Welcome to GOLF’s Fully Equipped’s weekly Tour equipment report. Each Friday of PGA Tour weeks (plus other times, if news warrants), GOLF equipment editor Jack Hirsh will run you through some of the biggest news surrounding golf clubs on Tour, including changes, tweaks and launches.
There’s no doubt, the fade has become the preferred shot shape at the upper echelons of golf.
The years of players meticulously crafting their swings to move from the inside out and hit push-draws have been replaced with power players pulling the club inside as hard as they can and hitting left-to-right peelers to retain spin and control.
Min Woo Lee, with his 124+ mph clubhead speed (fourth on the PGA Tour this season), is no exception. So why did Lee just switch into Callaway’s Eltye Triple Diamond Tour Draw driver head?
To understand why Lee, a modern power hitter who typically plays a fade, would switch into a driver head optimized to hit the ball the other way, we need to understand exactly what the Callaway Triple Diamond Tour Draw (herein referred to as the Triple Diamond TD) platform does.
The Triple Diamond head is Callaway’s Tour-inspired driver profile. It’s a slightly smaller head (450 cc), has more of a pear shape preferred by better players and, most importantly for our purposes, it has a right bias.
Lee won earlier this year at the Texas Children’s Houston Open with the Elyte Triple Diamond head, but notably, he had a wild right miss on the 70th hole, leaving the crucial tee ball in the water. He ended up making a bogey and got the win, but the right miss was the ball Lee feared, and it made him gunshy, according to Callaway Tour Content Manager Johnny Thompson. Lee fell from 5th to 102nd this season in Strokes Gained: Off-the-tee this season and hit just 55 percent of his fairways.
“With Triple Diamond, in the direction that his golf swing went. He was, he was looking up sometimes and seeing like, ‘Man, that kind of really slid and I just don’t feel like the golf swing produced that much slide,'” Thompson said. “That little doubt, which, under high-pressure situations, on those difficult golf courses they play, can be very discomforting, especially coming down the stretch.”
That’s where the Triple Diamond TD solves the problem. The Tour Draw head isn’t your typical draw-bias game improvement driver — although Callaway has a staffer, Alex Noren, who uses one of those for similar reasons.
The TD TD was introduced because Callaway found that players, specifically on lower speed tours like the PGA Tour Champions and LPGA, were setting up Triple Diamond heads to negate some of the head’s right bias. It has less face progression (the face of the driver sits behind the center of the shaft — i.e. more offset) and a different center of gravity to help encourage a straighter start line.
That turned out to be just what Lee needed.
“When they tested the Triple Diamond TD with the guys over in Europe, it was almost plug and play,” Thompson said. “Because he didn’t change his shaft. He didn’t change the length, didn’t change swing weight. The weights were even set up very similarly so that the feel of where the CG is in relation to the shaft axis — all that stuff was fairly similar.
“You could almost call it like a single variable change where they just gave a reduction of right bias.”
The new build paid immediate dividends for Lee two weeks ago at the FedEx Open de France where Lee was No. 2 in SG: Off-the-tee and T1 in driving accuracy on his way to a T5 finish.
This week in Mississippi, despite a lackluster 70-73 showing, Lee ranked inside the top-30 in SG: Off-the-tee, picking up more than a shot-and-a-half on the field.
Callaway Elyte Triple Diamond Tour Draw
Loft: 10.5˚
Cog Setting: N/S
Weights: 14 g forward, 2 g rear
Head Weight: 196 g
Shaft: Fujikura Ventus Blue 6-X
Length: 45″
Tipping: 1″
Swingweight: D3.9
Grip: Gripmaster Leather
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ALSO AVAILABLE AT: PGA TOUR Superstore, Callaway Golf
Disappearing 4-irons
First, they came for the 1-irons, then the 2s and 3s. Now, even PGA Tour pros are opting to take 4-irons out of their bags in favor of more forgiving 9-woods and hybrids.
At the Sanderson Farms Championship this week, a 12 players are going without a 4-iron, employing a high-lofted fairway wood or hybrid in its place to attack pins at the Country Club of Jackson.
Even as players opted to remove long irons, for a while it seemed like the trend would stop with 4-irons. But now Tour reps are able to adjust internal weighting of hybrids and high-lofted fairway woods to the point where they can produce any ballflight a player needs.
Many of them are replacing them with Ping 9-woods and hybrids.
“10 years ago, I would imagine there had probably been no players without a 4-iron,” Ping Tour Rep Kenton Oates told GOLF. “Now you have 12 guys not using one.”
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ALSO AVAILABLE AT: PGA Tour Superstore
Oates said, with the dramatic uptake in use of launch monitors, players are much more aware of their impact numbers and have become less steep in their angle of attack. Couple that with advances in equipment, especially the golf ball, and even pros with speed lose distance with 4-irons because they don’t spin enough. Then they have a gapping issue.
“Let’s say your 7-iron goes 190, your 6-iron is 203, your 5-iron is at 216, well, then the 4-iron is only going 220 or 223 because it’s just not staying in the air,” he said. “That player probably hits their 7-wood 255.”
That’s when a 9-wood becomes a great option because it can consistently carry 230 yards and modern advancements in weighting allow players to control trajectory better. As a bonus, it’s way more forgiving.
“It feels like you have a pitching wedge that you hit 230 yards, which you can imagine that’s a pretty good feeling to have,” Oates said.
He did give the example of a player with a high ballflight who might find a 9-wood always flies that same peak height. But that’s when you can use a 4- or 5-hybrid to fill the gap like Thriston Lawerence and Paul Petersen are doing this week.
Odyssey S2S Tri-Hot Launch
It’s that time of the year when companies are releasing new 2026 gear seemingly every week.
This week, Odyssey’s Square 2 Square Tri-Hot putters launched on all global tours and GOLF’s Jake Morrow got a look at the new designs at this week’s Epson Tour Championship.
So far, the folks at Odyssey are tight-lipped about the new technology in these putters, but from what we can see, there’s an obvious story of the weighting of these putters compared to the original Odyssey Square 2 Square.
The shaft is placed more forward with the S2S Tri-Hot and because the shaft axis of a zero torque putter must be through the CG of the putter, that mean mass must be pushed forward in these putters. That implies less onset than the original S2S, which should offer a more standard look to those coming from a traditional putter.
There appears to be a new dual-material face insert that maintains the AI Smart Face tech from the Ai-ONE line.
Lastly, a new red and black color scheme bears a striking resemblance to Xander Schauffele’s gamer.
Check this out
This section is dedicated to one cool photo we’ve snapped recently on Tour, but haven’t had a reason to share yet. For this week, check out this special TaylorMade MG4 wedge gifted to Rory McIlroy at the Travelers Championship in June to commemorate his Career Grand Slam at the Masters.
Odds and Ends
Some other gear changes and notes we’re tracking this week.
Christiaan Bezuidenhout is in PXG’s new Lightning driver (9˚) and fairway wood (15˚) that launched at the Procore. He has the UST LIN-Q White 7F5 in the driver and a Graphite Design Tour AD XC 7-X in the 3-wood … Both Hayden Buckley and Taylor Montgomery added new Titleist GT2 drivers to the bag and Titleist again had more than double the number of drivers in play (62/46%) of any other brand…. Project X launched the new Denali Frost Black and Blue wood shafts this week … Michael Thorbjornsen and Jacob Bridgeman have inserted TaylorMade’s new TP5 golf ball this week … Nicolai Hojgaard switched into a combo set of Callaway X Forged and the unreleased ’26 Apex MBs … With a 71-67 start, journeyman pro Vince Covello is off to the best 36-hole start of his PGA Tour career in his first week using Titleist’s new Pro V1x Left Dash.
3 things you should read/watch
A selection of GOLF content from the past week that may interest you.
Amari Avery: What’s in the Bag? – At this week’s Epson Tour Championship, Jake Morrow takes you through the bag of former USC star and TaylorMade athlete Amari Avery, including how she ended up in a split set of P770 and P7CB irons.
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How to fill the top end of your golf bag | Bag Builders — We look at Callaway’s three new long game options in the Apex Utility Series and see how you can use them to build out the top end of your golf bag.
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Ryder Cup 2025: Inside the golf bags of Team Europe — Take an inside look at some of the key clubs used by Team Europe on their way to winning their second Ryder Cup in a row last weekend at Bethpage Black.
Want to overhaul your bag in 2025? Find a club-fitting location near you at True Spec Golf.
