ATLANTA — As Tommy Fleetwood prepares to defend his Tour Championship title, there’s a strong possibility he’ll do so with a different TaylorMade Spider putter than the one he wielded last year at East Lake.
Fleetwood has spent the better part of two seasons working a TaylorMade Spider, but he wasn’t always a mallet user. “He was in a blade for a very, very long time,” said TaylorMade putter rep James Holley.
That history matters when you look at the TaylorMade Spider Tour V mallet that Fleetwood has been testing this week. Compared to the Spider Tour, the Tour V has a more forward center of gravity (CG) that’s geared for arcing strokes—similar to what one might find on a blade.
A blade typically pushes the CG farther forward with a longer blade length, so Fleetwood’s latest move feels like an opportunity to get the best of both worlds: mallet forgiveness with the flow of a blade.
“The CG for him specifically this week is more of like a feel thing,” Holley said, paired with “a little bit bigger blade length” and a different sole draft than what he’d been using.
Holley credits the three variables together—CG position, sole draft and a new alignment piece—for what’s clicked in testing so far. “I think it’s the combination of kind of all three things,” he said, “that’s been at least working initially with testing that we’ve done, is a nice feel for him.”
The forward CG shift changes more than numbers on a launch monitor. “If the CG is a little bit closer to the face, it hits a little bit more of like a thump and a little bit different feel off the putter,” he said. For a player with Fleetwood’s blade background, that’s a key detail.
Of course, Fleetwood’s stroke and release pattern have shaped more than just head selection. Holley pointed to Fleetwood’s ball-striking as the throughline: He’s one of the best iron players in the world, playing a controlled draw with strong face awareness. TaylorMade has leaned into that in prior Spider builds, including the tour flow-neck version, giving him “something to work off and close the face,” which Holley said has carried over into the putter fittings as well.
While most eagle-eyed gearheads will pick up on the head change, the most visually striking piece of this week’s putter is the alignment pattern, which features 11 laser-etched lines running the length of the putter. (Fleetwood has used a similar visual in the past, but the lines only extended the length of the topline on Spider Tour.)
Holley said single alignment marks haven’t historically worked well for Fleetwood.
“Anytime you give him one singular long line, for instance, or one small line, he kind of struggles a little bit,” said Holley.
The multi-line approach gives Fleetwood a broader visual track rather than a single mark to line up perfectly, which, Holley noted, is part of why Fleetwood originally gravitated toward the Spider X with no True Path alignment, relying instead on the shape of the head and a shadow-alignment effect.
The 11-line version is new hardware, made possible by laser engraving rather than traditional milling.
“Now we can do a lot of stuff with laser that maybe we can’t necessarily do as efficiently with a regular mill,” Holley said. Reed Potter, TaylorMade’s CAD designer, developed the visual concepts before the laser version was cut, and the first design out of the laser was the one that stuck.
Whether all the work Holley and Fleetwood have done on the putter lead to him giving it the green light on Thursday remains to be seen. For now, it’s a real-time look at how TaylorMade’s tour van adapts a mallet around one player’s very specific stroke and visual history.