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Tom Hoge captured his first PGA TOUR victory Sunday at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, standing strong down the stretch against the likes of former FedExCup champions Patrick Cantlay and Jordan Spieth. It was a long-awaited win for the TCU product and North Dakota native, coming in his 203rd career start. Recent changes to both his swing and equipment have clearly paid off for Hoge, who moved to No. 2 in the FedExCup. His win came just two weeks after a runner-up in The American Express. A putter switch quickly paid dividends, as last week’s victory was punctuated by a 20-foot birdie putt on the 71st hole. Hoge put the one-of-a-kind club in his bag at Pebble Beach, and the backstory of how it got there is quite incredible. Hoge was looking for a new putter a couple weeks ago at The American Express. He wanted one that could help him align more squarely to the target. According to Odyssey tour rep Joe Toulon, Hoge had a tendency to occasionally aim too far left. Hoge’s caddie, Henry Diana Jr., approached Toulon with a request to build a custom Odyssey 2-Ball for his player. “Henry thought a 2-Ball with a long line on it might be something easier for him to line up,” Toulon told GolfWRX. “He didn’t tell Tom about that conversation. I said, ‘You know what, I’ll have one made up and ready to go in case that time comes.’” The problem with the order, though, is that it had to be custom made. Hoge only plays putters with a plumber’s neck, but Odyssey doesn’t make a White Hot OG 2-Ball putter with that hosel. So, Toulon had to put an order into Odyssey headquarters for a custom version with a plumber’s neck. The order took about a week, and it got delivered during the practice days before last week’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. Upon arrival, Toulon noticed the plumber’s neck was significantly heavier than the stock hosel options on the 2-Ball, so he removed the back weight on the sole. At that point, the putter was ready for Hoge’s approval, and he tested it against his other options prior to the event. Obviously, Hoge ended up making the decision to switch into the new custom putter. And the rest is history. But there’s another fold to the story. Diana Jr., Hoge’s caddie, originally suggested the 2-Ball putter because he has a bit of history with that model himself. Back in the mid-90s, Diana Jr. was a professional golfer who, like Hoge, also struggled with aiming too far left. He was using a 1986 Dave Pelz 3-Ball putter at the time. That club was a predecessor to Odyssey’s original 2-Ball putter, which was released in 2001. Diana Jr.’s father was a tool and die maker who built golf clubs on the side. When Diana Jr. was searching for a fix to his alignment issue, his father decided to make him a 2-Ball version. The 2-Ball worked wonders for the younger Diana. Then, years later, Odyssey brought a 2-Ball putter to retail and it became a huge success. “My dad was a tinkerer and he was always forward-thinking in a lot of ways and he had great ideas,” Diana Jr. told GolfWRX. “Pelz was obviously the pioneer of it, and then [my father] tweaked it, then Odyssey obviously came out with it. But it really worked…It’s just unbelievable how full circle it went.” It was a great call by Diana Sr. to craft a prototype version of the 2-Ball back in the mid-’90s, and it was a great call by Diana Jr. to suggest the custom build for Hoge. It wasn’t just the shortest club in the bag that helped Hoge win for the first time. Changes to the longest club also paid off. “When I started helping him – the reason I started helping him – was because he didn’t drive it well enough,” Hoge’s swing instructor, Scott Hamilton, told GolfWRX. “He was at like 51% or 52% driving accuracy. He was so in front of (the golf ball). The thing that makes his iron swing so good wasn’t very beneficial for his driver. He liked to push his pelvis forward on his backswing, so he’d get so in front of it, and that just didn’t work with the driver. “We worked really hard on getting him to load and stay behind it. … He’s greatly improved his driving.” Hoge was using a Titleist TSi2 driver in early 2021 to help take advantage of its more forgiving properties compared to the lower-spinning TSi3 version. According to Van Wezenbeeck, the high MOI (moment of inertia) driver helped offset Hoge’s inconsistency (more on Titleist’s TSi drivers here). The improvements that Hamilton and Hoge made started to set in, however, and he was gaining speed. As his spin rates started to climb while using the TSi2, Van Wezenbeeck and Hoge started to explore the lower-spinning TSi3 head and more stable shafts. Hoge is hitting the ball both longer and straighter, a combination that any golfer would take. “We were kind of fighting spin with the TSi2, and the mishit wasn’t as good,” Hamilton said. “When he jumped to the TSi3, the spin and launch profile started matching up and it started really moving out there. … Last year, he was probably at like 113 or 114 (mph of swing speed), and two years ago he was like 112. … He hit one the other day like 122 or 121. So he’s ramped speed way up. His on-course speed is like 115-117 now; not always, but when he wants it, it’s in there. So that always helps.” It does indeed.

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DUBLIN, Ohio – Collin Morikawa and Patrick Cantlay will look to double down on their success at Muirfield Village. The two former winners here are tied atop the leaderboard, three clear of their nearest competitors, entering the final round of the Memorial Tournament presented by Nationwide. Morikawa’s 6-under 66 and Cantlay’s 4-under 68 on Saturday left the pair tied at 12 under par. They’ve had success at Muirfield Village, but their position atop the leaderboard is still a surprise. Defending Memorial champion Jon Rahm had seemingly built a six-shot lead after shooting 63, but then was forced to withdraw from the tournament after testing positive for COVID-19. South African Branden Grace (67) and Texan Scottie Scheffler (69) are 9 under and tied for third. Max Homa is in fifth place at 6 under after shooting 72. RELATED: Full leaderboard | Rahm withdraws from the Memorial Tournament after testing positive for COVID-19 Morikawa produced eight birdies and just two bogeys on Saturday with a near ace on the par-3 fourth hole the highlight of the round. His shot from 208 yards actually dipped down inside the hole briefly before popping out. Ironically, the same thing happened a year ago at the Workday Charity Open on the same hole. “I want to go see the replay right now. It looked pretty good from my end. It landed a lot closer than I thought, but I don’t know speed-wise how hard it was going in because it was about a foot away from the hole. That would have been really cool, but what are you going to do?” Morikawa said. “Today was really solid. The couple bogeys I had were just kind of poor bogeys. But it’s going to happen out here, especially if you’re missing the fairways. And overall, I was hitting some really quality shots. “I stuck to my game and stuck to the game plan. Out here with these soft greens you can get a little aggressive with wedges and put yourself in bad spots, but I thought I played pretty smart and I’ve got to do that tomorrow.” Cantlay’s round featured five birdies and just a lone bogey. “I thought I played really well. I made a lot of clutch putts on the front and didn’t make as many as I would have liked on the back but closed with a good one. My game’s in a good spot. I hit a lot of solid shots today and played really well. So I’m pretty pleased,” Cantlay said. “I really like this golf course and see the golf course really well, and so all the good memories I have here, it’s just easier to stand up and visualize the shot that I want to hit. It’s nice when you have that feeling around a place like I do here.” Both players are also chasing a second victory of the season with Cantlay winning THE ZOZO CHAMPIONSHIP @ SHERWOOD last fall and Morikawa saluting at the World Golf Championships-Workday Championship at The Concession. They would be the fourth multiple winner this season, joining Bryson DeChambeau, Stewart Cink and Jason Kokrak. Cantlay is currently 10th in the FedExCup and projects to take over the lead in the standings with a victory while Morikawa sits 23rd and projects inside the Comcast Business TOUR TOP 10 should he close the deal on Sunday.

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We are less than three weeks away from the PGA TOUR’s official return at the Charles Schwab Challenge. More than 90 days will have passed between the cancellation of THE PLAYERS and the TOUR’s resumption of play. When THE PLAYERS was canceled back in March, a cloud of uncertainty was hanging over golf and the world around it. Nobody knew when we would see the world’s best tee it up again, but both players and fans were certainly hoping it would be safe to do so sooner than later. We now have a clear schedule for the remainder of the year, with competition resuming 13 weeks after the THE PLAYERS was canceled. Let’s explore what impact this break might have on player performance. Needless to say, 13-week breaks are not common among PGA TOUR players. Overall, only around 2.7% of starts are made by players coming off a 13-week break. A lot can happen in that time. Back in 2000, Tiger went on a run of five wins, including three majors, in a 13-week stretch. Below is a chart showing the percentage of players in a given event, by weeks off entering the tournament. Fifty-two percent of a field played the week prior. As we might expect, there’s a clear relationship between performance and the number of weeks a player has been off. We can analyze how well players perform by comparing our estimate of their ability (how we would expect them to perform) to how they actually performed. Generally, players taking small breaks of two weeks or less are marginally better than expected, while longer breaks result in an average drop in performance of between 0.1 and 0.2 strokes per round. For context, a drop of 0.2 strokes per round is about the gap between 100th- and 135th-ranked players in the world. It’s a significant change, but not enormous. Additionally, the drop in performance after a 10-20 week gap is quite consistent across different levels of players. Top-50 players in the world are affected by a similar amount to those outside the top 50. The below bar chart shows how players performed against their expected performance after layoffs of varying lengths. Given how uncommon breaks of this length are, we can’t draw too many conclusions on who we might expect to perform well in the early weeks back. However, there are a few players who over the past five years have had multiple 10+ week gaps and performed better than expected on their return. Ryan Moore (+0.9 strokes per round) and Phil Mickelson (+0.6) top that list. The below table shows the players who have performed the best after long layoffs. Intuitively we might think that after an extended period without playing on tour that touch on the greens might be a little off, and putting would be the area to suffer. In reality, it appears to be the opposite. Taking a player’s performance in their ‘return’ event compared with their season average that year, putting is actually the only area that remains quite consistent, with the other areas all dropping by a similar amount.

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