14 of the 42 PGA Tour putters we track are Scotty Camerons. On the LPGA it is 6 of 26, behind TaylorMade and Odyssey

On the PGA Tour the putter conversation has one default answer, and it is milled in California with a circle-T somewhere on it. We wanted to know whether that default holds on the other side of the professional game. So we took every bag we maintain, split them by tour, and counted one putter per player by brand.

It does not hold. The brand that leads the men's bags comes third in the women's.

The number

Scotty Cameron is in 14 of the 42 PGA Tour bags we track, a third of them. In the 26 LPGA bags it is in 6, under a quarter, behind TaylorMade on 7 and Odyssey on 7, with Ping on 5.

The full PGA Tour split is Scotty Cameron 14, TaylorMade 11, Odyssey 9, Ping 4, L.A.B. 2, Bettinardi 1 and T.P. Mills 1. The LPGA split is TaylorMade 7, Odyssey 7, Scotty Cameron 6, Ping 5 and Piretti 1. Every player carries exactly one putter in our rows, so there is no double-counting. Brands are taken from the exact name on the row, so a TaylorMade custom proto counts as TaylorMade and a Spider counts as TaylorMade because the row says so.

The caveat, where you can see it: these are the bags we maintain and re-verify against named sources, not a census of either tour, and putters are the club most likely to change mid-season. Twenty-six LPGA bags is a small base, so one switch moves that tour's figures by about four percentage points. The 20 LIV, creator and amateur bags in our file are left out of the comparison entirely.

The rows, so you can check us

The LPGA TaylorMades are Nelly Korda on a custom NK Proto, Charley Hull on a TP Soto, Angel Yin, Miyu Yamashita and Julia López Ramírez on the Spider Tour X, and Maja Stark and Esther Henseleit on the Spider Tour V.

The seven Odysseys belong to Rose Zhang, Jeeno Thitikul, Minjee Lee, Lottie Woad, Carlota Ciganda, Ruoning Yin and Alison Lee. The six Scotty Camerons are Lydia Ko, Lilia Vu, Céline Boutier, Haeran Ryu, Megan Khang and Hannah Green. The Pings are Leona Maguire, Linn Grant, Lauren Coughlin, Jennifer Kupcho and Allisen Corpuz, and Shiho Kuwaki plays a Piretti.

On the men's side the TaylorMade eleven are all Spiders, from Scottie Scheffler's Spider Tour X down. Six of them are the exact Spider Tour X model.

The second split: putters that say prototype

There is a second difference inside the first, and it is the more useful one for anyone shopping. Counting only where the putter's own name says prototype, 13 of the 42 PGA Tour putters are prototypes, against 4 of the 26 on the LPGA, roughly 31 per cent against 15. Nine of the men's thirteen are Scotty Camerons. On the women's side three of the four are Camerons (Ko, Khang and Green) and the fourth is Korda's NK Proto.

Two notes on that count, because it is a strict one. It uses the name only. Four more PGA Tour rows mention a prototype in the spec line rather than the name, among them Tiger Woods' Newport 2 and Max Homa's Phantom X 5.5, and adding them takes the men to 17. No LPGA row has that issue, though Kuwaki's Piretti is listed as a tour-only blade. And a putter without the word prototype is not necessarily on sale today. Leona Maguire's Ping Vault 2.0 Ketsch and Carlota Ciganda's Odyssey White Hot OG V-Line are long-serving models that have no live retail page, which is why their rows carry no buy link.

We published the whole-file version of the prototype question in August, in the tour putters you cannot buy, when our file barely included the women's tour. That piece asked how many tour putters are prototypes. This one asks whether the answer depends on which tour you look at, and it does: on these rows, the men's bags lean twice as hard on tour-only builds.

Where the LPGA's putters come from instead

Two details stand out in the women's rows. Three of the seven LPGA Odysseys carry White Hot in the model name: Thitikul's White Hot Versa #7, Woad's White Hot OG Rossie and Ciganda's White Hot OG V-Line. None of the nine PGA Tour Odysseys does. Their names run to Toulon, Jailbird, TRTL and Tri-Hot instead.

And Ping on the LPGA side is mostly the PLD line. Four of the five LPGA Pings are PLD models (Grant, Coughlin, Kupcho and Corpuz), with Lauren Coughlin on the PLD Oslo 4. The retail PLD Milled Oslo is the nearest thing in a shop, at $500. Among the four men's Pings, two are PLD.

Why does Scotty Cameron drop to third? Our rows cannot answer that, and it would be easy to invent a reason. Staff contracts, which tour vans are present at which events, and how long a player has trusted one shape all play a part, and none of them is something we can measure from a bag list. It is worth noting the contrast with the ball, though. On the same tours, Titleist's ball share barely moved between the men's and women's bags. Its putter brand moves a lot.

What to do with it

If you are buying a putter, the useful lesson is about the prototype gap rather than the brand table. When a putter in a women's tour bag shares a name with something in the shop, it is more often the same thing. Angel Yin, Miyu Yamashita and Julia López Ramírez play the Spider Tour X you can order today at around $450. Charley Hull's TP Soto is a retail TP Collection blade at $500. Woad's Rossie is on sale at $325.

The Scotty Camerons in these bags are a different story on both tours. Ko's Phantom is a tour prototype, and Boutier's 9R and Ryu's 11R OC have no live retail page. The retail Phantom line at $550 is the nearest equivalent, which is a perfectly good putter and not the same club.

None of this should choose a putter for you. Length, lie, loft and how the head sits to your eye decide whether putts go in, and a fitting will tell you more in twenty minutes than this table can. What the table does show is that the men's tour default is a men's tour default. Look at the other half of the professional game and the most common putters are TaylorMades and Odysseys, and most of them say nothing about being prototypes.