By Ken Van Vechten
This one’s too long. This one’s too short. Mmmm, this one’s just right.
Thanks for tuning in to “Golfilocks and the Three Putters.”
If you’ve been nosing around the putter corral at your local shop, you’ve noticed a trend toward longer wands, something that sizes up a few inches stretchier than your “standard” flat stick but not getting close to the sternum-length altitude of a “broomstick.” Mid-size. Longer. Long-ish. Call it whatever. Just know that in a common configuration said putter will be 38 inches long, with a mallet head, a 17-inch grip, and an overall heft 75 or so grams heavier than “standard” but with a similar sensation of balance.
In some sense, it might be the new standard.
Here's how it works: Grab an Odyssey Ai-ONE CRUISER, Cameron Long Design, PING Craz-E CB, or other. Grip the putter with several inches of the handle above your top hand. That is by design. The putter will feel heavier than the typical “normal-length” blade or mallet, with more mass in the head, shaft, and grip, with the latter two weight points working to counterbalance the first, providing a similar sensation or feel despite the heavier weight. The net effect of it all is to quiet the hands and move the putting stroke more into the stable muscles of the shoulders. High-handicap yip-sters or major winners – hello, Wyndham Clark – the design is intended for wide application.
“It appeals to a broad base of players, of whatever ability,” says Luke Williams, senior director of product and brand management for putters at Odyssey/Callaway Golf. “Despite the added weight and counter-balancing, the CRUISER is conventional in terms of grip, set-up, and stroke. If you have a tremor or the yips, it can help. Generally, in those cases, weight is your friend. It is easier to control, smoothing out your stroke. Those players are the obvious candidates. But the design was validated on tour, and it is used on tour, so we are seeing broad appeal.”
If your putting woes are such that your only hope appears to be arm-lock or a broomstick method, a mid-length, counter-balancer might be worth a try as both of those approaches require significant equipment and technique changes.
None of this is astrophysics but the interplay of head weight and design – most of these putters are mallets, but not all – the heft of the longer shaft, and added weight in the grip owning to its extended length is best thought of as a system. For instance, there are aftermarket grips of various lengths and with counterbalancing weights, but simply slipping one on your gamer 8802 isn’t likely to improve things, as the swing-weight and balance will be all jacked up, with too much heft up high, not enough down at the business end, and almost certainly a case of the head wobbles.
“Just adding weight to the grip and not making any changes to the head, you’re putting a lot of weight in the hands, and the balance point will move up that putter pretty high, so you’re not going to have as much control,” says Austie Rollinson, senior director of putter research and design at Scotty Cameron. “The intent (with heavier, counter-balanced putters) is to provide a sense of balance to help the golfer control the putter, to help stabilize the hands and take the hands out of the stroke, to simplify it for them.”
Heavier putters were a thing more than a decade ago, with the aptly named Odyssey Tank being a forerunner. But with a 400-gram head – a typical mallet head is 355 to 360 grams (380 grams in a CRUISER variant) – there was pushback from the tour that these implements were simply too heavy and problematic on long putts. The trend ebbed but as happens in golf, tweaks were made, and this “modern” rendition of a less-heavy-but-still-heavier, longer, counter-balanced putter came back.
Will you gun a 40-footer? Perhaps at first. Then again, heavier means less need to impart “hit” on a put of any length. As with any change in gear, put in the time on the practice green. And the positive corollary out the chute is you should get more of those troublesome mid-length lags to makeable next-putt distance and not have as many red-faced two-footer episodes.
“Tour players are more sensitive to distance control, and notably on long putts,” Rollinson says. “What average players need help with, and what they need to work on, is being more consistent from three, four, and five feet. Scoring is what matters. But short or long putt, getting the hands out of it is almost always a good tradeoff for the average player.”
[A similar thing might be said about really fat grips, which have a reputation for being deal-makers on short putts and deal-breakers on cross-country lags. Practice can overcome a lot. Regardless, solid from three is a far better tool in the arsenal than lucky from 30.]
Sure, golf equipment is no one-size-fits-all, and one of these heavier middies would not go over well with a more handsy feel putter a la a Crenshaw or Tiger. The rest of us? We’re neither Ben nor the G.O.A.T.
But we can find us. And that’s just right.