What putters did the last five Masters winners use and the stories behind their choices
There have been all manner of shapes and sizes of putters that have landed a Masters Green Jacket.
Jack Nicklaus won the ’86 Masters with an MacGregor Response while others have preferred a more traditional blade.
The previous five winners have all used very different putters and for very different reasons and here we look at how the flat sticks have ended up in each player’s bags.
2024 Scottie Scheffler – TaylorMade Spider Tour X
Scheffler’s brilliant 2024 season hinged on a change of putter in March. He would win at Bay Hill and then THE PLAYERS the following week and he then added a second Green Jacket the following month. He won nine wins in total that year including the Olympics and Tour Championship.
It’s easy to forget that he was occasionally ranking bottom of the week’s putting stats before he made the switch.
“At times I struggled lining the ball up in the middle of the face so I lined the ball up on the toe sometimes and I struggled with a tiny bit of a heel strike. And that just became kind of my miss, like if I was fighting a duck hook off the tee, I was fighting a little bit of a heel miss with the putter,’ the World No. 1 said.
“This Spider putter is really easy for me to line up,” he continued. “I don’t have to use the line on the ball. I line the putter up really well, and I line up in the middle of the face, and pretty much as simple as that. Kind of gives me just a really good visual.”
Scheffler won that 2024 Masters by four shots from Sweden’s Ludvig Aberg.
2023 Jon Rahm – Odyssey White Hot OG Rossie S
Here Odyssey tour rep Joe Toulon explains how the Rossie ended up in the Spaniard’s hands – he would win the US Open at Torrey Pines in 2021 before adding The Masters two years later.
“The Rossie was one of the putters I had made for him back in January 2021 and I could just tell, watching him look at all the putters and listening to his initial thoughts, it was all positive with that one, and he kept kind of looking back at it, so that was something I built up for him along with a couple of others.
“We kind of pieced everything together knowing that he’s not a very linear person; he doesn’t like lines on his putter, and we knew he liked the insert. He liked the speed off the face, the feel, and the roll, so we knew we were going to go with that insert. And we wanted to go back to something with an S-neck so he could feel the face rotate.
“He came into the test centre to look at putters and dial in the right one and he was in love with the Rossie and we got him on Quintic and PuttLab and made sure the numbers were good. We may have made a slight loft adjustment to help launch angle but that was it. It was pretty amazing just to see how confident and comfortable he looked with that putter in his hands. He was a completely different person on the greens.”
2022 Scottie Scheffler – Scotty Cameron Special Select Timeless Tourtype GSS Prototype
Scheffler bizarrely four-putted the 72nd green three years ago but he still had the shots in hand to win by three over Rory McIlroy (remember that holed bunker shot?).
He put it in play for his win at the WM Phoenix Open in February 2022 where he ranked second for the week in Strokes Gained: Putting (+6.49).
“He just wanted to switch things up a little bit and give himself a slightly different look heading into 2022,” Scotty Cameron Tour Rep Brad Cloke said. “Prior to visiting us in the Studio, he’d been messing around with an older Newport 2 Timeless he had at home. He’d added a bunch of lead tape to the sole to try and get it to a similar swing weight as his Super Rat. He really liked the profile but the feel wasn’t exactly where he wanted it, so we went to work on building him a new set-up with adjustable weighting.”
He played his first two events of the season with the Newport 2 Timeless tour prototype as he waited for his new Special Select Timeless Tourtype GSS – with a length of 36 ¼ inches and two 25g adjustable weights – and he later added the Arnold Palmer, Match Play and The Masters in a matter of months.
2021 Hideki Matsuyama – Scotty Cameron Newport 2 Tour Prototype
Supposedly Matsuyama has a huge collection of Scotty Cameron putters but the one that he won the Masters with only went in the bag on his previous start.
“Early on he was a Cameron fan when he was at school then got into college and our fitting studio in Hamamatsu, Japan is where he would hang out,” explained Scotty Cameron.
“It’s at a golf course but it’s a separate building and it’s a museum and gallery that was built for the Cameron stuff and the headcovers and the putters. Hideki has been coming there since he was 16 and he maybe gets the most putters made for him.
“He loves to be surprised with a new putter, he says it energises him and gets him re-focused and excited on something new. So he’s always looking for the next greatest Scotty, so I’m gonna say probably Hideki has one of the greatest collections.
“He tries everything, he’s a mallet guy, he loves mallets. He’ll switch every once in a while to something new that we give him but he’s loyal on that Newport 2 GSS with three black dots in the back.”
2020 Dustin Johnson – TaylorMade Spider Limited Itsy Bitsy
Johnson isn’t known for sticking to one putter but the Itsy Bitsy would generally make its way into the bag before the first round of a tournament. The mallet putter once belonged to his brother Austin and he asked to borrow it minutes before teeing off at the 2016 BMW Championship. Four days later he went on to win.
The American won his Masters in the November due to the global pandemic but his 20-under winning total was still remarkable. Johnson received some help from Greg Norman ahead of the 2020 Masters and it paid off with his second Major triumph.
“I try to get my hands a little bit higher so I don’t pull it. It’s kind of something that I always try to do,” he said of his putting style.
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