The last few months have taught Lucas Glover one important lesson: Success can come without notice. One day you’re struggling to get the ball in the hole, the next you’re making everything in sight. For Glover, the hole has, indeed, grown to the size of a manhole in recent weeks.
It’s a welcomed sight for someone who battled the putting yips before exploring a method that’s proven successful for several of his colleagues on Tour. Over the last several months, longer putters have enjoyed a comeback of sorts in the professional ranks. It started with Rickie Fowler switching to a 38 5/8-inch Odyssey Versa Jailbird which led to a return to form. Wyndham Clark eventually joined the trend and won the U.S. Open with a carbon copy of Fowler’s putter. Then came a victory from Keegan Bradley’s at the Travelers Championship to keep the putter front of mind.
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At the same time Jailbird was having a resurgence, Lucas Glover was contemplating a switch of his own to a method (and putter) that’s reinvigorated his game on the greens. Unable to get anything going with the wand, Glover made the decision to give the broomstick method a shot before the Memorial Tournament. (After mulling over some extreme changes, including going to a left-handed putter, a chat with Tour veteran Brad Faxon helped push him over the edge.)
“I was down to I knew I had the two weeks off before Memorial,” Glover said after his win at the FedEx St. Jude Championship. “I had some family stuff during Colonial and then I was off PGA because I wasn’t in. I made up my mind something was going to change then. I was going to try the long one and if that didn’t feel good, I was going to try left-handed. That’s how far down the road I was. Nothing I did worked, nothing I practiced worked. Brain was just fried. Ten years of dealing with it and not understanding it and not realizing or not comprehending how it could happen that I could just lose all feelings over a 10-inch putt. It was frustrating.”
Glover was sold on the idea of trying a broomstick, but he didn’t have one in his garage. Instead of having one made from a putter at home, Glover reached out to L.A.B. Golf and requested a special Mezz.1 Max build for initial testing.
“I just ordered one and asked for Adam Scott specs from the putter rep,” he said. “I said we’re about the same height, I don’t want to know anything else and I’ll teach myself how to do this.”
The “Adam Scott specs” is code for a 45-inch broomstick build — better known as the long putter Scott used to win the 2013 Masters. Unlike a conventional putter where the hands are placed one directly above the other on the grip, Glover’s broomstick build required him to get comfortable with a different stance and split grip — meaning two separate grips on the shaft — that positioned his hands well apart from each other. Glover admitted there was an acclimation period, but it didn’t take him long to see a noticeable improvement in his stroke.
“Spent a couple days in the garage, figured out how to stand,” he said. “Took it to the practice green and spent about 10 days working on it. Took it to Memorial and putted nice. My misses weren’t that crazy, awful, yippy stroke, they were just misses. And that’s OK. So then once I figured out my tendencies with it, it became fun to kind of teach myself. I think I said it last night or yesterday was kind of that thing if you ever want a Tour player to practice more, you give them a new club because they’ve got to get used to it, figure it out. That’s kind of how it’s been. It’s been, it’s just basically a whole new motor skill, a whole new brain function because it’s so different, so out there from what I was doing.”
In addition to the longer build, Glover has seen more putts drop since moving to L.A.B. Golf’s Mezz.1 Max, a model Scott helped popularize. The multi-material head is CNC machined from a billet of 6061 aircraft aluminum and features a stainless steel midsection. The head is able to keep torque low — thereby reducing unwanted twisting at impact — thanks to 16 individual sole weights positioned along the wings that stabilize the head throughout the stroke.
The Mezz.1 Max has played a key role in a career resurgence for Glover this season, who won for the second time in his last two starts at the FedEx St. Jude Championship. Along with Glover, other L.A.B. Golf putter users have seen success in recent weeks as well. During the Wyndham Championship, four of the top-7 wielded a L.A.B. putter, including Glover and Scott, a sign that things are looking up for L.A.B. on Tour.
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