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Why a growing number of stars have made the switch to putting with a mallet.
Rory McIlroy has made a flurry of late-season equipment changes, including switching the shaft in his driver and putting an old 3-wood into his bag last week at the BMW Championship after he tossed his previous 3-wood into the trees during the last round of the Northern Trust. All that came after McIlroy changed back to an old set of irons a few weeks ago.
And then there’s the putter. McIlroy raised the eyebrows of equipment junkies when he benched his TaylorMade Spider X and put an old Scotty Cameron 009M blade back in play at the Olympics in Toyko. But before the BMW Championship, he returned to a TaylorMade Spider.
“I said to Harry (Diamond, his caddie) after the first round (at the Northern Trust), ‘I’m thinking about going back to the Spider,’ and then I proceeded to gain four strokes on the greens over the next two days with the blade,” McIlroy said last Thursday. “But I think the thing with the blade is, the good days are really good, but the bad days are pretty bad, as well.”
The first heel-toe-weighted, blade-style putter to impact golf was the Ping Anser designed by Karsten Solheim in 1966. Solheim sketched out the details of the club on the dust jacket of a record album, and as the story goes, he thought it was the answer to a lot of golfers’ putting problems. His wife, Louise, suggested he name the putter the Answer, but Solheim said the name was too long to stamp on the back bumper of the putter. Louise then suggested dropping the w, making the name Anser. The rest is history, and other manufacturers have copied that club’s characteristics ever since.
However, as popular as heel-toe-weighted blades have been over the past five decades, they typically are not as forgiving as mallets. That’s what McIlroy seems to be coming to grips with.
“There’s quite a lot of inconsistency in it for me. It’s almost like I need to practice with the blade at home, because you have to get your stroke spot-on to hit good putts with that style of putter,” he said at Caves Valley Golf Club. “But then, when I come out here, I started hitting putts with the Spider again, and it felt so easy. Felt like I couldn’t not start it on line. There’s a lesson in there somewhere about maybe just keeping the blade at home and practicing with it and then coming out here and putting with something that’s got a little more technology in it.”
The winner of the BMW Championship, Patrick Cantlay, used a Scotty Cameron Newport prototype, a heel-toe-weighted blade, for years. At the Zurich Classic in New Orleans, he put a Scotty Cameron Phantom X5 mallet in the bag. Using the Phantom X5, he won at Memorial and again last week at Caves Valley.
You might also recall that Justin Thomas broke through and won the 2017 PGA Championship shortly after switching from a Scotty Cameron Newport prototype blade to a Scotty Cameron Futura X5 mallet.
From a forgiveness standpoint, mallets usually outshine heel-toe-weighted blades because designers can add more weight to the perimeter and pull it farther back, away from the hitting area. That makes the putter more resistant to twisting on off-center hits, so putts that a player strikes outside the sweetspot not only roll out more, they tend to stay online more too.
While scores of great putters use blades – Tiger Woods, Jordan Spieth, Ben Crenshaw and Brad Faxon – the increased acceptance of mallets should be attributed to Jason Day. The Australian became the first to finish a PGA Tour season with a strokes gained putting average over 1.0 when he ended the 2015-16 PGA Tour season with an average of 1.13 using a TaylorMade Itsy Bitsy Spider. The red mallet was compact and ideally balanced for Day’s slightly arched stroke. His success spurred more pros to try mallets and permanently destroyed any stigma that mallets were only for golfers who struggle on the greens.
So could a mallet help your putting? The best way to find out is to work with a good custom fitter and try several models. Here are a few to consider.
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