PGA TOUR equipment reps go in-depth on Mitchell's mixed bag
13 Min Read
Keith Mitchell changed his putter and wedge right before winning The Honda Classic
Mizuno staffer Keith Mitchell’s win at the 2019 Honda Classic marked his first career PGA TOUR victory, but for Mizuno, it also meant something special. Known mostly for its forged irons in recent years, Mizuno hasn’t logged a PGA TOUR victory with one of its drivers since the 2000 Masters, according to Mizuno’s Senior Club Engineer Chris Voshall.
Mitchell’s breakthrough win also came on the same week that he changed into a new TaylorMade Spider X copper putter and a new Titleist Vokey 60V prototype wedge that has a special “Marianas Trench” stamping on it. To get the details on these changes, PGATOUR.com spoke with Chris Trott, Director of Global Tours for TaylorMade, and Aaron Dill, Titleist’s Vokey Tour Rep.
Enjoy the in-depth look into Mitchell’s mixed setup with help from Voshall, Dill and Trott.
Chris Voshall speaks on Mitchell’s driver, Mizuno getting its first driver win since 2000
“We were looking back thinking our way through it, and as best as we can tell, that’s the first [win for Mizuno drivers] since the year 2000 at an early April tournament from Vijay when he was playing our 300S, literally when he won the 2000 Masters. I’m pretty sure this is the first win since that.
It’s amazing. It’s a little frustrating just because Luke [Donald] was always in and out of our driver. Jonathan Byrd was in and out of our driver. [Jeff] Overton was in and out of our driver. Actually, Stacy Lewis won some on the LPGA with it, but it’s the first actual PGA TOUR victory in way too long.
It’s funny. I feel like we’ve been putting a lot more emphasis behind drivers for the past 3-4 years. We’ve really tried to make a bigger play for them. Each one has gotten better and better and better. The frustrating thing is that nothing has clicked. There’s always been a reason that a previous one didn’t work. It ranged from well, ‘this one sits a little too upright,’ or ‘this one’s face is a little too shut,’ to ultimately, we literally landed on ‘this one’s the wrong color.’ So with this one, with the 190 drivers, we really feel like we just checked every box. I feel like we had good performance before but there were just these little nit-picky things that kept it out of people’s bags. And finally with this one, I think we didn’t miss anywhere. While I don’t think it performs anything significantly different than anything we’ve done, it’s not like the last ones were bad and this ones really good – we’ve had good drivers for awhile – it just took us building that little bit of trust with the consumers and with the TOUR players to show that this one is going to work and to trust it.
At the same time, Keith is a really cool story because as much as TOUR players don’t want to say how influenced they are by TOUR players, how numbers driven they are, that’s not always the case. It takes a certain mindset. I don’t know if it’s stubbornness… it takes a certain person to play what nobody else is playing, but he trusts what he sees on the numbers. And honestly I think that’s what held us back for a little bit for certain players. Even though we’ve beat their gamers on the course, with Trackman, on the range, we’ve beat their numbers everywhere, but there’s just that little mental thing of well, is it worth taking it out for the big money?
And Keith… all he cared about was what he saw on the course. He seemed to block out any other outside distractions. And I think it took someone like him doing that. And it’s funny, just because where he lives and the proximity to other TOUR pros, I feel like he’s rubbed off on other people. So it’s been cool.
We had Lucas Glover playing the driver as well. And when he was one-shot off [the lead], it looked like he could have been in the playoff. It could have been multiple Mizuno drivers in the playoff, which would have been crazy.
We’ve had Keith on staff for a couple years now. We actually signed him when he was on the Web.com. The funny thing about Keith is that he’s only signed for a bag and irons. His driver is not something that’s part of his contract. Of course, if he puts it in, we’ll hopefully try to take care of him a little bit, but by no means is it a required club. But it’s something that we’ve had our eyes on Keith for a while. From Web.com days, we’re in Georgia and he’s a Georgia guy. We’ve known about Keith for a little bit and we’ve followed his career. We actually re-upped him this year because we felt like he has a lot a lot of potential. He’s kind of slid under the radar of a lot of the young guys out there. But he has the right mindset, he’s got the confidence, he’s got the ball speed. He’s got all those tools, and it just felt like a matter of time before he clicked.
I know on 18 yesterday, his ball speed was 189 mph off the tee. Which, that’s moving it. Typically in testing with him, we haven’t seen it that high. I feel like there was a lot of adrenaline flowing. In a given test, we’ll see him from early in the season we’ll see him in the low 180s, to mid 180s usually when he’s really getting it moving. But that was the fastest I’ve ever seen him swinging it. And you could see him on the 18th tee, there were a couple extra waggles there as he was getting ready to just murder the ball.
…what he liked about the ST190 (driver) is that every time he hit it, it just fell slightly to the right. He’s always looking for a ball that’s going to fall with like a 3-5 yard cut on it at the end. And that’s why that driver worked for him, because if he needed to turn it over he could, but he knew with his normal swing, it’s just going to fall slightly to the right."
Chris Voshall on Mitchell playing Mizuno MP-18 blade irons, not liking to change clubs much…
“He’s played blades basically his whole career. He’s always been that guy, so MP-18 was an easy transition for him. Because he’s got so much distance, depending on the course, his bag actually varies a lot….I was down with him in December towards the end of the year right before he was getting ready to head to Hawaii to play the Sony. For that tournament, he had both a 1 iron and a 2 iron in the bag, our MP-H5. He’s the type of guy, he sees the driver as an advantage, but on a course like the Sony where you don’t really need that, he can hit that 1 iron 280 yards so he’s good with that thing.
He’s a set it and forget it guy for sure. It’s funny because, and we talked a little bit about it when I was down there with him, he is a minimized variables kind of guy. He does not like to tinker. He’s played the same shaft, the same grip, the same everything for a very long time. His iron shaft, it’s the same one he played back in college. Even the same grips he played back in college. His whole thing is, I know what it does, and I just want something that does that. He’s by no means looking for something else.
There was something different about this event all along. We always get a TOUR report from Jeff Cook. We had 15 sets of irons in play this week. As far as I can remember, that’s the most we ever had. With that, I think only 5 were on staff. So that means 10 players were playing the irons not on staff. And there are a couple additional guys who just had long irons in the bag. So we had clubs in close to 20 different players’ bags, which is really… you go back a couple years ago and you hope Luke signed up for the event or you don’t have anybody. At one point, we had four people tied for the lead late on Sunday [all playing our products]. And the interesting thing was they were playing 4 different sets of irons, too.”
Aaron Dill on Mitchell’s prototype wedge and stamping for the Honda…
“I gotta start out by saying Keith is so funny. He’s not really demanding. He’s like this super polite, appreciative guy. It’s really nice. Sometimes he’ll text me and he’ll say, ‘Hey, can I get a new 60 for next week?’
I’m like, ‘Of course.’
And he likes a specific grind, it’s a V-grind that we make, and then we have a part in the back called a channel, which is like this little part that we take out of the back to make the wedge sit closer to the ground. And he’s loved that wedge. So he texts me, and he goes, ‘Can I get one of those for next week?’
I make him one and I put it in his locker. He texts me and goes ‘Hey are you around?’
I said ‘Yea, I’ll be out on the range in a minute.’
So I go out there and he puts his arm on my shoulder, and he goes, ‘You know, Aaron, every time I ask you for one of these things this channel gets a little shallower.’ And I just kind of laughed because I knew he likes that spot on the wedge to be kind of deep.
I tell him, ‘I tell you what, I’m going to go fix it for you. Where are you going to be?’
He says, ‘I’ll be on the range.’
So I run back to the van, I make that channel even deeper, fix it all up for him, make [the wedge] the way it’s supposed to be, and I had this moment where I was like, I have to stamp something on here, this will be kind of funny. And I was like, the deepest channel in the ocean is the Marianas Trench.
So I said, “Can I stamp something on this wedge?’ I didn’t tell him what it was.
And he goes, ‘Yea, do whatever you want.’
So I stamped that on the sole with little arrows, and I just thought that was funny. So I gave it to him. I didn’t see him in the process, I just put it in his bag and I walked away.
He texts me later, and he goes, ‘You’re not going to believe it, but I holed it out with the first shot. I went to the practice area in the bunker and I holed out the first shot. This is going to be good.’
I just thought it was funny. I didn’t think for one second that he would go out and win the tournament. I mean Keith’s unbelievable, he can do it at any moment, we all know that, but I didn’t expect that to happen. But it’s just funny. We make the wedge this week, we joke about it, and he goes out and wins the tournament.
…he doesn’t change [wedges] much. He just likes fresh grooves from time-to-time so we just keep up on that. If he ever needs stuff we do it, but he’s very loyal to what we got.”
Chris Trott on Mitchell’s last minute change to a TaylorMade Spider X putter…
“It’s been an on-going project [getting a TaylorMade putter in the bag]… I hunted him down last year and he didn’t play our putter once. Then we were in Boston at the FedEx, he said to me ‘Man, I’ll get into it. I’ll get into it. Send me something in the offseason.’
I said, ‘Come on, come on.’
And he said, ‘Why are you always after me anyways?’
I said, ‘I’m always after you because I think you’re going to win. And when you win, I want you to be in our putter.’ I think he quite liked that. Basically time went on, and he put in[a Spider X putter] for the first time [at the Honda Classic]. And he said to me on Wednesday of Honda, he said, ‘I’m going to go with it this week.’
We had a couple more [Spider X putters] that were here, pre-ordered for him, but he said, ‘Look I’m going to go with this one.’
He said he loved the fact when you put this [Spider X] down, the edges of the ball are just outside of the white line, and he loved the fact that it looked like a channel, and he was pouring in. It was everything that’s in our marketing stuff, he basically quoted the marketing brief to me. So obviously our office was going to love that regardless of the result.
So he goes ahead and wins and I sent him a text message just saying, ‘I told you you were going to win. And I told you I wanted to get in your bag.’
And he just came back saying, ‘Yea baby.’
I’m so happy, it’s great. I’ve actually got two more [putters] here for him that were what we discussed last week [at the Honda Classic]. Apparently the week before last week, he worked on [putters from other companies], and that’s when he ordered these with me. And then he turned up with the one I had given him two weeks before and he just went with it. The new Lamkin grip as well, the deep etch that we’re doing, KBS shaft, it’s just a single-bend with no sightline.
I went with his [previous] gamer specs… 34.75 end of grip, 71 degrees [lie angle], 2 degrees [loft], E3 [swing weight], 551.7 grams [total weight].
I think he thought the Spider Tour from last year was a bit too big. And then when I saw the wings had gone on this [Spider X], I knew that it was going to be more up his alley. In Hawaii I spoke to him in Honolulu, and he had that [Scotty] Cameron, the blade with the two wings He said he liked it, he just felt like he couldn’t line it up. But with ours, he felt like he could line it up.
He’s ordered two [Spider X putters] in the midnight colorway. And he wanted to basically get into a darker face. He felt like he was seeing the loft and seeing the face, which I thought made sense, because a couple guys have said that. So I ordered up these gunmetal aluminum faces, and he said he wanted dots. Then he said to me. ‘Look, I’m putting so well with the one I’ve got, I’m just going to roll this.’ Which happens a lot. A lot of guys will see it and just be like, ‘I’m putting so well with what I have.’’
So yea, I’ll show him [the two new putters we made for him], but I’ll be along the lines of ‘Don’t change.’
He’s not going to change. He’ll certainly have a look at the navy and white, and maybe he’ll change that, but he won’t make any changes hopefully. Because he took a navy and white originally, and then he took the copper one that I made for him, and he said ‘I think I’m just going to run with this.’
But what a great win. He’s a baller.”