Sports
The 3 biggest equipment changes of 2026 … so far
Six months into 2026 and the PGA Tour season is nearly over as we approach the final major of the season next week.
The year has been a great one for equipment, and that’s led to some volatility in the bags of the game’s best players. Some moves have been more consequential than others.
While changes last month like Bryson DeChambeau’s prototype TaylorMade driver and Jordan Spieth’s near putter switch stole headlines, others had lasting impacts — and two even led to major titles.
There’s still plenty of golf left this season, but take a look at some of the biggest gear switches of 2026 so far.
Rory McIlroy dabbles with cavity backs
Rory McIlroy kicked off the year strong by gaming a set of TaylorMade P7CB cavity-back irons both at TGL and his first DP World Tour starts of the season in the Middle East.
Just a month earlier at the Australian Open, McIlroy first forayed into the cavity-back long irons, the first non-blades he’s played in competition, and liked them so much he switched to the rest of the set by the weekend.
That set was still in the bag for his first TGL matches and again at the Dubai Invitational.
“If there’s help to be had, I’ll definitely take it,” McIlroy said after an opening-round 66 in Dubai in early January. “And even in Dubai at the end of last year, I hit a couple of 5-irons that I mis-struck slightly, and instead of it maybe coming up five or seven yards short, it was coming up more like 10 to 15 yards short.”
But while the early results were promising, the new cavity-back irons didn’t stick, and he was back in his custom RORS Protos by his first statestide start at Pebble Beach.
He revealed the rationale didn’t necessarily have anything to do with performance, but rather his familarity with what his blades did versus the cavity backs.
“So whatever way the weight of the head was or whether it was the blade length,” McIlroy said in February, “I’d make swings that I feel like I’d make with my blades that would be a very neutral ball flight, and then with the cavity backs, they would just like start to tail off to the right.
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“It made me feel like I could fully release like my iron shots, which is great in theory and great in practice, but then once you get on the course with a card in your hand, for so many years I’m used to feeling that like held-off position through impact, and then to go from that to trying to release it, it just was a different feel, especially under pressure or in the heat of competition,” he said. “Just didn’t feel as familiar as I wanted it to.”
Ultimately, McIlroy was gaming the RORS Protos when he won his second straight Green Jacket in April, but he seemed like he left the door open on using a cavity back iron in the future.
We’ll stay tuned on that one.
Wyndham Clark finds ‘the one’
It’s rare that a gear free agent falls in love with a club so much that they end up signing with the company that makes it, but that was a match made in heaven for Wyndham Clark and Ping’s Scottsdale TEC Ally Blue Onset putter.
Clark, newly a free agent to begin the year, started playing putter and driver roulette at the beginning of the season, trying five drivers in as many weeks to start the year and then moving on to putters.
He later joked that he was “dating” a lot of golf clubs as he explored options.
It even got to the point where Clark showed up to the Players Championship with a putter he bought at his home club’s pro shop.
But ever since Houston, he’s stuck with Ping’s Scottsdale TEC Ally Blue Onset putter and later moved to a new counterbalanced build of the head. Since then, his putting stats have returned to the all-world level that saw him win three times in nine months, including his first U.S. Open.
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Clark and Ping formalized their relationship on Wednesday of the U.S. Open week, and that deal couldn’t have been timed better as Clark won his second U.S. Open title, cementing his comeback and giving a ton of publicity for their new putter line.
McLaren debuts with big Justin Rose splash
McLaren Golf launched with much pomp and circumstance at the end of April, but no move was flashier than the announcement that Justin Rose was coming on board as both an ambassador and an investor.
Rose had won twice in the past eight months and finished top-3 at the Masters for the second straight year. At 45, Rose could have easily continued on his free agent ways, but instead he’s gone all in with the super car maker’s new venture into golf equipment.
The former World No. 1 debuted a combo set of McLaren’s Series 1 and Series 3 irons that utilize Metal Injection Molding technology at the Cadillac Championship.
“McLaren Golf has been something that’s been on the back burner for a good number of months,” Rose said at his pre-tournament press conference that week, his first comments after the announcement. “Obviously, to launch a brand out of the ground obviously has been going for a lot longer than a year. It’s something I’ve been involved with from the outset, really helping the engineering team, really testing the very first editions of the club. So yeah, I’ve been kind of working with the project for well over a year, probably.”
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Since his debut in Miami, Rose has continued to make tweaks to his iron setup and teased that more clubs are coming down the road.
In his past five events, Rose has finished outside the top-25 just once.
The author welcomes your comments at Jack.Hirsh@golf.com.
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