Growing up in Southern California, the youngest of three children and the only boy, Scotty Cameron fell hard for golf when he was in grade school. He enjoyed playing the sport, almost as much as he did baseball and football. Golf also provided him a way to spend time with his father, an insurance investigator and single-digit handicapper who liked repairing and refinishing persimmon woods in a small workshop in his garage. It did not take Scotty long to discover there was something else he loved about being in that place. And that was the chance to channel the interest and energy he was developing for tinkering with clubs himself. Only the objects of his affection were putters.
“One time, my dad bought me a secondhand Zebra putter, and it had interchangeable weights and a head cover that matched the grip,†Cameron remembered. “I thought it was so cool, and from that point on, when my dad went to the shop to work on his woods, I did the same with my putters.â€
In addition to nurturing an interest in club design and the ways those implements functioned, Don Thomas Cameron also schooled his son on the importance of craftsmanship and doing the job properly.
“He always said, ‘Do it right, or don’t do it at all,’†said Cameron, who was named after his dad at birth but later nicknamed Scotty by his mother. “And if I did not do it right, my dad would make me leave until I was ready to come back and do it over.â€
Cameron and his father often teed it up together, and in many ways, the youngster could not have been happier with the times they spent together in and out of the shop. “But then he died,†Scotty said. “He was only 46 years old, and I was 13. It was a tough loss, and I will never forget that one of the last things he ever said to me was, ‘Stick with the game of golf. I think you have a future in it.’â€
That was sage advice, and it led Cameron to pursue a career in the design, development and manufacture of putters that eventually put him at the very pinnacle of his profession.
Consider that on any given week on the PGA Tour, nearly 50 of the golfers in a full-field event have one of his flat sticks in their bags. And his putters have “won†44 professional majors over the decades, from the 1993 Masters when he was just 30 years old (Bernhard Langer) to last year’s Masters, PGA Championship and Open Championship (Scottie Scheffler, Justin Thomas and Cameron Smith, respectively).
That number, by the way, includes all 15 of Tiger Woods’ majors – from his maiden Masters victory in 1997 to his Hogan-esque triumph at Augusta in 2019. And it further speaks to just how well Cameron’s putters have performed for so long.
His creations are also considered works of art, which has led to the establishment of a Scotty Cameron Golf Gallery in the Southern California surf town of Encinitas and a museum and gallery containing his work in Shizuoka, Japan. In addition to serving as places where some of his rarest and most unique works are displayed and offered for sale, these outlets act as putter-fitting facilities for people who want to receive the same special treatment tour players get in Cameron’s uber-private putting studio in San Marcos, California.
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