The flat stick has been responsible for many a rise and fall of a TOUR player. Flesch has putted well since joining PGA TOUR Champions in 2017, including ranking No. 7 in putting average in 2019 and tying for 13th in putting average for the 2020-21 super season that just concluded.
But to know Flesch is to know he is a tinkerer. He is constantly toying with clubs and heads and shafts and grips. He’ll try anything he thinks might work. If it works for a while, then doesn’t, he moves along to whatever is next.
When PGA TOUR Champions reached the American Family Insurance Championship in May, just before Flesch’s 54th birthday, he put a new putter into play – an Odyssey Arm Lock 2-Ball Ten Putter.
“I was putting cruddy and I thought, ‘What the heck, I’ll try this,'” Flesch said. “I shot 63 in the final round (the low round of the tournament by two strokes), but it was kind of crazy. All of a sudden the ball started finding the hole.
“Then I played pretty decent through the US Senior Open with the Arm Lock, but I had a bad finish there – bogey, double to drop out of the top-10. Then I just switched models of Arm Lock to a newer version and just stuck with it.”
Flesch liked that the Odyssey didn’t have lines, just the two balls on the putter head. It looked and felt cleaner to him. He called it a “less mechanical way of putting.”
With the new putter and perhaps less clutter in his head, Flesch overhauled his putting routine, too. He felt the Arm Lock allowed him to set up to the ball the same way all the time, that all he had to worry about was ball position.
“It just frees me up. I changed my routine to where I literally don’t take a practice swing over the ball,” Flesch said. “I might take one behind my ball. Otherwise I take one look behind it and go. The less time I’m over it, the better I putt. It gives me less chance to think about it when I’m over the ball. I’m just playing by feel and that’s kind of as good as it gets.”
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