Scottie Scheffler gave us a review of his driver. Here is the gist
Scottie Scheffler not playing the latest TaylorMade driver for the second year in a row may be a story now, but it won’t be for a month or so.
Scheffler surprised many by returning to his TaylorMade Qi10 driver, which has won three majors and 14 PGA Tour events, last month during his American Express debut. That was after debuting the new Qi4D at the Hero World Challenge in his previous debut in December and that month’s Golf Channel Games. Of course, he will end up winning in Palm Springs.
This week, Scheffler showed up at TPC Scottsdale on Monday and went straight to work with TaylorMade’s Adrian Reitveld and coach Randy Smith on testing the new driver. The trio, along with Caddy Ted Scott, spent several hours at the range, with several different Qi4D heads and Fujikura Ventus Black shafts looking for “the one.”
After his Friday round, in which Scheffler came back from a two-over opening day to score a six-under 65 to make the cut, he gave us a peek into the process.
“I don’t like to change as it is, and I have a driver in my bag that has won a lot of golf tournaments; he’s had a lot of success with it,” Scheffler said. “It’s one of those tough things. I’m not going to put anything in the bag unless I feel better. We’re getting very close. There’s some improvement I’ve seen in the new driver. It’s not where it needs to be to put it in the race.”
With the level of success Scheffler has had with his Qi10, it makes sense that he would want to stick with it. He said earlier this week that he is “attractive” to certain groups.
“Once you feel the club, you know, I think it’s a big part of the game, so changing clubs can be difficult,” he said on Wednesday. “Even though I have the greatest club maker in the world make a set of irons for me and measure them and check every inch of them, I have a guy at TaylorMade who takes great care of me, and I still get inconsistencies with things that I’m still getting used to.”
Reitveld, that “guy at TaylorMade,” is one of the reasons Scheffler ended up signing with TaylorMade back in 2022, in the midst of his first four-game winning streak that culminated in his first Masters.
“It was like, hey, ‘I love the equipment, love the guys I’ve been able to work with,'” Scheffler said. “Adrian is one of the first people I worked with in the company. He does everything for me. My clubs usually don’t start a tournament without him setting his eyes on it here on the road.”
That’s why both Scheffler and Reitveld are taking their time to turn Scheffler into a new driver. Are there operational reasons for doing so? Of course, even if it wasn’t, they wouldn’t bother about it.
Jack Hirsh/GOLF
But when you have a guy like Scheffler, who is in the middle of a generational streak in part because of the comfort level he has with his teams, making sure Scheffler is as comfortable as possible is the goal. Once he arrives, a new driver, any club, will go into the bag.
There is a certain level of trust Scheffler has in Reitveld and the TaylorMade team, and they have learned a lot over the years of working together. They will fix this one.
The author welcomes your comments at Jack.Hirsh@golf.com.
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