With just 24 days as a professional golfer under his belt, Jackson Koivun can already call himself a PGA Tour winner after he blitzed the field at the 3M Open, setting the tournament scoring record and finishing ahead of the world’s current No. 1, Scottie Scheffler.
He also did it after some significant switches in his bag, a few of which flew under the radar, including new prototype irons and a 3-wood, along with his third putter change in as many months.
Koivun led the field in Strokes Gained: Approach at TPC Twin Cities, gaining a whopping 9.363 shots with his iron play. That’s double what Scheffler achieved, arguably the best hitting into the greens of this golfing generation.
So what went into building Koivun’s iron setup? Well, originally, the 21-year-old was playing Titleist’s current blade model, the 620 MB.
“I’ve used blades forever now,” Koivun shared in the Titleist Tour Report. “I just love the way they look, how they perform.”
Koivun went on to add: “They get my spin right. Some say they may be a little harder to hit, but I think it’s worth it for the performance factor of it. And I love these things. You can shape them a little more… and I think that’s so worth it to be able to use these things. I think I definitely have a creativity factor. I try to hit the ball pretty straight, but if I need to, I can take out one of these things and hit any shot I need to.”
But after just one event into his professional career, Koivun is experimenting with the tour-only “dot” head, a model that Titleist is keeping hush about.
Over the last few years, Titleist has worked with both Justin Thomas and Cameron Young to create specialized MB heads for each, tailored to their needs. For Thomas’ 621.JT irons, it was all about reducing the offset of the blade. With Young’s 631.CYs, the team focused on increased leading-edge bounce, compared to the current generation 620 MBs for better turf interaction, due to the current Players Champion’s steeper swing and more shaft lean at impact.
Could either of these techniques be used in the mystery Koivun prototypes? Potentially, and it’s not the first time their names will be mentioned in this piece. Also, from closer inspection of Koivun’s sticks, the leading edge is marginally different to the current MB.
With the proto MBs in the bag, Koivun pairs them with a custom-ground Titleist T100 4-iron, which sees plenty of the leading edge shaved off of the club. To add to the customization, Koivun uses a thin strip of lead tape in the cavity of the T100, likely to replace the weight lost from the custom grind.
Another addition to Koivun’s bag since turning pro is his 3-wood setup, with both a new head and shaft. Koivun moved into again, a tour-only option currently, with the GTS proto head that we spotted in Michael Brennan’s hands when they released earlier this spring. With the new head, Koivun also swapped out a Fujikura Ventus Black 8X for a higher-launching Graphite Design Tour AD DI-8 X.
Finally, and maybe the most interesting part of Koivun’s setup is his putter, and the journey he went through to find it.
From ending his amateur days and entering the professional space, Koivun has created quite the collection of Scotty Camerons. When GolfWRX first captured his bag, Koivun was gaming a custom Phantom T9 with a flow neck. Just a month later at the U.S. Open, he ended up using a Scotty Cameron Xperimental Prototype 10, featuring a Teryllium face insert. According to Golf Channel’s Brentley Romain, Koivun even switched between the two putters after his quarterfinal match at this year’s NCAA Championship.
But at the ISCO Championship, Koivun worked with Scotty Cameron Tour Rep Drew Page and found what he was looking for, and to no surprise, it’s a pretty familiar model on Tour. According to Page, Koivun benefited from more toe flow, and the first putter they tested was the same 9.5R gamed by, you guessed it, Young and Thomas.
