A change in the rulebook will help players on the PGA Tour this season – and Ludvig Aberg was the first to take advantage…
Ludvig Aberg had a problem last week at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.
The Swede struck his drive out of bounds, way right on the iconic par-5 18th – his ninth hole – during his third round on the iconic Pebble Beach course.
To compound matters, he then realised he’d cracked the face of his driver.
This, of course, isn’t out of the ordinary in the modern game, where every yard matters and equipment manufacturers are fitting high speed players with club faces made with ultra-thin materials.
But up until very recently, Aberg would have had no option to replace his driver and would be teeing off with his 3-wood for the rest of the round instead. That changed in 2025, when Model Local Rule G-9 was updated to allow players to replace drivers that had a visible crack in the face.
The update came after a high-profile incident involving Matt Fitzpatrick at the 2024 BMW Championship, when the Englishman’s driver was not deemed to be damaged significantly enough to warrant a replacement and he was forced to suffer the consequences.
The problem with that rules tweak, however, was that players were not allowed to keep a spare driver part in their bag and could only collect a replacement from the locker room. It was still hugely inconvenient and practically unviable to go and retrieve the part from the clubhouse without holding up play or losing out on hitting the club on important holes.
So as part of a series of rule changes ahead of this 2026 season, the PGA Tour had another update which allowed caddies to carry a spare head in the bag and change it on the course as soon as a club had been damaged.
“They sent out rules changes at the start of the year and one of them was you no longer had to keep it (the replacement part) in the locker,” Aberg’s caddie Joe Skovron explained to the Associated Press. “Before, someone had to get it for you. Now you can carry it in the bag, and if your driver is deemed damaged, you could put that one in. I had the backup in the belly of the bag.”
Aberg was therefore able to call in a rules official to approve the crack in his driver and delve into his bag for a new driver head. He re-loaded and split the fairway before just missing out on a par.
“We like the fact if a club is cracked or broken, it can be replaced right there,” said Steve Rintoul, the PGA Tour’s vice president of Rules & Officiating. “The old method of the replacement was so archaic.”
This week, Aberg defends his title at the Genesis Invitational as the $20million signature event returns to iconic Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles.