If you’ve been watching golf the last few weeks, maybe you’ve seen Tony Finau’s new putter. People are asking, “Just what is that thing?”
Well, that thing is the Caliber Golf putter, more commonly referred to as the hockey-stick putter. It was invented by two guys from Kenosha, Wisconsin, Tim Wright and his brother Chip, who grew up playing hockey in the winter and golf in the summer.
And when Finau saw the putter, he decided to put it in his bag because he was having more than the average amount of difficulty with his putting. That led to a season with a result he didn’t want. He finished 2026 at No. 98 on the FedEx points list. While that was good for the 2026 season, it’s not going to work at the end of 2027. And he may be in jeopardy for the top 100 at year's end because other players have a chance to pass him between now and the very end of the season.
“I didn't have the PGA Tour season that I wanted throughout the '26 season, but the great thing about this game with the experience that I have is any time you're playing well, it's a good time to play well,” he said at the Bank of Utah Championship. “We have golf all year round on Tour. Any time is a good time to play well. Hopefully, I start playing better at this tournament this week.”
Luckily though, Finau’s exempt through 2027 due to some past victories on the PGA Tour, but he’s not looking to stop playing now.
“I want to finish in the top 100 after the fall just to kind of secure my status and my spot,” he explained.
To do that, he knew he needed to change something, anything, with his putting.
“If you saw me putt a couple weeks ago in North Carolina, I was trying out a kind of a hockey stick style putter, and I really liked it. So, I'm going to stick with it,” he said at the Bank of Utah Championship on Wednesday.
Not only is he using a new putter, he’s also going to be conservative about his play. The reason is the lava which is found surrounding many holes at this week’s golf course, the Black Desert Resort.
“The lava is basically out of bounds. It's not like hazard,” he noted. “If you do that a couple times throughout the week, you're not going to have a chance to win the tournament.”
What Finau likes about the hockey stick putter is that it gets everything pointing to the target.
“It's not a round grip. It's literally perfectly flat, but everything, the way you put your hands on it, it all faces the exact same angle as the putter face,” he explained. “I thought that was a really cool thing, and I just think it's easier to aim.”
Finau said he’s always been good with long putts. It was the short ones that bothered him. (We all know what that’s like!)
“The closer you get to the hole, the better you have to aim,” he said about regular putters. “(With this putter) you don't have time to manipulate the face on a short putt. So, it seems to help me aim better, and that's why I put it in the bag.”
Since the Wrights played a lot of hockey, to them, the idea of the hockey stick was something kind of natural.
“Back when I was playing a lot of hockey, I could rip a slap shot over a goalie's shoulder from the blue line, but I couldn't make a four-foot putt,” Tim explained. “I came to the realization that in my stroke, the better way of holding this putter grip is by using a right hand low position to make sure that that face is square because (then) when I'm looking at the green, I can read the green.”
Once he dropped his right hand down the shaft, closer to the putter face, he saw the light and the line. The putter face was square at impact.
“The balls were rolling truer and center cup,” he said.
So, he took a putter, a Scotty Cameron 2 that he’d just recently purchased, and cut it off, and took an old hockey stick – he had plenty of broken ones in the garage – and it was like the commercial where the peanut butter jar crashes into the chunk of milk chocolate. It was a new delicious combination, for Wright at least. He knew he wasn’t the only person who had problems with short putts and was sure this was the fix.
“I started to practice a little bit with it and then ended up winning the Kenosha Country Club flight that I was assigned,” Tim recalled. “My pro said that it was conforming but every other player out there said, ‘That is a non-conforming putter.’”
Then brother Chip got on board.
“Once I got it in my hands, like holy, holy cow, oh, this is amazing,” Chip said. “So, then I'm like, ‘Tim we may have something here.’”
Chip took it to the club where he plays, and one of the assistant pros told him he could use it at the club, but he should definitely contact the USGA to get it approved.
The initial problem for the USGA in calling it a shaft was, as Tim explained, “it didn’t deflect equally on all sides.”
The Wrights thought making it out of carbon fiber might solve that issue because they thought that material wouldn’t deflect. No, said the USGA. It deflects, albeit a small amount. So, what they did to solve the situation was to call it a grip.
“The biggest question is, is that legal, and yes it took a little while to get, a couple years to be approved,” Chip noted. “It conforms to the rules of golf. That's the big, big thing that we needed to do because if we didn't get that, we weren't going to pursue this because we didn't want it to be a novel item. We wanted to be able to play legitimately on the golf course or any golf course.”
As most golfers know, when you can’t make putts like you used to, you’ll try anything. No matter what it looks like. Finau is using a custom-made Caliber putter which was inspired by hockey. If he makes it to the top 100 at season’s end, he’ll consider it a success.
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