A surprising equipment change officially went into effect on Thursday at the Sony Open. And while it’s only been one round, so far so good.

Denny McCarthy has swapped putters for the first full-field event of the 2025 PGA Tour season. Yes, that Denny McCarthy. The guy who is arguably the best putter on the planet.

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McCarthy has finished in the top four in strokes gained putting on the PGA Tour in five of the past six seasons, including finishing first in the category twice. But at the Sentry last week, McCarthy finished 55th in the stat out of a field of 59 players, prompting the 31-year-old to make a move from his trusty Scotty Cameron GoLo N5.

“I really struggled last week on the greens,” McCarthy said. “I find those greens really tricky to read last week. For some reason I like my gamer putter on fast Bermuda greens, but I struggle with them on slow Bermuda greens. These are a little slower again this week.”

But it wasn’t just one poor performance that led to the swap to another Scotty Cameron model.

“I’ve just kind of been struggling looking down at my putter,” McCarthy added. “It just hasn’t felt right lately. I don’t know what’s been going on, but it just hasn’t looked great to my eye the last couple months. I’ve been fighting it. So after last week, I kind of had determined that I wanted to change this week, just something different to look at, and I really liked how this one felt. I went through a couple different putters trying them on the green, and landed on this one and it feels pretty good.”

Listen more to McCarthy’s reasoning here:

After an un-Denny McCarthy putting week at The Sentry, Denny felt he had to change things up…

145′ of made putts later, including a closing birdie, on Thursday @SonyOpenHawaii, he tells Myan Patel what he saw with the new flatstick:@_dennymccarthy | @ScottyCameron | @PGATOUR pic.twitter.com/OIDecRlElk

— SiriusXM PGA TOUR Radio (@SiriusXMPGATOUR) January 10, 2025

It seems like a bold move, but it’s working so far. On Thursday, McCarthy was fifth out of 143 players in strokes gained putting, shooting a bogey-free 64 to grab a share of the Day 1 lead with Harry Hall, Adam Schenk, Eric Cole, Paul Peterson and Tom Hoge.

“It feels good on the practice green. You never know how it’s going to be when you take it into tournament play,” McCarthy said. “So that little downhill little left-to-right six-footer got my day going, and just kind of felt comfortable from there on out.”

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This article was originally published on golfdigest.com