Putting has a habit of making even the best golfers question everything.
More so than possibly any other club in the bag, putters have a habit of going cold more times than we care to say. Us golfers seem to try everything to hole putts on a regular basis. From zero-torque putters to fancy drills, the chances you’ve probably gave the lot a go.
But have you tried putting with a wedge? It’s a technique many a golfer swears by. When the putter isn’t behaving, out comes the wedge.
For Dan Landman, though, it became much more than a practice aid. It sparked an idea that would eventually lead to the creation of Spoiler Golf.
Speaking on the Your Golf by NCG Podcast, Landman explained the unusually way in which the golf brand was created and without any formal background in golf too.
“During the COVID time, my dad, he just started putting with his wedge,” he said.
“After doing some of these drills, he was like, ‘I swear, I putt butter with it’. He was just putting, probably about six, eight months, strictly with a wedge.
“I went down to visit him down in South Carolina, and he convinced me to putt with my wedge too, and so I did, and I was like, ‘Yeah, the the putts definitely roll better’. It was just a matter of forgiveness at that point.
“Like, how do we actually get this same roll but more often? It’s hard to hit the equator to the ball with that little tiny leading edge of wedge. We just kind of started noodling on on different ideas at that point, but it all stemmed from dad just just playing with a wedge. I don’t know if that was purely out of he was better with it, or it was just laziness.
“But he putted incredibly well with it, and you can truly see the ball roll different, hear it roll differently when you strike it correctly with a wedge. We’re like, ‘hey, maybe there really is something to this’.”
Part of the challenge was incorporating that clean strike sensation you get when putting with a wedge with enough forgiveness for everyday golfers to use. Landman revealed just how tough this was when they were testing out their first few prototypes.
“It felt incredible when you hit it, but it was still the same issue where it was like, well, it’s not forgiving enough,” he added. “You might as well just use a wedge if you’re going to do that.
“It was just a case of going through iteration after iteration until finally we were like, this one feels good. This one looks like something commercially we could put out there.
“It didn’t have all the colours, design and everything, but at least it had the shape and it had the feel of a real putter.”
Former PGA Tour winner and Champions Tour great Lauren Roberts, regarded as one of the finest putters of his generation, was one of a number of PGA Tour players to give the prototypes a go.
For the Spoiler co-founder it was the validation he needed.
“After he rolled a couple he said, ‘Why has no one ever done this before?’. And at that point, it was like we needed that momentum.
“We spent all this time and money trying to build something that is new and actually rolls the ball better, and now we have somebody who’s arguably top 10 putter ever saying, why has no one ever done this? And it’s like, all right, let’s move forward with this then.”
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