Building the Bag: eBay, ChatGPT and Google searches helped Ross Steelman make PGA Tour

PGA Tour players have lots of help choosing the best clubs for their games. They can use Tour trucks filled with the latest technology and get advice from trained experts who can tell them what is working and what is not. But Ross Steelman has taken a different approach to building his set of clubs.

Steelman is one of the newest members of the PGA Tour. He earned his Tour card this season by finishing first on the Korn Ferry Tour points list. His clubs look fairly normal at first, but the story behind how he chose them is unlike most other players' stories.

Steelman uses a TaylorMade Qi4D driver with 8 degrees of loft. This is a common choice on Tour, but he has made a personal change to his driver. The 25-year-old used a permanent marker to cover the shiny strip around the clubface. He also uses a Mitsubishi Chemical Diamana PD 60x shaft. This shaft came out early in the decade, and because it is an older model that is hard to find, Steelman bought a used one on eBay.

“I really enjoy, like, finding kind of niche clubs on my own, and just making them work,” Steelman said. “You know, we are very fortunate to get any golf club we want for free, but there’s just something romantic about finding it yourself and kind of having hands-on experience with how it is, and just a lot of trust that goes into it, knowing that I’m the one that did, you know, everything to make it work.”

Steelman admitted that he had to have his driver shaft reattached earlier in the year because he had not put the club together very well. Even so, the driver worked well. Steelman ranked first on Tour in Strokes Gained: Off the Tee, a statistic that measures how much a player gains on other players with his shots from the tee.

His 15-degree Qi4D 3-wood has a similar story. He found its Diamana PD 70x shaft on eBay, too, and put the club together himself.

“Length … who knows, I kept cutting and re-gripping until it felt right,” Steelman told GolfWRX about how he built his clubs.

His iron setup is where things get especially unusual. Steelman liked how the Diamana PD shafts moved during his swing, so he used ChatGPT's artificial intelligence to find an iron shaft that might feel similar. He wanted to test it in his TaylorMade P7CB irons.

“It told me to try steelfiber, so I bought one and put it in an old 8 iron, and it was perfect,” Steelman told GolfWRX about using AI to help choose his equipment. “Super light, right amount of give, very muted feel through the turf, which I love.”

Steelman first tried the Aerotech SteelFiber 110CW shaft in just one 8-iron and quickly saw good results. After he started using the shafts in his full set, he said he finished 160 under par over eight events. Steelman built the irons himself, and each one has a different swingweight, which describes how heavy the club feels as it swings. He started each club at D0, then added lead tape to some of them “purely based on the feel of each head.”

Steelman also uses lead tape on his wedges as a simple way to keep track of how many rounds he has played with each one. This helps him decide when it is time to replace them.

“It’s about 16-20 before it’s time for a new one,” Steelman thinks.

Steelman continues to use secondhand golf equipment for his putter, too. He bought a TaylorMade Rossa TP by Kia Ma on eBay.

“I was using an old red Spider which I really liked but wasn’t putting very well … searched ‘TaylorMade milled blade’ and bought the first one that came up,” Steelman said. “It was 34 inches, so I extended it, slapped a piece of lead tape on the bottom, and haven’t hit a putt with another putter since.”

Before adding this blade putter to his bag, Steelman ranked 112th on Tour in Strokes Gained: Putting. He finished the season in 29th place, gaining an average of 0.338 strokes on the greens per round. Scott Boulware and James Holley, TaylorMade's Tour representatives, are the only people who know the putter's exact specifications. They have strict instructions not to tell Steelman what they are.

“Sometimes things are best not known,” Steelman said. If you want to buy one of these putters on eBay, you may need to hurry, because Steelman is buying plenty of backup putters.

Here is Steelman's full list of clubs and their specifications: