Meet the man behind Rory McIlroy’s Masters-winning Spider putter

As Rory McIlroy put the finishing touches on his second straight Masters win, 144 miles away, James Holley watched with the TV blaring from a TaylorMade Tour truck.

He was already on-site for this week’s RBC Heritage on Hilton Head Island, but he couldn’t miss this moment — especially since he played a part in it.

“It’s always fun to see a putter you have a little bit a part of win on Sunday,” says Holley, TaylorMade’s putter rep and the man responsible for maintaining McIlroy’s Spider putter, the same one he used to win a green jacket last year as well. “And especially in a major it’s awesome.”

Holley will be a busy man on the putting green at Harbour Town as well, but it won’t faze him. That’s basically been the case every week this season on the PGA Tour.

In a lot of ways, it’s fitting that a Spider putter won the Masters yet again. The putter family has won all but two Masters since 2020 and won three of the four majors last season. It was the winningest putter on the PGA Tour last year with 15 victories.

But the hype around the putter has hit a fever pitch to begin 2026 as pros seek to copy what is working for others. With McIlroy’s win at Augusta, that marks six wins by five different players already this season, including five of the first six events of the year.

McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler, who finished second at the Masters, account for the majority of those victories last season, but the residual effects of their success are evident in other players.

New pros are adding the putter seemingly every week, including names like Brooks Koepka and Collin Morikawa, who won with a flow neck Spider Tour X after years of waffling between putters, mostly blade models.

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“It’s definitely the hot putter and a lot of players you wouldn’t necessarily think want to try to tinker and switch into the putter have come up and we’ve built putters for them,” Holley said during an interview in March, just after Jacob Bridgeman won the Genesis Invitational with a Spider Tour. “It’s a good spot to be in.”

Holley sits firmly in the middle of all that success as TaylorMade’s putter rep, a job he’s had since the summer of 2024. In that time, Spider usage on the PGA Tour has exploded, in part led by Scheffler’s switch earlier that spring.

But just about everyone who has switched since, like Tommy Fleetwood, who got “Spidered” last spring, Holley has been the one helping them through the fitting and building process on the practice green.

Holley had aspirations of being the guy fitted for putters, not necessarily the one doing the fitting.

He was a standout junior golfer and played at San Diego State from 2013 to 2015, the same time Xander Schauffele was an Aztec. In the spring of his junior season, he captured his only collegiate victory at the WIU/Carlton Oaks Invitational.

While he was in school, he also did product testing for TaylorMade, whose headquarters are in nearby Carlsbad. That introduced him to TaylorMade Tour reps Ryan Ressa, who took care of Holley’s club needs in college, and Bucky Coe, TaylorMade’s putter rep at the time.

Holley played the mini tours and worked as an instructor on the side, but he found out that life wasn’t for him.

“I have a family, so it got kind of old,” Holley says.
”You know, making a lot of money one month and then no money the next month.”

It was around this time when Coe transitioned out of his role as TaylorMade’s Tour putter rep and posted the job on his Instagram. A lifelong putter nerd, Holley pounced on the opportunity.

“I’ve always kind of been a putter-tinker and would always jump on like the Quintic here and test a bunch of different stuff,” Holley says. “That’s probably what makes me a good tour rep but didn’t make me a good tour pro. The amount of putter knowledge I have is probably not super great for, you know, playing golf.”

He got the job on a Monday in August 2024 and flew to Memphis that evening for the first round of the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup Playoffs. The first person he was introduced to was Tommy Fleetwood, who ended up being one of his first major success stories.

At the end of 2024, Fleetwood was beginning his search for a new putter to replace his longtime Odyssey White Hot Pro 3 blade. The first try was a TaylorMade Prototype Truss Soto blade. The Truss putter line was released in 2020 and featured a unique triangular hosel that was aimed at reducing the twisting forces of the putter on mishits while retaining a traditional look.

Fleetwood had two different versions of his Truss prototype before Holley approached him in early 2025 about switching into a Spider.

“That’s the kind of art of being the rep of trying to go up to a guy who’s maybe been struggling, and if it’s the right time to ask him if he wants to try a putter or not,” Holley says. “I had been watching him putt for the last six to nine months, an hour each day during the week.”

The key, Holley says, is never pushing a move on a player. While much of his job revolves around being ready for when a curious player walks up to his bag stationed at the putting green, the real work is biding his time to know when he’s going to approach a player.

The results for Fleetwood speak for themselves. He was 84th on the PGA Tour in SG: Putting entering the RBC Heritage and was 15th at the end of the FedEx Cup Playoffs. The putter change sparked the best summer of Fleetwood’s career, culminating in his first PGA Tour win at the Tour Championship, another victory at the DP World India Championship and a career-high World Ranking (3rd).

At his breakthrough at East Lake, he led the field in putting, picking up more than eight shots over the week on the greens.

Fleetwood liked the milled True Path alignment aid on the Spider ZT, so Holley drew Sharpie lines on the top of the Spider Tour and Fleetwood liked it so much he stuck with that version until the Texas Open this season. (Holley redrew those lines by hand every few weeks, but it was worth it.)

The same success story holds true for TaylorMade’s two other top-ranked athletes. Scheffler was 143rd in SG: Putting during the 2024 season before making the switch to the Spider at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. He improved to 69th by the end of 2024 and 18th by his final start of 2025.

McIlroy was 97th in 2018, the year before he started dabbling with the Spider. In the 2019 season, when he won three times, including the Players Championship and Tour Championship, he was 25th. Last year, his first full season using the custom torched Spider Tour X, he finished in the top 10 in putting for the first time in his career.

What makes the Spider so successful at taking long-time blade users and turning them into some of the top putters on the PGA Tour?

Take it from Holley himself, who was a blade guy most of his playing career until he started using a Spider.

He was — and still is, as his Handicap Index is +5.4 — an extremely high-level player, giving him a unique perspective to pitch the Spider to Tour pros.

But the thing that makes the Spider tick, Holley says, is TaylorMade’s Pure Roll insert.

The insert is made from a blend of Surlyn and aluminium and has grooves angled at 45˚ that are supposed to help you produce immediate forward roll on your putts instead of skidding. The most common insert on Spiders on Tour is the 80/20 variant with 80 percent Surlyn and 20 percent aluminum, but Holley can also do a fully Surlyn insert to soften the feel or add more aluminum to make it more responsive.

“Any of the guys that have switched like Scottie or Tommy, they see such a big improvement inside that 20 feet,” Holley says. “Especially out on Tour, that’s where those guys make their money. Statistically, the best putter and the worst putter from 30 feet, there isn’t that big of a difference from a strokes-gained perspective.”

After Scheffler’s putter switch, he went from 151st from inside 10 feet in 2023 to 33rd last season.

That kind of statistical success is crucial for Holley, whose job is much different than a Tour rep dedicated to full swing clubs.

Early in the week on a PGA Tour practice green, the perimeter is lined with staff bags, each with dozens of putters leaned up against them, just asking to be rolled. The putter reps stand nearby, waiting to spring into action. But because of the Spider’s success, players visit Holley often, curious about what so many pro are using and winning with.

Technically, Holley’s first putter switch was McIlroy’s move to the torched Spider Tour X at the 2024 Tour Championship.

“All I did on that was punch in the email,” he jokes. “So that was the extent of the switch that I had there.”

Holley also plays a role in the week-to-week maintenance of the putters. He takes care of loft and lie checks and regrippings, like the one he did for McIlroy at Bay Hill last month, the same putter that’s now responsible for two consecutive Masters wins and potentially many more victories.

While McIlroy probably won’t change any time soon, these things have a domino effect. Not only will more players be curious to try a Spider after yet another win, but TaylorMade is launching a whole new line of Spiders on the PGA Tour this week, presumably the first step of a new retail release later this year. (From what Holley and TaylorMade are willing to divulge at this point, it doesn’t look like there’s been much of a change to the shape of the uber-successful Spider Tour or Tour X shapes, nor the Pure Roll Insert. But a new Spider Tour V and Spider Tour X are joining the fray.)

But for Holley, there’s little time to celebrate. Back on Hilton Head Island, his week just got a whole lot busier.

The author welcomes your comments at Jack.Hirsh@golf.com.

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