Wyndham Clark credits AI-crafted putter with turnaround on the greens

08/02/2024 17:45

Wyndham Clark showed great precision on the greens during his AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am success and has credited both his new Odyssey putter and work with putting coach Mike Kanski, who's the head instructor at Phil Kenyon Putting.

Clark has switched to the brand-new Odyssey Ai-One Jailbird Cruiser.

The latest product of supercomputing and machine learning, this new putter has some deep tech behind it.

For Clark the decision was based on feel off the green.

"I've got to give some credit to my team," Clark said after his historic round at Pebble.

"I worked with a guy by the name of Mike [Kanski] … just met him this week. I flew in early Sunday [to Pebble Beach], and spent about three, four hours with him. I had nine putters on the putting green, and I've been using kind of the putter that Rickie [Fowler] and I have been using. Kind of started using that last year, and I've really struggled on the greens since the U.S. Open."

Clark has opted against using a putter with any sort of alignment aid as well in an interesting choice.

"So basically I brought these putters and we resulted to changing no line on the putter," Clark explained.

"I went a little bit shorter, and I went from being conventional to cross-hand. A lot of big changes, but when you were as – when you're in a spot where I was mentally in putting, you kind of need a change, just something totally different so you couldn't complain or have those same feels that I had in previous tournaments. So yeah, a lot changed, but I think not having the line on the putter's been the biggest thing for me."

Aside from the length and removal of any alignment lines or dots from the crown, Clark’s new putter head has an artificial intelligence-designed face insert. Odyssey’s new series of Ai-One putters employs cutting-edge face inserts with different thicknesses to assist golfers gain greater forgiveness and speed control on their putters.

Clark changed more than just his putter this week at Pebble Beach. He also upgraded from Titleist’s prior TSi3 driver, which was introduced to the public in 2020, to a new Titleist TSR3, which debuted in late 2023. Clark won the Wells Fargo Championship and the US Open in 2023 with the TSi3 driver. However, since the end of 2023, he has been switching between the new TSR3 and the older TSi3. Clark settled on the TSR3, which paid off handsomely in the Pebble Beach Pro-Am.

In addition, he switched from Vokey SM9 wedges to Titleist’s new Vokey Design SM10 wedges earlier at The American Express.

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