In the pantheon of revered golf clubs, there’s Ben Hogan’s 1-iron, and there’s Tiger Woods’ putter. You’d be hard-pressed to find other clubs worthy of being mentioned in the same breath.
Tiger won 14 of his 15 Majors with his famed cherry bomb Scotty Cameron putter, a back-up of which sold for more than $US393,000 last year. Perhaps the best part of Tiger’s Elder Wand is how its appearance has changed over the years. Dents and dings have appeared, as has an almost perfectly round wear mark squarely in the centre of the face.
It comes out to just 8 millimetres. For context, that’s within 2 millimetres of what Dave Pelz’s putting robot “perfy” would hit putts at.
“Tiger is not far off being a robot!” he says. “And that’s over thousands of putts.”
Aim small
As for how we can actually use this information to improve our own games, The Putting Engineer says to aim a little lower than the greatest of all time.
“For amateur players, if you can strike the majority of your putts in a dime on the front of your putter you are doing very well,” he says. “If you can strike the majority of your putts in a [nickel] then you are doing OK. If your strike pattern is any bigger than that you will struggle with speed control in my opinion.”
Endeavouring to do anything golf-related half as well as Tiger Woods, I put an American dime over the sweet spot of my own putterface and placed a set of Putt Dots on either side.
It took a few putts to adjust, but I started to get the hang of it. It gave me yet another new sense of appreciation for Tiger Woods, and something useful to practise.
