[Photo: Alex Slitz]
If Wyndham Clark’s victory at the BMW Championship seemed eerily similar to his two US Open wins, it’s because it contained elements of both. Clark downed Rory McIlroy at Los Angeles Country Club in 2023 and survived frittering away a substantial lead at Shinnecock Hills earlier this year. At Bellerive Country Club, Clark did both, besting the Masters champion after squandering a five-shot 54-hole lead.
It wasn’t pretty, but Clark will take his even-par 70. However, his superior play over the first 54 holes and a timely birdie at the par-3 16th proved enough.
Tied with McIlroy, Clark struck his Titleist T200 5-iron to 17 feet and then rolled in his first putt of more than 10 feet on the day to break the deadlock. Another birdie putt at the 17th, a 13-footer, gave him some breathing room and one more on 18 capped his furious finish.
His putter is a Ping Scottsdale Tec Ally Blue Onset mallet, a club he put in play at the Masters after going through multiple putters in the first few months of the season. Clark’s putter has several strips of lead tape on the bottom of the sole to counterbalance the weight of the long, oversize Superstroke Revl Mid F/C grip. The 38-inch putter has 3 degrees of loft, a 20-degree lie angle and an estimated head weight of 400 grams, extremely heavy given most putters are in the 340- to 360-gram range. For the week Clark ranked 10th in strokes gained/putting, despite being more than 1.4 strokes worse than the field average in the final round, speaking to his proficiency with the putter the first three days.
Clark’s putter is not zero torque but rather an onset model. Onset putters are designed with the shaft near the centre line of the putter head, behind the top rail and ahead of the centre of gravity. That provides golfers with a full-face view of the ball at address and encourages more of a pulling motion instead of a push-like stroke, which Ping feels is more consistent.
This theory was first employed by Ping founder Karsten Solheim, who often used a wheelbarrow analogy to make his point. He described how much easier and more stable it was to pull a wheelbarrow over a curb than to push it.
Or to pull out a win in St Louis.
What Wyndham Clark had in the bag at the 2026 BMW Championship:
Ball: Titleist Pro V1x
Driver: TaylorMade Qi4D (Project X Titan Yellow 60 TX), 8 degrees
3-wood: Ping G440 Max, 15 degrees
5-wood: Ping G440 Max, 18 degrees
Irons (4-5): Titleist T200; (6-9): Titleist T100
Wedges: Titleist Vokey SM11 (44, 50, 54 degrees); Titleist Vokey WedgeWorks (60 degrees)
Putter: Ping Scottsdale Tec Ally Blue Onset
