Will Zalatoris is making his return to official competitive golf this week at the 2023 Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas. Zalatoris, a one-time PGA Tour winner, had been out for seven months with a back injury.
Now that he's back on the PGA Tour and healthy, Zalatoris has made a change in the weakest part of his game. Zalatoris is using a new putter this week at Albany Golf Club.
Zalatoris has gone to the long putter after struggling with a conventional length putter -- and really almost any kind of putter -- is his relatively short PGA Tour career. The Wake Forest product is an incredible ballstriker from tee to green, but he sheds strokes with the putter and has made a number of shaky-looking strokes. Some of the strokes on short putts have drawn a lot of criticism on social media.
Looking to change that, Zalatoris has gone to a long putter made by L.A.B. Golf. LAB Golf (formerly Directed Force). The model Zalatoris using is the Mezz.1 Max, which is 20 percent larger compared to the original Mezz1. The putter is designed for stability and those looking for maximum forgiveness. The putter is available in standard lengths, armlock style and as a long putter, and it retails for $560 as a custom build.
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L.A.B. in LAB Golf stands for "lie angle balance," which is a notion that a putter balanced in such a way will not naturally twist or turn via torque on its own. The benefit of lie angle balance is described as relieving a golfer of the need to manipulate their putting stroke to control the inherent twisting of putter heads. In other words, let the putter do the work.
L.A.B. Golf is the same company that produced the putter that Lucas Glover has credited with saving his career and leading him to consecutive wins on the PGA Tour this summer.
While Zalatoris struggled in the opening round with putting, so did Glover. Glover did not do well with the L.A.B. Golf putter in the first month of using it, and then he figured it out and started working well with it.