Fresh off his Pebble Beach win, Collin Morikawa admits the equipment tinkering never stops, especially when it comes to wedges and putters.
ORLANDO — Seventeen days ago, Collin Morikawa shot a Sunday 67 to beat Min Woo Lee and Sepp Straka by a shot and win the 2026 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. At 29, he has won two majors and played on the United States Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup teams. The win at Pebble Beach was his seventh, and heading into this week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational at the Bay Hill Club & Lodge, the former University of California star has more than $47 million in career earnings.
He also has a disease that afflicts weekend golfers around the world: He can’t stop tinkering with his gear.
Spend a few minutes listening to Morikawa talk about equipment and you quickly realize something. The obsession that drives a 12-handicap to pull three different putters out of the garage before a Saturday morning round is not all that different from the impulse that sends one of the best players in the world down a rabbit hole of testing. The stakes are higher, the tools are better and the feedback is more precise, but the instinct is the same.
“Yeah, I’m the worst,” Morikawa said Wednesday afternoon. “You should see my house, and you should see my conversations with the TaylorMade guys, they’re really fun,” he added, laughing at his own sarcasm. “I’m sure they hate me by now.”
The reason for the 29-year-old’s compulsion is simple. For Morikawa, feel matters, and feel is not something that can be measured on a machine like loft or weight.
“Feel’s very hard to explain to people and to club fitters and even other players because everyone’s different,” he said.
Morikawa explained while the numbers may tell one story, his hands and his eyes can tell another, and while his head may now say a club will work for him, he’ll just know it’s not right.
“So I do that a lot (of testing), but not necessarily on irons,” he said. “When I find my woods, I leave my woods alone, but wedges I tend to mess around with a lot, 60s, and putters.”
True two form, Morikawa had two 60-degree wedges in his bag on Tuesday.
Having won less than three weeks ago, you might suspect that Morikawa’s bag and setup is locked in place, and having been victorious with a TaylorMade Spider at Pebble Beach, his quest for the ideal putter would be suspended. You’d think wrong.
“So I brought up to James, who, James Holley, who has fitted nearly all of us in our Spiders,” Morikawa said. “And I was like, look, we’re going to be going on a lot faster greens, they’re going to look a lot faster, they’re going to play faster, they’re going to be baked. There’s a certain ball speed I like off the face.”
On Tuesday, Holley, who is TaylorMade’s PGA Tour rep for putters, brought Morikawa three Spiders to try ahead of this week’s tournament, each with a slightly different insert.
“The insert I’m using, I believe is the same insert as what Scottie, Rory and Tommy (use). It’s kind of the stock insert that a lot of people use in the Spiders,” Morikawa said. “And for me it’s just like, let’s just check a box.”
In classic Tour-player fashion, the testing process itself was brief. A 10-minute putting session on the practice green confirmed to Morikawa that he’s using the ideal putter. Ten minutes might sound casual to the average golfer who has spent an hour in a store trying to decide between two nearly identical mallets, but Morikawa explained that elite players tend to know very quickly whether something works.
In the end, all that tinkering led Morikawa right back where he started. The putter he had been using stayed in the bag.
“But I’m very, very happy, I’m sticking with the same one I’ve been using,” he said. “And it’s nice because it just confirms that like what I’m feeling over this putter is kind of what I’m looking for. I just wanted to test other ones to make sure that.”
If that sounds like the equipment version of checking the fridge three times to confirm there’s still no leftover pizza, well, welcome to the mind of a professional golfer.
Asked whether there will ever come a time when the experimentation stops, Morikawa didn’t hesitate.
“No,” he said. “No. Sadly not. At least not for me.”
For the TaylorMade reps that support Morikawa, that answer might inspire a groan or two. For golf nerds everywhere, it’s oddly comforting.