With three straight winners using long putters, the PGA Tour is starting to resemble the Champions Tour. And with youthful, long-hitting, short putter-wielding Fred Couples winning his first over-50 major on Sunday in the Senior Players Championship, the Champions Tour is starting to resemble the PGA. It was a day of mistaken identity as 26-year-old Webb Simpson, using a Ping Craz-E belly putter, won the Wyndham Championship. The high-tech contraption helped Simpson win for the first time on the PGA Tour.
He joins long-putter converts Adam Scott, 31, who captured the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational two weeks ago, and Keegan Bradley, 25, who won the PGA Championship last week.
Scott went to the long putter the old fashioned way — after years of struggling on the greens. But Simpson and Bradley are different. They’ve taken to the long putter early in their respective careers, a sign that the much-debated instrument is here to stay.
Now it is up to the USGA to determine whether long putters give players an unfair advantage.
– Kevin Dunleavy
