When sportscaster Kay Adams asked Jordan Spieth to address a certain hot-button topic on her “Up & Adams” podcast at the Players Championship on Wednesday, he looked and sounded a bit like a witness being cross-examined on the stand.
“Can you tell me what I need to know about this anchoring thing?” Kay asked Spieth who was seated at a desk across from her. “Akshay wins API. Is this OK? Is this not OK? Should putters be shorter? Should long putters not be a thing?”
Kay was referring to Akshay Bhatia, who won the Arnold Palmer Invitational last week with a 50-inch broomstick putter and an oh-so-close-to-anchoring technique in which he hovers the butt of his putter within a whisper of his chest; pressing the club into his chest would be anchoring, which was outlawed by the governing bodies in 2016, but Bhatia is not anchoring. Trouble is, the space between the end of his putter and his sternum is so narrow that, with the naked eye, it is hard to detect the gap, which has led fans on social media to not only question Bhatia’s method but flat-out accuse him of cheating.
When the peanut gallery made those allegations during the Pebble Beach event earlier this year, Bhatia wrote on Instagram, “Not anchoring. Literally 2 inches short of my chest haha.” On Monday, in the wake of a fresh wave of anchoring skepticism directed at Bhatia, PGA Tour winner Michael Kim came to Bhatia’s defense, writing on X, “It’s funny to me that Akshay anchoring is a thing. In person, it’s not that close. This is not a concern amongst the players.”
Still, not many pros have been asked on the record about Bhatia’s approach, so when Kay put the question to Spieth, who sits on the Tour’s Player Advisory Council, you could sense he was choosing his words as carefully as he might a club selection on the 12th tee at Augusta National, albeit without caddie Michael Greller’s counsel.
“Um…” Spieth began as he and Kay reviewed footage of Bhatia’s putting stroke. “This is, uh…”
But soon enough, Spieth got going.
“There’s a skill to it,” Spieth said. ”If it were that easy to do and made everyone that much better, everybody would do it. … He’s been doing it for a long time. Most of the people who have [have been].”
Bhatia, who is 24, actually hasn’t been using the broomstick for all that long. After struggling on the greens in the early part of his professional career, he consulted with a couple of long-putter converts, including Lucas Glover. In the fall of 2023, Bhatia made the leap. “We took a chance on switching to the broomstick, and I talked to a couple players about it, and they gave me some good advice, just kind of what to work on,” Bhatia said at the 2024 Masters. “I made a promise to myself that I’m going to take at least six months to try this putter out, regardless of how it goes, and so far my stats have kind of skyrocketed.”
In the 2022-23 season, Bhatia finished 183rd in SG: Putting. In both 2024 and 2025, he finished among the top 40 in the category. This season, he’s currently ranked 12th, helped in part by his sensational week on the crispy surfaces at Bay Hill. Bhatia’s nearly 16.3 combined strokes gained on and around the greens was the best performance by a Tour winner in the ShotLink era, which dates to 1983.
Bhatia, of course, isn’t the first pro to come under scrutiny for wielding a broomstick. Major winners Adam Scott and Bernhard Langer also have heard it from critics. But Bhatia is one of the younger pros to have adopted a long putter. Pair that fact with his vastly improved putting and now his third Tour win and he becomes an easy mark for skeptics and traditionalists.
So, where does Spieth stand on sweepers in general?
Pushed by Kay for his opinion Wednesday, he said: “I would like the putter to be the shortest club in your bag, because it is the shortest club in my bag, and I do believe that it forces more skill. It uses your hands more, which makes you have to be more, kind of athletic and deal with the stuff that comes up a little bit more.”
Tiger Woods said much of the same in 2012, four years before anchoring was outlawed. “I believe it’s the art of controlling the body and club and swinging the pendulum motion,” Woods said of his aversion to what were then called “belly” putters. “I believe that’s how it should be played. I’m a traditionalist when it comes to that.”
However you feel about broomsticks, reasonable minds can probably agree that at the very least the optics of Bhatia’s method are problematic. But that’s not on Bhatia to solve — that’s on the rulesmakers whose job it is to remove gray areas from the rule book, especially if those gray areas are causing fans to unfairly question players’ integrity.
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