Scottie Scheffler won over $21 million in prize money last season and was one of the PGA Tour’s worst putters. His driving and iron play were that good. He played in 23 events and made the cut in all of them, earning top-10 finishes in 17 to go along with two wins and two runner-up finishes. He did all that while finishing No. 162 in Strokes Gained: Putting.
Scheffler tinkered with different putters in the second half of 2023, benching his Scotty Cameron blade-style putter for a prototype TaylorMade Spider with a milled face at the end of the PGA Tour season. That didn’t work, so Scheffler played a few events with a blade made by the Olson Putter Company at the end of 2023 and in early 2024, but that didn’t work out either.
Then, in the days leading up to the Arnold Palmer Invitational in March, Scheffler switched back into a TaylorMade Spider and won, leading the field that week in Strokes Gained: Putting. The following week, he won again at the 2024 Players Championship, finishing first in Strokes Gained: Off the Tee (naturally) and 37th in Strokes Gained: Putting.
Rory McIlroy’s prophecy appeared to be coming true because, speaking with Amanda Balionis at the Genesis Invitational in February as Scheffler struggled on the greens, McIlroy had said, “I’d love to see Scottie try a mallet, but selfishly for me, Scottie does everything else so well that he’s given the rest of us a chance.”
A few days before the Masters, Golfweek talked with Andrew Oldknow, TaylorMade’s director of product creation for putters, to learn what makes Scottie Scheffler’s new Spider Tour putter unique, how it is similar to Spider Tour X putters sold at retail and more.
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TaylorMade created two prototype Spider mallet putters with milled faces for Scheffler to try at the 2023 Tour Championship. (David Dusek/Golfweek)
Golfweek: Let’s go through a progression. Towards the end of last season, Scottie Scheffler started using a TaylorMade Spider putter with a milled face. Was the goal to create a mallet that would feel like the milled blade putters that he had before but that would provide the forgiveness or stability?
Andrew Oldknow: The goal, honestly, was to give him better alignment. While centering the ball with the alignment system, we were actually trying to get that thing to perform just like a blade.
We put a massive amount of tungsten in the front of that putter. We used all aluminum in the back. We gave it a…
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