Matt Fitzpatrick has opened up about his opening round at the 2024 Masters, and was puzzled by his equipment that failed to give him the results that he wanted on Thursday. The golfer finished T15 on the leaderboard with a score of 1 under 71 after the end of the first 18 holes at Augusta National.
After completing his opening round, the 2022 US Open Champion stated that his irons had a typical spin. As quoted by Golf Monthly, Fitzpatrick said,
“Just my short irons just do not want to spin. Like they do not want to spin. So you get some that I hit and ball just goes forever…I don’t really know what to do.”
Interestingly, Matt Fitzpatrick is decently placed on the PGA Tour’s Strokes Gained: Total ranking with an average of 0.657. However, he saw a significant downfall in the opening round at Augusta National. Meanwhile, the Englishman has dropped to 56 percent in the green-in-regulation on Thursday. Earlier, in the whole 2024 season, he had 68.5 percent in this particular statistic.
Matt Fitzpatrick’s opening round at the 2024 Masters had five brilliant birdies. However, it was those four bogeys that restricted him to a 1 under 71 score on Thursday. He is set to tee off at 01:36 p.m. ET in the second round on Friday.
Why Did Matt Fitzpatrick Have An Equipment Change In The First Place?
There are times when professional golfers too miss the minute details in their equipment. Back during the 2024 Players Championship, Fitzpatrick was asked how he played so brilliantly in the opening round at TPC Sawgrass. He replied that it was all because of his driver.
Well, earlier in 2023, Matt Fitzpatrick’s team decided to put some grips into his irons to make it a little better as an experiment. As the new weighted irons seemed to have benefitted the Englishman, his team added the grips to his drivers as well. However, later in March 2023, the 29-year-old opted to remove these weights from his equipment. But he forgot to do that for his driver.
The weight of the grip remained on his driver until February 2024. When the driver’s grip was worn out, he went to Titleist for regripping it. Since the person who repaired the grip earlier added some tape to the handle, it remained until it was regripped. These tapes exceeded the maximum length.
Matt Fitzpatrick explained the weights were added to his equipment to provide him with better face rotation which would help the ball not go further left. However, once the weight exceeded, it certainly became tough for the golfer. Since the ball was drifting left even if he hit the ball with maximum power.
So, after his driver was regripped, everything became better and he felt like his old self. Fitzpatrick claimed that if this fault was not there in the first place, he might have won four tournaments instead of two.
Matt Fitzpatrick is again facing an equipment malfunction at the 2024 Masters. He can go back to finding what is wrong and figure it out before the second round at Augusta National. Now, it remains to be seen how he performs on Friday.
