Drive for show, putt for dough. It's the famous golf saying that every golfer has either heard or spoken about after another missed putt ruins another great day of ball-striking.

For Rico Hoey, it encapsulated his 2025 FedExCup Regular Season. Dead last in Strokes Gained: Putting, losing over 70 strokes total during the season, the 30-year-old sat outside the top 100 in the FedExCup and was in fear of losing his PGA TOUR card in just his second year on the top circuit.

But surprisingly, for someone on the edge of relegation back to the Korn Ferry Tour, no one, apart from Scottie Scheffler, was better tee-to-green on TOUR than Hoey. He ranked second to the Player of the Year in Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green and was second best on TOUR in Total Driving and Greens in Regulation — a lethal combination if said player could perform somewhat average with the flatstick.

Scheffler was familiar with that recipe, winning twice in 2023, including THE PLAYERS Championship, and then again during a nine-win year the following season, all while ranking no higher than 77th in SG: Putting. Hoey, though, could only amass two top 10s before missing the FedExCup Playoffs. From the Charles Schwab Challenge through the Regular Season-ending Wyndham Championship, a seven-tournament span, Hoey never made more than two consecutive starts with the same putter, switching out models nearly every single event.

That’s when the broomstick intervention occurred, where Hoey started working with his caddie, Bryan Martin, and putting coach Marcus Potter and to find the fix.

“We asked like Titleist and all these other companies to send broomsticks, and I show up to the house and there it is, so I'm like, I didn't think it was that bad, but I tried it out during that month off,” Hoey said at the Bank of Utah Championship during the FedExCup Fall. “I ended up breaking two course records with it within the first two weeks. I'm like, all right, I think this is it. It's been great. It's been good to me. Just going to keep working hard with it. There are some things I need to keep working on, but, yeah, it's been great.”

At the Procore Championship, the first event of the FedExCup Fall, Hoey put a Scotty Cameron Phantom 11R OC (Onset Center) Long Tour prototype in play for the first time. The putter sits at 45 inches with one degree of forward-shaft lean and three degrees of loft.

Onset Center refers to the putters’ shaft position, which is set back of the putter head’s leading edge (onset) and in line with its center of gravity (center). The Tour-validated setup minimizes torque and simplifies the putting stroke, best fit for players looking to minimize face rotation and feel a straight-back-and-through stroke.

"We had trouble getting his body lines squared up with the short putter," Potter told PGATOUR.COM." That caused the stroke to fluctuate a lot and just never allowed him to get comfortable. The long putter setup was instantly cleaner, which made him more comfortable and the stroke more repeatable.

"Good ball strikers pretty typically (not always), have a move that isn’t necessarily great for putting and or short game in general," Potter added. "That’s where the challenge lies in helping them build a stroke and setup that doesn’t interfere with their biggest strength."

Now the problem isn’t totally fixed. During the fall, only six of his 13 rounds that had strokes gained recorded resulted in positive results on the greens. But compared to just 16 of a total 65 rounds completed in the Regular Season, it’s a drastic improvement.

“To have three top 10s out of the four weeks (after switching to the broomstick putter), it's incredible for me,” Hoey shared. “So I'm really happy where I'm headed.”

From sweating on the bubble to keep his card, with improved putting, Hoey vaulted to 54th in the FedExCup Fall, and now has his sights set on Signature Events in the new year, after earning spots in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and The Genesis Invitational via the Aon Next 10.