Aaron Rai was eight years old when a small moment on a golf course locked in a habit for life. It started partly out of necessity, practicing in colder weather in England to keep his hands warm, and then it just stuck.

“I just happened to be given these two gloves. The guy who actually makes them sent a pair over, and I got into the habit of wearing them,” he told Golf Monthly. “Then, a few weeks down the line, my dad forgot to put the two gloves in the bag, so I had to play with one. It was terrible. I couldn’t play, I couldn’t feel the grip, so I’ve always stuck with the two gloves ever since.”

Rai believes the two gloves are a big reason why he plays as well as he does, and he has been a top-50 player in the world for the past two years. That is not a small claim, but his results back it up. He won the 2024 Wyndham Championship for his first PGA Tour title and, in November 2025, defeated Tommy Fleetwood in a playoff to win the Abu Dhabi Golf Championship.

The gloves themselves are not random either. Rai is an ambassador for MacWet, a company whose gloves are specifically designed to increase grip the wetter they get. For a golfer who grew up playing through English weather, that is a natural fit.

He does remove both gloves to putt and uses only one for bunker shots, so there is still some calculation involved. And for those wondering whether the two gloves are his only quirk, he also uses iron covers on his clubs because his father taught him to treat expensive equipment with care.

His gloves are not the only thing that makes Aaron Rai different from the field.

What’s in Aaron Rai’s Bag?

Aaron Rai has been using the TaylorMade M6 driver since 2020, a club most tour pros would have retired years ago. It was actually the “game improver” model when it launched, not the tour-preferred M5. Yet it was in his bag when he won the Scottish Open and again at the Wyndham Championship in 2024.

For irons, the golfer plays TaylorMade P7TW blades, the same model Tiger Woods helped design with Nike contractor Mike Taylor decades ago. He pairs them with S300 stiff shafts rather than the X100s most tour pros prefer. It is a softer setup for a tour player, but his ball-striking numbers justify every bit of it.

His wedge setup involves a collaboration with Titleist’s top wedge technician, Aaron Dill. The lob wedge started as a standard 60-degree K-grind but has been heavily modified on the sole to suit how Rai interacts with turf.

On the greens, he puts the gloves down and picks up a TaylorMade Spider Tour V mallet. He plays the standard Titleist Pro V1 rather than the X model, choosing a lower-launching ball that suits the flight window he built playing European links and West Midlands parklands growing up.

Basically, everything he carries has a reason behind it.