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Rory McIlroy didn’t need to change putters at the 2024 Tour Championship. With $25 million up for grabs in Atlanta, it would have seemed ludicrous for anyone in the field to shake things up at the conclusion of the FedEx Cup playoffs. But McIlroy went ahead and did it anyway.
In fairness, the change wasn’t all that drastic. McIlroy simply opted for a different finish on his TaylorMade Spider Tour X after being presented different looks by TaylorMade tour reps at East Lake.
Asked why he made the cosmetic change late in the season, McIlroy said there was no rhyme or reason for the switch. He simply thought the unique torched finish “looked really cool.” The testing process consisted of McIlroy hitting a few putts with it on the practice green and giving it the green light.
“It’s how I end up in a lot of things, I just stumble upon them,” McIlroy said on Wednesday at the Genesis Invitational. “It’s not really intentional.”
So why are we highlighting a putter McIlroy’s been using since late August? Because McIlroy remains the only pro on tour using a Spider with the torched finish. It might not seem like a big deal, but even one of the best players on the planet admitted it’s always special to be one of a kind.
“It’s sort of nice that you’re using a putter no one else has either,” he said.
When McIlroy signed with TaylorMade in 2017, he was the first staffer to receive a set of prototype blades bearing his “Rors” nickname on the muscle pad, so this is familiar gear territory for the four-time major winner. Funny enough, the irons still reside in his bag nearly eight years later.
TaylorMade tour rep Bucky Coe confirmed the company has done torched finishes in the past on blade putters as a way to offer a darker finish option, but McIlroy’s Spider was the first to receive the same treatment.
“For Spider, we’ve used a gunmetal finish on Spider Tour X and a black PVD on Spider Tour,” Coe said. “Those are the two options, and they take time. If someone wants something quickly, we typically do those in house. That means completely blasting the True Path out if someone wants a single-tone colour or sand blasting and torching it.”
The torched finish on McIlroy’s current putter takes roughly two hours to complete and requires the head to be sand blasted using two different grits to achieve the raw finish. From there, heat is applied to the head, via a blowtorch, to give it a rustic look. The amount of heat ultimately dictates the colours and hues on the head.
After allowing the head to cool, a single white line was added to the crown for alignment purposes. It’s a simple, clean look that turned out to be a winning combination for McIlroy, as evidenced by his first victory with the putter at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am earlier this month.
“It was just giving Rory some different looks,” Coe said. “He’d been using Spider for a long time, but we just felt the need to have some different options on the truck. We did a full sand blasted one and a couple torched ones. We presented them to him to test and that one was a home run for him.”
As for the possibility of TaylorMade bringing the torched finish to retail, it remains unclear if even a limited run is in the cards. For the moment, McIlroy’s the only one wielding the custom wand on tour.
