3 Most Popular Grips on The PGA Tour (2023 Update)
A golf grip helps you maintain control over your club during and prior to the swing motion. By changing grips, you can offset your clicking difficulty and cure your swing. But to ensure your grip serves you instead of burdening you to change your swing, you need to use one manufactured for high-level performance.
Looking at the PGA Tour bags can help you find the brand worth investing in. So, what are the most popular grips on the PGA Tour?
The most popular grips on the PGA Tour are Golf Pride Tour Velvet, Golf Pride MCC, and various iterations of SuperStroke Pistol GT. The top golf grip brands are Golf Pride, SuperStroke, and Lamkin.
In this article, you will learn more about the top three brands, the players who use the grips from each one, and the most used grips made by each company. Towards the end is a short buying guide that can help you decide which grip is best for you.
Popular Golf Grip Brands on the PGA Tour
Going for the most-adopted golf grip is not going to improve your game. PGA bags are good indicators of manufacturer integrity and overall brand quality. But beyond that, you must focus on your own needs. This section puts forth three brands that you can buy grips from. The grips made by the following companies are used by Tour players.
The most popular grips on the PGA Tour are:
- Golf Pride Tour Velvet – 28 grips used on Tour.
- Golf Pride MCC – 11 grips used on Tour
- SuperStroke Pistol GT – 7 grips (different iterations) used on Tour.
Let’s look at these in more detail.
1. Golf Pride
Golf Pride has been in the golf grip business since the 1940s and was founded by Thomas L. Fawick, the inventor of the pneumatic clutch and brake. Aside from its incredible founding story, Golf Pride is popular because it accommodates the broadest set of needs among golfers and dominates the iron grip market.
Ever since the 1940s, this company has been innovating, which has earned it the special status it enjoys today. Some of its firsts include rubber grips and slip-on grips, neither of which were common when Golf Pride decided to take a risk. Today, when Pride grips take a risk, people pay attention.
Today, Golf Pride’s marketing revolves around it being the #1 grip on Tour. The company isn’t investing so much in its campaign and standing by a tagline that another grip manufacturer can steal. Pride prides itself in being the #1 grip on Tour. Then there must be something to its popularity on Tour aside from sponsorship money.
Provided the grip maker is owned by the Eaton corporation and has a significant sponsorship budget, it seems confident that even if a competitor tried to come for its #1 on Tour title by soliciting a broader range of Tour golfers, they would turn them down because of Golf Pride’s superiority.
The steep difference between Golf Pride and its competitors does reflect this as well. Golf Pride golf grips are used by 69 players on the PGA Tour. This is almost 3 times as high as the second-place grip brand’s adoption.
Among the pros using Golf Pride golf grips are Tiger Woods, Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, Patrick Cantlay, Tommy Fleetwood, and Xander Schaufelle. This is one of the most highly-ranked rosters of any golf brand’s adoption across any category.
The top 5 players in the world today, alongside an all-time great, use Golf Pride golf grips. Generally, brands that sponsor their way into Tour bags often play for breadth (get a large number of low-purse players) or concentrated rank (get a few high-ranking players).
Golf Pride being adopted by the highest ranked players and the largest number of pros on Tour speaks for its quality and versatility.
What this means for you is that if you like Rory McIlroy but are a high-handicap player with different needs, you can both use different grips from the same brand. That said, knowing which grips are used by Tour players is very important.
What Golf Pride Grips Do The Pros Use?
The following Golf Pride grips are found in Tour players’ bags:
| Golf Pride Grip | Number of Grips Used on PGA Tour |
| Golf Pride Tour Velvet | 28 |
| Golf Pride MCC | 11 |
| Golf Pride Tour Velvet Cord | 9 |
| Golf Pride Z-Grip Cord | 5 |
2. SuperStroke
While SuperStorke grips are not as widely adopted as Golf Pride, they have a unique set of patents that make some of their grip models unlike most grips on the market.
SuperStroke has been in the golf grip business since the 1990s, slightly late compared to Golf Pride but still with a significant history, research, and development.
SuperStroke dominates the putter grip market and is still the only big grip manufacturer that offers a wide range of grip sizes. Many starting golfers can improve their score-to-hole efficiency by stepping up their grip size.
However, SuperStroke’s high adoption among hobbyists has slightly stigmatized the brand in the eyes of pro-purists. Pro golf players don’t seem as eager to tout bigger SuperStroke grip on Tour.
Still, 24 players use one SuperStroke grip each. Again, this reflects on the versatility of the Golf Pride grips since multiple players use two or more grips. In contrast, SuperStroke grips are used more sparsely. The ones who use a SuperStroke grip use only one.
“That means the specific grip is more important than the brand.”
Golf Educate
In other words, if you don’t find a SuperStroke grip that serves your specific needs, don’t get the next best grip from the brand. If SuperStroke has anything to offer, it is the grip-player compatibility.
Rory McIlroy, Justin Thomas, and Xander Schauffele are among the pros using SuperStroke grips on Tour. While the SuperStroke adoption roster isn’t as ranking-packed as Golf Pride, it does overlap a little with the #1 grip on Tour.
This shows that even if SuperStroke isn’t as heavily invested in bag placements, it has the quality that some of the top-ranking Tour players can rely on.
Which SuperStroke Grips Do PGA Tour Players Use?
The superstore grips most adopted on the PGA Tour are:
| SuperStroke Grip | Number of Grips Used on PGA Tour |
| SuperStroke Pistol GT (various iterations) | 7 |
| SuperStroke Traxion Pistol GT (various iterations) | 5 |
| SuperStroke Flatso | 2 |
Even the SuperStroke models that are adopted have further iteration preference, which reemphasizes that SuperStroke doesn’t have grips that are universally better-performing, but it has specific grips that can help you perform better.
But again, it all relies on finding the grip that matches your needs, and it is possible that SuperStroke might not have what you need.
3. Lamkin
Lamkin is one of the oldest grip manufacturers, with a history dating back to the 1920s. Its rubber grips are made in China, and almost any feature offered by its competitors is seemingly offered by Lamkin.
Rubber grips? Lamkin has got them. Plus-size grips? Lamkin has them too. However, Lamkin, despite trying to be everything for everyone, isn’t as widely adopted on the Tour.
Lamkin has 8 times lower adoption numbers than the #1 grip on Tour. However, the names that have adopted it are worth paying attention to.
Earlier, I mentioned how some brands don’t spread out their bag placements across a large number of players but focus on getting their products in the bags attached to the highest-value purses.
Lamkin seems to be using this strategy because some of the names on the Tour use at least one Lamkin grip. Household names like Brendan Steele, Justin Rose, and Matt Kuchar use Lamkin grips.
Which Lamkin Grips Do The Pros Use?
The Lamkin grip models currently used on Tour are:
| Lamkin Grip | Number of Grips Used on PGA Tour |
| Lamkin Full Cord | 2 |
| Lamkin Crossline Full Cord | 2 |
| Lamkin PistolClaw | 1 |
Sidenote: Do you want to know what irons the pros use? Check out this article, What Irons Do PGA Players Use?
Golf Grip Buying Guide
Now that you know which individual grips are popular and the brands that make their way into Tour players’ bags, it is time to go over the essentials of getting a golf grip that you can be happy with.
- Use brand as an indicator of quality – Because golf is a high value-market, there is plenty of cheap stuff marked up to be sold to willing buyers. Brands with PGA Tour visibility are more reliable.
- Know your base spin rate – You should know whether you want the ball to spin more or less with a specific club.
- Pick the grip size that works for the specific club – The bigger the grip, the higher the spin rate. If a particular club drives well, but the ball slants too much, you might need an undersized grip.
- Know your base pressure – Do you grip the club too harshly? Do you apply very little pressure? Knowing this can help you get the right material.
- Pick grip material that serves you – Soft grip material is more comfortable, while firm grips will do the job with light pressure.
- Get fitted for a grip if you need to – If you’ve assessed everything and are still not confident about your grip choice, feel free to get fitted for a grip.
Let’s Wrap This Up!
Golf Pride leads the race by some margin for the most popular grips on the PGA Tour, with some of the biggest names in the game using their grips with great success. Now that you know which players use which brand, be sure to keep an eye out for them on TV.
It will be interesting to see if and how these numbers change over the coming years as manufacturers jostle to increase the popularity rankings, but for now, the top three are well ahead of the chasing pack.
