Robert Garrigus has converted from the PGA Tour's shortest putter to a long baton (Photo: PGATour.com)
With all the talk about long putters, news of one recent convert to the dark side came as something of a surprise. Robert Garrigus, previously known for using the shortest flat stick on the PGA Tour — a 28.5-inch bat that looked like a kid’s toy in the hands of the 5-foot, 11-inch golfer — switched to a considerably longer model to start out his 2012 season.
Garrigus replaced his trusty Titleist Scotty Cameron Studio Select Newport Squareback with a Titleist Scotty Cameron Big Sur S putter. He wielded the 46-incher with success in his first tourney of the year (a T2 at last month’s Humana Challenge). The putter will be available in May at a suggested retail price of $375.
“I would have never in a million years been like, ‘oh, I think I need to go to a belly putter,’” Garrigus said. “I putted with a few different styles, the belly, I tried the chest, and the chest ended up being perfect. It was 46 inches, which is three inches shorter — kind of fitting, because my other putter was about seven inches shorter than everybody else’s. But I started rolling it, I started getting confident with it, and about five or six days before I came out [to Humana], I found the perfect grip for my putting stroke, and it took all the tension out of it.
“Man, I tell you what,” Garrigus said, “I haven’t rolled it this good in quite a long time.”
We’ll have to wait and see if Garrigus sticks with the big hammer. He missed the cuts at both tournaments after Humana — Farmers Insurance Open and Phoenix Open — and needed 30 putts to post a 2-under in Thursday’s opening round of the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am.
