Pro borrowed Titleist’s new 2025 ProV1x. Then he won with it

It’s a feeling many of us have encountered on the golf course; Nico Echavarria they were running out of golf balls.

Fortunately for Echavarria, who picked up his debut PGA Tour win at last year’s Puerto Rico Open, he wasn’t playing a PGA Tour event at the time. Instead, he was playing a practice round last month with friend and fellow PGA Tour pro Tyson Alexander when he ran into a similar situation.

What is unrelated is that his resolve to run out of golf balls played a role in his winning the PGA Tour less than a month later.

Alexander began hearing word a week ago at the Procore Championship about Titleist’s new 2025 ProV1 and ProV1x golf balls, a sentimental release of the Tour’s most popular golf ball as it marks 25 years since its introduction. Alexander asked Titleist for some sleeves of the new ProV1x to test at home.

When Echavarria needed some cartridges, Alexander offered him the prototypes.

“I didn’t grab balls from my house, and he had some extras and they were the juniors, and I just tried it,” Echavarria told Titleist last week at the Shriners Children’s Open.

It wasn’t long before he began to like what he was seeing with the new ball.

Titleist is keeping the technical details of the new golf balls under wraps for now, but tournament approval has been swift. A handful of pros put the 2025 ProV1 and ProV1x into play at Procore while Echavarria put the ’25 ProV1x into play in his next start after his round with Alexander at the Sanderson Farms Championship. He missed the cut that week, but kept the ball in play in Utah at the Black Desert Championship, where he finished T11.

“(’25 Pro V1x was) maybe just a hair faster and something with touch around the greens is what I felt,” Echavarria said. “It worked really well last week (at the Black Desert Championship) with the altitude. I’ve been struggling to hit my numbers at altitude and this was pretty good for how the numbers were.”

At the Titleist PGA Tour’s official presentation of the new golf balls at the Shriners, 23 players immediately switched to one of the models. Five other players added the new balls to their bags this week in Japan at Zozo, but the ball made it first win with EchavarriaWHO Justin Thomas stopped with a final round 67 to win by one stroke.

A win that might not have happened if Echavarria hadn’t run out of golf balls last month when he was training with Alexander. To his credit, Alexander also put the new ProV1x into play, doing so at the Shriners.

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