It was a busy week in Monterey for the 2022 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. Celebrities were prowling the grounds, professionals were getting dialed into their equipment, and GolfWRX was there inside the ropes to keep an eye on all of the important gear going into play this week.

Our Tour Report wraps up everything we saw and heard from on-site at Pebble Beach ahead of the event.

No sense wasting time, let’s dive right in. Below are the 10 most important things that happened in equipment news this week.

• Check out all of our photos from Pebble Beach here!

1) Ryan Palmer’s custom Jordans

During his practice round on Tuesday, Ryan Palmer was rocking some jaw-dropping custom Jordan 11 golf shoes with an elephant-print design on their uppers. As he revealed to GolfWRX, the shoes were actually hand-painted by Nomad Customs, who he found on Instagram.

Listen here as Palmer explains how he ended up with the shoes, what else he has in his sneaker collection, and his take on being an equipment free agent.

2) Mia Hamm’s putter dilemma

When the greatest women’s soccer player of all time showed up to the practice green at Pebble Beach on Wednesday, she had a blade-style custom Byron Morgan GSS putter in the bag. With the plumber’s neck design, however, Bettinardi rep David Kubiak noticed that her blade was opening and closing too much throughout the stroke, causing inconsistent pushes and pulls.

So, around 30 minutes prior to the AT&T putting challenge, Kubiak put her through a brief putter fitting. As it turned out, she found more stroke stability using a Bettinardi Inovai 8.0 mallet putter with a short slant neck, equipped with a custom green LA Golf graphite shaft.

She put the brand new Bettinardi into play for the putting challenge, and she’s currently using it in the AT&T Pebble Breach Pro-Am competition. Talk about a last-minute gear switch-up.

See what’s in the bag of all the celebrities here.

3) Jordan Spieth’s shaft change

Jordan Spieth is typically slow to upgrade his equipment, choosing instead to stick with what he knows. During a recent fitting session at Titleist’s Performance Institute in Oceanside, though, Spieth tried out Fujikura’s recently released Ventus Blue TR shaft in his Titleist TS2 fairway wood.

Here’s how and why the switch happened, according to Titleist tour rep J.J. Van Wezenbeeck:

“Coming from Ventus Blue, anytime they update a shaft you’re just intrigued on that, and he liked how [the Ventus TR Blue] loaded compared to the original Ventus Blue for him,” Van Wezenbeeck told GolfWRX on Tuesday. “He felt like when he mishit it, there was a little more control. So that was a good option for him…we did a little bit of internal work on the head to make sure there’s enough spin, because want to make sure his 3 wood doesn’t have too low of spin. He liked how the TR reacted on mishits where the spin didn’t drop, and it had more consistent spin from swing to swing.”

Check out the full story here.

4) Ryuji Imada’s return

Ryuji Imada hasn’t played on the PGA Tour in the United States in about 7 years, but he’s making his return this week at Pebble Beach. He also has an awesome gear setup full of old and new equipment.

While catching up with Imada on Tuesday, GolfWRX learned that Imada is still playing with a Titleist Scotty Cameron Bullseye putter that he’s had in the bag for about 15 years!

“I think I got that putter about, I wanna say at least 15 years ago,” Imada told GolfWRX. “I can’t remember where I got it, but I think I just saw one on the putting green and I started putting with it, and it felt really good. I asked to have it, and it’s been in my bag ever since. I actually have another putter that I switch to sometimes – I switch between two putters – and the other one is probably a little bit older. Every time I feel I’m not putting well, I just switch over. But yeah, the [Bullseye] putter has been good to me.”

He also has new Proto Concept C-01 blade irons in the bag, which are forged constructions built with a 25-gram titanium bar inside the heads. Thanks to the weight positioning in the heads, Imada says they’re very forgiving despite their compact size.

I’ve always used blade irons growing up, probably up until almost 30 years old,” Imada said. “They’re great looking, and surprisingly they’re very forgiving. I’d been playing cavity backs for the last 10 or 20 years, but these are probably more forgiving to me than the ones I’ve had before. I get more height with the middle irons, a little bit more spin, and they feel really good, they look good, and that’s all I can ask.”

Click here to see more photos of Imada’s equipment, and our full story of his setup.

5) Inside info on Maverick McNealy’s new training aid

In our Equipment Report on PGATOUR.com, we went deep on McNealy’s new training aid invention, and how dental equipment is helping him and Odyssey bring it to life.

“Everybody has seen those clubs that have, like, the training grip on it that shows you where to put your hands,” Toulon told GolfWRX. “And he had this thought, ‘What if I do that off of my own putter grip and make a grip off that, and every time I’m a little bit lost with my putting or my grip feels like it’s changed a little bit, I know what it needs to feel like?’ He’s obviously putting well right now, so he kind of wants to hang onto that feeling and make sure he knows exactly how things have change. It would act like a guide. It’s a good time to get a baseline.”

There’s no specific timeline on when the grip will be made, since it’s Odyssey’s first time even trying an endeavor like this, but we’ll be on the lookout for the potentially game-changing training aid design.

6) Jonas Blixt’s unique wedge

Short game guru Gabe Hjertstedt, a.k.a. “Gabe Golf,” works closely with tour players, and he’s built numerous training aids throughout the years that are used by pros and amateurs alike.

His newest offering is a 6109 “The Surgeon” wedge that Jonas Blixt has in the bag and uses for competition. When I asked Blixt why he uses the relatively obscure wedge, and what he likes about it, his response was simple.

“Just open the wedge up like you’re hitting a flop shot and lay it down on the ground,” Blixt told me, as he handed me the wedge.

When I put the wedge down on the fringe with the face wide open, the leading edge sat nearly flat on the ground. This allows Blixt to slide underneath the ball when trying to hit flop shots, even from tight lies.

Lucky for interested golfers, Gabe Golf offers the wedge to the public in his online shop.

7) The big mistake amateurs make with their driver

After catching up with Van Wezenbeeck regarding Spieth’s shaft change (as highlighted above), I asked him a broader question about driver fitting: “What’s the biggest mistake that golfers make with their driver setups?”

His answer was eye-opening:

“I think a lot of times you get a player that says, ‘I’m high spin,’ and they’re hitting it very much on the heel, and the ball is gearing up and to the right. That high spin is from contact point. That could be due to shaft length, shaft, CG location, setting, etc.

“I worked with an amateur 3 or 4 weeks ago, and I asked them why they’re in the setup they were. They said they were pretty high spin. They were spinning it around 3,000 rpm, but the setup was low loft with a stiff shaft to try and kill spin, but all it caused was him to heel strike it even more. So we went lighter, softer and with more loft, and the strike location moved center where the miss was then high toe. Their solid one went to 2500 rpm and their miss went to 2300 rpm. (Even though on paper it was a higher spin setup), we found a better strike location, so ball speed went up, spin went down, launch went up.

“That’s an easy way to find yardage; find a driver that you can hit more center that allows you to work your launch conditions way easier. Just because a shaft says low spin doesn’t mean it’s low spin if you can’t hit the center.”

The takeaway here is that it’s crucial to find a driver that helps you hit the center of the face. This often requires a full club fitting, so you can try out different shaft and head combinations until you find the setup that works best for your game. That’s what the pros do.

8) Carlton gets a lesson

This isn’t so much a gear note, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Alfonso Ribeiro, best known for his role as “Carlton” in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, was getting a lesson from none other than Sir Nick Faldo at Pebble Beach on Tuesday.

Faldo was working at length with Ribeiro on his takeaway move. Afterwards, Ribeiro proceeded to hit balls on the range for a longer time period than any other pro on the range. From my observations, Ribeiro is a grinder who isn’t afraid to put in serious time to improve his game. If he contends this week at Pebble Beach, we know why.

On the gear side of things, Ribeiro is a Ping ambassador with a bag full of Ping equipment.

9) Behind the scenes at “The Hay”

Tiger Woods and his TGR Design team recently re-designed the short course at Pebble Beach, which is now named “The Hay” in honor of original course creator Peter Hay.

On Tuesday, I took a full walking tour of the new course setup. You can check that out here. Also, keep in mind, “The Hay” is open to the public year-round for $65, and junior golfers under 12 years old play for free.

10) Nick Hardy’s custom Scotty Cameron

PGA Tour player Nick Hardy changed into a new Scotty Cameron with a unique finish this week. When Scotty Cameron tour rep Drew Page handed Hardy the putter on Monday, his eyes lit up and he immediately started showing the putter off to the people around him.

After checking out the putter for myself, I could see why he was so excited.

Hardy’s custom tour-only putter was specially heat-treated to create the blue hue on the sole and the “dots” in the back cavity. The wide-bodied blade also has a welded plumber’s neck and a milled face. Just, wow.

On that note, that’ll do it for this week’s Tour Report. We’ll be back at it next week at the 2022 Waste Management Phoenix Open for more of the latest gear news and insider insights. See you next week!

(Don’t forget to listen to our latest “Two Guys Talking Golf” podcast below, where me and Brian Knudson recap all of the week’s golf gear news and my behind-the-scenes insights!)

Check out all of our gear photos from Pebble Beach here!