Why is a 50-year-old putter being played on Tour? Pro’s answer tears him up
Jay Don Blake on Thursday on his first hole at Black Desert.
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Jay Don Blake understands the head tilts. The perplexity.
Nope, he’s not yielding a Millenium Falcon-looking mallet, nor a broomstick that stretches to his navel.
Yes, he’s rolling with a gold-colored blade putter that’s maybe an inch thick and a few inches long, whose only frills are just a small curve near its heel and a few words on its bottom, these three being its most pertinent:
Titleist Bulls Eye.
“I know a lot of guys have looked at me like, ‘What do you got there?” Blake said.
“Some people haven’t even seen a putter like that.”
This week, as the PGA Tour plays its first-ever Black Desert Championship, Blake would have better chances of breaking 50 than he would avoiding all the potential feels. The Black Desert is being held at Black Desert Resort in Ivins, Utah, where Blake said he could squint and spot where he grew up, in a trailer in nearby St. George. Thursday’s first round also marked Blake’s 500th career Tour start, a milestone he crossed after tournament organizers offered him a sponsor exemption for what was the 65-year-old’s first Tour event since 2018.
So how would he memorialize it all? Maybe the better question is how could you, but Blake had a thought, and with it, a story, which he shared Wednesday. It started with a Vegas trip — seemingly some of the best yarns do — where Blake, his nephew and some of his nephew’s friends went on a Sin City golf bender, and the longtime pro played as if going low would earn him a buffet comp. With a 62 one round (that included a final-hole bogey), he broke his age for the first time. But more notably for this story, a playing partner also had a Bulls Eye. Blake had one of those. It sat in a corner in his home. It’s 50-plus years old.
Dad had once given it to him, too, and wouldn’t it be so sweet to drop it in the bag this week — nah, he couldn’t. OK, OK, but he could with friends. One round. Why not?
“And they, still to this day, keep saying, he made every single putt with that thing,” Blake said.
“Then I go back to a Scotty Cameron putter that I’ve been using for quite a few years and I’d putt OK with that and I’d bring that Bulls Eye back out and every time I putted with that thing, I felt like I putted pretty exceptional. I’ve been debating whether I’d put it in play or not.”
You know how things settled there. Of course, he did. What a story, right?
A 65-year-old making his 500th career PGA Tour start in eyesight of where everything started for him then continued.
“I mean, it’s nice that I feel comfortable with the putter, but it’s a remembrance of my father,” he said as he started to tear up. ”And so I’ll be walking the fairways again with that putter. I’m proud to do that. I’m comfortable with it, and I feel like I’ll have no issues.
“So it’s going to be fun and I’ll enjoy it, and all this stuff is going to be a lot of good memories.”
Before we go, though, one more story from Blake.
Hadn’t he mentioned above he uses a Scotty Cameron? He had. Would he want to share how that relationship started? He would.
It starts with a putter toss — seemingly some of the best yarns do.
“I went out and played this golf course, putted horrible, still putting bad, I was frustrated,” Blake started. “I’m not a guy that gets upset; I’ve never broken a club in my life. Well, I’ve done it just for fun just to say I’ve done it.
“But I played these holes and missed these putts, and about the 14th, 15th hole, I got frustrated and I went to kind of take my putter and kind of flat fly it, boomerang it over just off to the side of the green. And I accidentally held onto it too long, and the carts were about 10 feet just right of where I was going to slide it over to it, and all of a sudden as I let it go, I see where it’s headed. And the putter sounded like a pinball machine, the shaft rattling the railing.
“And I’ve still got that putter today, and it’s got bands in it where I’ve had to re-straighten it and get it all back into shape to where I could use it for the rest of the round. I didn’t make it to the rest of the round. I threw it in the pond over at the golf course over there.”
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Only, around that moment in February of 1991, he soon had to play that week’s Tour stop, the Shearson Lehman Brothers Open, played at Torrey Pines in San Diego. (The tournament’s now called the Farmers Insurance Open.)
“We get over to San Diego,” Blake continued. “I drove over there and they went back home, and it’s still afternoon. And I go to the putting green, and there’s a gentleman, Scotty Cameron, that had just got credentials to provide putters that he’d built with his dad in the garage. He grew up there in San Diego, so he was out there promoting his equipment.
“So I’m out there looking for a new putter and end up finding one and putting with two or three of them. And he’s like, can I help you with anything?
“I was like, I’m just checking out your putters. Turns out he let me use one of the putters that I felt comfortable with, and using that putter I ended up winning the San Diego golf tournament that same week. So me and Scotty have been kind of buddies for a while.
“After the interviews and stuff, you’re leading the tournament, they come and ask you some questions, what’s changed in your game. I’m like, I couldn’t think of anything. I said, I’ve never really done anything different from the game and the game is still the same, I didn’t change much — oh, wait a minute, I got a new putter, I got a different putter. So they asked me what happened to the other one and I had to tell that story.
“Then as the story goes on, they send a scuba diver over to Palm Springs and they fished the putter that I threw in the lake out, and I’ve still got it. It sits in the corner with the one my dad gave me. It still looks as good as ever, but it’s got a few little nicks in it. That’s kind of the story of the Bulls Eye putter of how I went from that to the Scotty Cameron. And then it’s going to be a pleasure to use a Bulls Eye again that was given to me from my dad. It meant a lot when I got it, and it still does.
“It’s a good thing to remember my dad for.”
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