worst,” Morikawa said Wednesday afternoon. “You should see my house, and you should see my conversations with the TaylorMade guys, they’re really fun,” he added, laughing at his own sarcasm. “I’m sure they hate me by now.”

The reason for the 29-year-old’s compulsion is simple. For Morikawa, feel matters, and feel is not something that can be measured on a machine like loft or weight.

“Feel’s very hard to explain to people and to club fitters and even other players because everyone’s different,” he said.

Morikawa explained while the numbers may tell one story, his hands and his eyes can tell another, and while his head may now say a club will work for him, he’ll just know it’s not right.

“So I do that a lot (of testing), but not necessarily on irons,” he said. “When I find my woods, I leave my woods alone, but wedges I tend to mess around with a lot, 60s, and putters.”

True two form, Morikawa had two 60-degree wedges in his bag on Tuesday.

Having won less than three weeks ago, you might suspect that Morikawa’s bag and setup is locked in place, and having been victorious with a TaylorMade Spider at Pebble Beach, his quest for the ideal putter would be suspended. You’d think wrong.

“So I brought up to James, who, James Holley, who has fitted nearly all of us in our Spiders,” Morikawa said. “And I was like, look, we’re going to be going on a lot faster greens, they’re going to look a lot faster, they’re going to play faster, they’re going to be baked. There’s a certain ball speed I like off the face.”

On Tuesday, Holley, who is TaylorMade’s PGA Tour rep for putters, brought Morikawa three Spiders to try ahead of this week’s tournament, each with a slightly different insert.

“The insert I’m using, I believe is the same insert as what Scottie, Rory and Tommy (use). It’s kind of the stock insert that a lot of people use in the Spiders,” Morikawa said. “And for me it’s just like, let’s just check a box.”

In classic Tour-player fashion, the testing process itself was brief. A 10-minute putting session on the practice green confirmed to Morikawa that he’s using the ideal putter. Ten minutes might sound casual to the average golfer who has spent an hour in a store trying to decide between two nearly identical mallets, but Morikawa explained that elite players tend to know very quickly whether something works.

In the end, all that tinkering led Morikawa right back where he started. The putter he had been using stayed in the bag.

“But I’m very, very happy, I’m sticking with the same one I’ve been using,” he said. “And it’s nice because it just confirms that like what I’m feeling over this putter is kind of what I’m looking for. I just wanted to test other ones to make sure that.”

If that sounds like the equipment version of checking the fridge three times to confirm there’s still no leftover pizza, well, welcome to the mind of a professional golfer.

Asked whether there will ever come a time when the experimentation stops, Morikawa didn’t hesitate.

“No,” he said. “No. Sadly not. At least not for me.”

For the TaylorMade reps that support Morikawa, that answer might inspire a groan or two. For golf nerds everywhere, it’s oddly comforting.



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]]> https://ultragolfing.com/collin-morikawa-explains-why-he-keeps-testing-putters-at-arnold-palmer/feed/ 0 Scottie Scheffler 7-wood explains why TaylorMade skipped a 5-wood https://ultragolfing.com/scottie-scheffler-7-wood-explains-why-taylormade-skipped-a-5-wood/ https://ultragolfing.com/scottie-scheffler-7-wood-explains-why-taylormade-skipped-a-5-wood/#respond Sun, 08 Feb 2026 01:14:19 +0000 https://ultragolfing.com/scottie-scheffler-7-wood-explains-why-taylormade-skipped-a-5-wood/

Scheffler’s new 7-wood is a precision gapping club built to hit one number consistently and with a specific flight.

Scottie Scheffler won the American Express, but not because he added a 7-wood to his bag. However, the fact that he won with it tells you almost everything you need to know about how the best player in the world thinks about equipment.

Scheffler has used a 7-wood before, so the Texan wasn’t hopping on a trend or suddenly embracing a “higher, softer” club for no specific reason. Scheffler’s Qi4D 7-wood exists for one reason: to hit a very specific carry number more often than his 3-iron could, without creating new problems elsewhere in the bag.

And that’s the part that matters.

For Scheffler, the target was a reliable 240-yard carry. According to TaylorMade, his 3-iron could get there, but not every time, and not always with the launch and spin he wanted. A standard 5-wood, however, was never really an option because Scheffler’s 3-wood is built shorter-than-standard to control distance. That means a traditional 5-wood would fly too far and create gapping issue.

Why not use the adjustable hosel and just add loft to a 5-wood? While it seems like the obvious solution, but according to TaylorMade, adding loft to a 5-wood to slow it down would also close the face, making it appear to point left at address and create a draw bias that Scheffler doesn’t want.

So TaylorMade’s PGA Tour reps did something more interesting. They took a Qi4D 7-wood head with 21 degrees of loft and built it closer to the specifications of 5-wood. The lie angle was adjusted to be more upright to help it sit square. The ultra-stiff Ventus Black 9X tipped aggressively and the club’s finished length was made shorter than standard. The swingweight is also heavier than a typical 7-wood. The result is a club that has the speed and stability characteristics of a stronger-lofted fairway wood, but launches higher and spins more like a true 7-wood. Scheffler’s “high one” launches around 15 degrees, spins north of 5,000 RPM and carries about 245 yards at roughly 160 mph ball speed.

That combination is the point. Predictable height and spin to a predictable number.

The takeaway for club players is this: Scheffler didn’t ask for a 7-wood. He asked for a number. TaylorMade simply used the head that allowed them to hit it without compromising the rest of the set. The club is a tool designed to solve a problem or produce a specific shot.

And in classic Scheffler fashion, he didn’t overthink it once it worked. He put the club in play, leaned on his strengths, gained nearly three strokes off the tee, hit almost 82 percent of greens at the American Express and walked away with his 20th PGA Tour win.

At this level, equipment isn’t about chasing distance or trends. It’s about solving one small problem before it becomes a big one. Scheffler’s 7-wood does exactly that, and nothing more.

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