On September 17, 2002, I posed a question on your forum asking you about the new Carbite Tru Trak Golf Ball, publicized as the truest ball developed for putting...a weight-centered golf ball designed to be in perfect balance and would improve not only putting, but would also provide longer and straighter ballflight on both tee shots and approaches. Then, the following June, I mentioned that I would check out two other balls, the Top Flite Tour 3000 Golf Ball and the Wilson Staff True Ball, both touted to be perfectly balanced as well. I have yet to try the Carbite ball, but wanted to report what I found with the other two. So, for what it’s worth, I tested the accuracy of putting with the 1)Wilson Staff True Ball and 2) the Top Flite Tour 3000 Ball. I didn’t run extensive tests with scientific equipment like Dave Pelz might do, but just played a number of rounds with the two balls on various courses over the past four months. Both performed equally well on fast and slow greens and I made some very long putts with both. However, my conclusions mirror your original response to my question posed in September. And for those of you that are interested in Geoff’s excellent response about golf balls touted to be perfectly balanced...go back to the topic, TruTrak Golf Ball posted December 17, 2001. And Geoff,I hope you don’t mind me quoting you here, but you said it beautifully, “...even if all balls are NOT perfectly balanced, the question is what difference does it make. Perhaps a certain type of Titleist ball has an imperfection in balance such that for 95% of a batch of balls, 1 out of a box of 12 will have a maximum imbalance that might cause the ball to wander off line 0.5" in a 10-foot putt in 1 out of 20 putts with that ball, and all other balls are better than this. If you played golf with this box and changed balls once each round, you might not hit ANY putt off line in the slightest, or you might hit one putt out of 12 rounds of golf (about 360-400 putts) that curls 0.5" off-line. But this putt still went in the 4.25" wide hole! You have to have numbers to judge the importance. Also, even if every single ball has this same degree of imbalance, does it matter at all, or are the problems of the surface much greater, or are the difficulties of stroking with a putterface perfectly square much harder, so that the ball imbalance gets swamped by bigger problems and doesn't end up mattering on the score card at all? In the meantime, you have to trust your eyes. If you make what feels like a perfect stroke, and you perceive no break, but the ball wanders off to the side anyway, are you confident that the ball is at fault? If so, put it in a test bath and see, or just toss it and use another ball. In sum, the IDEA of "perfect" balancing sounds great, but it's probably not worth worrying about much.” “Cheers! Geoff Mangum...The PuttingZone.”
Geoff, your response was ‘RIGHT ON THE MONEY!’ After I tested those supposedly perfectly balanced balls, I concur and repeat what you said... “The IDEA of "perfect" balancing sounds great, but it's probably not worth worrying about much.”
And I add, it doesn’t really matter that the ball you use is supposed perfectly balanced...what really matters is the person holding that putter!