Jordan Spieth tests golf’s most controversial putting stroke
When sportscaster Kay Adams asked Jordan Spieth to address a hot-button topic on his “Up & Adams” podcast at the Players Championship on Wednesday, he looked and sounded like a witness being cross-examined on the stand.
“Can you tell me what I need to know about this attachment?” Kay asked sitting at the desk across from him. “Akshay wins API. Is this OK? Is this wrong? Should putters be short? Shouldn’t long putters be a thing?”
Kay was talking about Akshay Bhatia, who won the Arnold Palmer Invitational last week with a 50-inch broomstick putter and an oh-so-close-to-anchoring technique where he moves the butt of his putter inside his chest whisper; pressing the club in the middle His chest will be strengthened, which was closed by the governing bodies in 2016, but Bhatia is not focused. The problem is that there is so little space between her hips and buttocks that, with the naked eye, it is difficult to see the existing gap, which has led fans on social media not only to question Bhatia’s style but to accuse her of cheating.
When the peanut gallery made those allegations during a Pebble Beach event earlier this year, Bhatia wrote on Instagram, “Not sure. About 2 inches missing from my chest haha.” On Monday, after a fresh wave of skepticism directed at Bhatia, PGA Tour winner Michael Kim came to Bhatia’s defense, writing in X, “It’s funny to me that Akshay anchoring is a thing. Personally, it’s not that close. This is not a concern of the players.”
Still, not many experts have been asked on the record about Bhatia’s approach, so when Kay posed the question to Spieth, who sits on the Tour’s Player Advisory Council, you could sense he was choosing his words as carefully as he might choose a club on the 12th tee at Augusta National, albeit without caddy advisor Michael Greller.
“Um…” Spieth began as he and Kay reviewed video of Bhatia’s stroke. “This, uh…”
But soon, Spieth left.
“There’s skill in it,” Spieth said. “If it was that easy to do and it made everybody better, everybody would be doing it. … He’s been doing it for a long time. Most people have done it. [have been].”
Bhatia, 24, actually hadn’t used a broomstick for that long. After struggling on the greens early in his professional career, he consulted with several long putter reformers, including Lucas Glover. In the fall of 2023, Bhatia made a move. “We had an opportunity to switch to the broomstick, and I talked to a few players about it, and they gave me good advice, just what to work on,” Bhatia said at the 2024 Masters. “I made a promise to myself that I would take at least six months to try this putter, regardless of how it goes, and so far my numbers have gone up a lot.”
In the 2022-23 season, Bhatia finished 183rd in SG: Ranking. In both 2024 and 2025, he finished in the top 40 in the division. This season, he is currently ranked 12th, helped in part by his incredible week in the hot spots at Bay Hill. Bhatia’s combined 16.3 strokes gained on the greens was the best performance by a Tour winner in the ShotLink era, which began in 1983.
Bhatia, of course, is not the first professional to be considered for wielding the broomstick. Big winners Adam Scott and Bernhard Langer also heard it from critics. But Bathiya is something one of the few professionals to accept a long putter. Couple that fact with his much improved putting and now his third tour win and he becomes an easy target for doubters and traditionalists alike.
So, where does Spieth stand among the sweepers overall?
Pushed by Kay for his opinion on Wednesday, he said: “I’d like the putter to be the shortest club in your bag, because it’s the shortest club in my bag, and I believe it forces more skill. It uses your hands a lot, so you have to be more, kind of athletic and deal with things that come up a little bit.”
Tiger Woods said the same in 2012, four years before the law was enacted. “I believe it’s the art of controlling the body and the club and swinging the pendulum,” Woods said of his distaste for so-called “belly” putters. “I believe that it should be played like that.
However you feel about the broomsticks, reasonable minds would agree that at least the optics of Bhatia’s approach are problematic. But that’s not in Bhatia’s solution – that’s for the referees whose job it is to remove the gray areas from the rule book, especially if those gray areas cause fans to unfairly question the integrity of the players.
