Hi David,
Thanks for the compliment.
Here are some more or less random thoughts about putter design. Please understand that I am somewhat vested in learning about how the traditional putting works best, so I may have a blind spot about very creative innovative putter designs. This perhaps includes Belly Putters and other technique-specific putters like the Pivot Putter and The One pendulum one-handed putter from Sweden. (See my January 2002 Newsletter,
http://puttingzone.com/newsletterJan2002.html). So, I am talking about standard putters in the 30-25 inch range, either blades, mallets, heel-shafted, center-shafted, and the like.
For me, great putting starts with good or optimal technique, and only THEN do you start looking for a putter design that facilitates the technique. By the way, if I am right about this, then all putter fitting is hooey, if it doesn't start with the golfer's technique. You can't simply fit a putter to whatever the golfer brings to the fitting, because if the golfer brings flawed technique, the fitting simply cements this flaw into his or her game.
So, the putter has to suit me and my technique!
To test a putter, it has to pass some basics first. If it feels weird or too light or too heavy or is crooked --- pass, next. But if it is basically OK, then I want to see how it acts when I make my stroke. I'm sort of a little nutty about this. My attitude is: I have a perfect stroke. Is this putter design messing it up?
If I make a stroke with the putter and the stroke looks and feels right, then I thank my stroke and take small pleasure in the fact that the putter did not mess the stroke up. It's probably not too much to say that there's nothing a designer could do to HELP the stroke get better! If the putter is within a certain range (weight, length, grip size, shaft, lie, head weight, ...), then my inquiry is to try and find whatever the designer has done to mess up my stroke.
Apart from aiming visual aids, there's not really much a designer can do to make a putter that IMPROVES your stroke. Almost all putter design features are intended to make a bad stroke less bad, by correcting the putt's roll in terms of startline or energy from an off-center of high-low impact or a poor stroke path. This explains heel-toe weighting, cavity weighting, face radiusing or curving, and similar features. It's sort of a Blades versus Game Improvement issue as for irons. If you can make a straight stroke consistently with solid impact and the putterhead weight suits, then these design features will cause you to vary from this pattern to accommodate the putter.
In the case of the heel-toe weighting schemes, these are heel-shafted (like Pings and Scotty Camerons) to be sold to the vast majority of casual golfers - who ain't that good at putting. The stats show rather conclusively that mid- to high-handicap golfers hit putts in a very large sweetspot area on the face (about 1" wide and 1/2" from top to bottom) -- not a pinprick spot. So the heel-toe weighting counteracts the golfer's natural face twists that result from off-center hits. That helps these golfers, but if your quarry is optimal putting at the highest level, the heel-toe scheme makes the putter "gate" open and closed during the stroke. (The toe weighting in particular creates forces in the stroke that open and close the toe.)
For a perfectionist, this means giving up a straight stroke and instead coming to terms with the gating. Usually, this is done by firming up the grip and the elbows -- just tighter altogether in the arms and hands, a real constricted "triangle" and by manipulating the putter with hands and wrists to manage the putterface orientation even during the gating. That creates problems by opening the door to handsy strokes, a misguided reliance upon fine-motor control as a sort of "touch" and "feel", tension, and distance problems. Give me a break! Forget all that. I want a putter that works WITH my stroke, and doesn't gate or force me to deal with the gating.
So when I "test" a putter with my stroke, if it gates, I toss it out.
This approach has led me to face-balanced, center-shafted putters.
Incidentally, the putter manufacturers are starting to admit the validity of what I'm saying here. The heel-toe, heel-shafted putters are now being "recommended" for golfers whose setup positioning of eyes and arms compels them to use a gating stroke whether they want one or not. Hands out ballward from beneath the shoulders and eyes back from ball compel a gating rainbow-shape in the stroke path back and thru. The poor devils need a Ping or a Scotty Cameron so they can KEEP this gating intact.
If you don't want the gating, but do want the Ping of the Scotty Cameron, then you need to manipulate the putter in the stroke back and thru to eliminate the gating. This was formerly known as "hooding" the putterface with wrist manipulations so that the face stayed aimed square to the initial address direction (not the target, but aimed "due north") even though the putterhead is gating in a rainbow arc. It's quite a trick and was taken very seriously up until about 1960, when the shoulderstroke gained adherents (Bob Charles and George Archer). Walter Hagen, Bobby Locke, Horton Smith, and many others worked diligently to get this move perfected. Today, the Dandy Putter celebrattes this technique with a heel-shafted putter and seeks to reinvigorate it. Even without this move explicitly, top putters who have some gating do the same or something very similar with their wrists in order to make a straight stroke consistently. (Loren Roberts has some folding of the right wrist going back and then holds this going thru.) ben Crenshaw is probably the only pure gater in recent years. he likes it, uses a heel-shafted blade to fit it, and realizes it is not the way others should putt (and said so in the 1977 article he wrote about this problem).
In my stroke, I don't want any hands or arms or even shoulders active. I'm dead from the shoulders on out. In order to keep the shoulders dead, so the armpits don't open or close in the stroke, I have to keep the putter's butt aimed at the pivot of my stroke at all times in the movement. This means moving the shoulderframe as a whole. I don't have ANY issues about the wrists or the hands or the grip form. My only issue is to keep the shoulders dead and keep the motion one of total shoulderframe all at once.
To help keep the putter pointed to the center of the pivot (in my neck area), the grip is light so I can sensitively detect ANY waggling or flopping about of the handle in my hands during the stroke. This is a sign I am moving the putter too fast and causing jerkiness and twisting. So, for me, the ideal stroke includes monitoring my hands and NOT FEELING A THING as I make the stroke. That's my goal. Because of this, I really don't care much about the grip design in terms of thickness or softness. But it helps to have a flat top for the thumbs. I can putt as well with a Putt-Putt putter with NO GRIP at all as I can with other putters, so long as the putter swings true in my stroke.
The one design feature that seems to matter is putterhead weight. The goal is to have the putter acting like an extension of your arms, without change during the straight stroke. A light putterhead encourages snatchiness and too quick a tempo. Too heavy a head encourages a poor sense of touch or how the blow will cause the ball to go off with send. The happy medium is a head weight that promotes a smooth steady takeaway and that delivers sufficient energy to the ball at impact. I personally don't believe light putters are better for fast greens and heavy putters are better for slow greens. That implies a handsy fine-tuning of the motion pattern in the stroke that varies from green to green. In my approach, you just register you touch for linoleum or car-hood or ice or whatever and then let your targeting and tempo handle the amplitude of the stroke. So, for me it ends up being somewhere around 330-350 grams for a putterhead on a standard length putter. The weight is heavier on a broomstick, to keep the swingweight up, and that's one reason I don't like broomsticks (400-450 grams in the head).
The current trend is towards face-balanced, center-shafted, shorter putters with a good head weight. The center-shafting can now be found in a very good TaylorMade putter (whose brand name I don't know), and it is much better than a Scotty Cameron for my stroke. (This is true despite the fact that some TaylorMade putters don't really have exquisite craftmanship).
I'm not sure what to make of insert technology. I absolutely love the STX Sync Tour putter, which has the softest face in golf. But I believe it's more because it is a center-shafted putter that works best with a straight-back and striaght-thru stroke with good tempo. Other insert putters don't do anything for me. There is a physics issue, because the added "dwell time" during ball-face contact changes the energy transfer. The longer contact increases the "impulse" -- so inserts are not short in any sense, really. To me this is just part of what the brain needs to register, along with the ball's weight and the green speed. Once registered, who cares? It is possible that the sponginess of the insert has an effect upon directional purity, as this sort of cradling of the ball's shape during impact lessens the disruptive effect of dimple shapes on the surface (which can send a perfect stroke off a bit). It is also possible there is a minor reducing-of-error effect that comes from bad stroke path or face orientation at impact, also from the cradling effect. That's why convex putter faces are not legal, but perhaps the insert is getting away with a little convexity under the USGA radar. It's something I would like to study in detail with some real science.
Roll-face technology is a bit odd. There are "cylinder" putters with diameters like a quarter, and then there are "radiused" faces where if you made a complete circle out of the mild radiusing of the face, it would result in a circle 40-feet in diameter. That's the recent TearDrop radiusing. The idea of the radiusing is to deliver the putter at impact in such a fashion that the ball starts rolling sooner and skidding less. (No one, btw, has offered proof that skidding really hurst the result.) This is based on a billiards model wherein a cue-stick blow delivered to a cue ball precisely 5/7ths the way up from the bottom sends the cue ball off with it's roll perfectly matching its lateral movement, so there is no skid. Billiard rails are edged at this same height for the same reason. Golfers have persisted in believing something like this can be done with a golf ball and a putter, but a putter is not a cue stick. Hence the radiused faces, trying to convert the putter into a cue-stick while also arranging for the blow to contact the ball slightly north of its equator. The original TearDrop was very tightly radiused, and golfers had a hard time being consistent with it. That's why they reduced the radiusing so drastically. I have a knock-off of the current TearDrop design that works very well for me, but only because my stroke is arcing up as it reaches the ball anyway. I'm not sure I would stake my life on any supposed benefit from the face radiusing.
The one feature that helps a lot is a good visual aiming aid design. The STX Sync Tour has a barrel or columnar shape sticking straight back from the ball, that is about the same diameter as the ball. If the face is not square behind the ball, the lines of the back column look like a breached shotgun and it's obvious you need to pay attention to the face squareness. The Callaway Two-Ball putter is not this good. Dave Pelz claims to have created a three-ball putter back in the 1970s, but I've seen a prior two-ball putter advertised for sale in Golf Digest way before Pelz. Pelz claimed the three-ball design was recommended by vision specialist, but he never shared anything specific. I personally find that hooey. I've studied visual processes very deeply now for ten years and have never encountered anything to that effect. Instead, the issue is always whether you can detect whether the square face is aimed straight thru the middle of the ball, and if so, whether this is where you want the ball to start out. Anything that tells you the ball-face arrangement is out of square is helpful.
The Two-Ball Callaway doesn't do this -- it's ball against ball, which shows you nothing about directionality thru the front / real ball. The is a sense in which this putter helps you see where a straight stroke ought to go, tho -- and this is not at all the same as seeing the line where the putt out to start off. The two-ball design, placed behind a third ball or even in reference to a sweetspot mark ahead of the forward of the two balls, defines a line in the ball in between (the forward ball) that is square to the putter face. A straight stroke moving this putter from its static position without altering the face orientation will follow this line thru the enclosed ball. That's something, but it's not much. The line that counts is the one thru the ball you're going to putt. That line has to match the startline you intend AND the stroke path's line of motion. There are THREE lines to make coincident, and the Callaway only helps to any significant degree with the least important of the three (stroke line). After all, you can correct a poor stroke if you know wher the blow needs to go thru the ball.
Some of the aiming aids that really help are the ones that help you see whether the ball-putterface orientation is square thru the middle of the ball, and whether this square direction matches the intended startline of the putt. The stroke path line back away from the ball is easily seen from these others without need for separate aiming help. Lines on the top of the putterface that point square and parallel to each other and that are about as wide apart as the ball itself seem pretty good for ball-face and face-path alignment.
Visual aids like the SeeMore gimmick of painting a red stripe on the heel so that you have to cover the heel with the shaft in order to have the shaft oriented the way the NC people think is best strikjes me as not very helpful. I agree that the shaft ought to be oriented that way, but I think there are better ways to go about it. One visual aid that I recommend is a sunken trench marking the sweetspot, with the bottom of the narrow trench painted a certain color. This way, if your eyes are not really over the sweetspot on the putter, you cannot see the color at the bottom of the trench. Sort of like noon over the well of Archimedes in Alexandria, Egypt, along the earth's equator -- the sunbeams shine straight down the edges of the well and there is no shadowing inside the well's column. I haven't heard of that on except maybe one putter (can't recall which one), but it at least gets the head over the putter. (But it doesn't guarantee that the gaze is straight out the face.)
So, that's enuf for now I guess. Summing up, if you use a shoulderstroke with a straight-back and straight-thru stroke (or very close) and hit pretty consistently the same location on the back of the ball with the same location near the sweetspot of the putter on a trajectory thru the sweetspot of the ball, and all this is squarely executed and squarely aimed where you want, then putter's start to look a lot less important in their design features, except to the extent the feature is meant to do something about a problem you don't have. I'm certainly open to ideas about shafts and that sort of thing, and I'll keep checking things out with an open mind, but so far, I keep finding the old putters work very well. Get the stroke down first, and then worry about the putter. The more you become sensitive to the putter messing up your stroke, the better you will be. I bet Brad Faxon makes Scotty cameron rip his hair out because Scotty surely has a hard time making a putter that doesn't mess up Brad's stroke. Have you ever seen Brad's SC putter up close? Lead tape all over it!!!
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
The PuttingZone
The Future of Putting Now.
PS - Richard Feynmann was an MIT guy!!!