The putter is the most used club in the bag, but so often, it’s also the club for which the smallest number of golfers get custom fit.
That’s beginning to change, though.
Putter fittings are now a fast-growing segment of the custom-club business, and Fully Equipped co-host Wadeh Maroun recently had the opportunity to go through a putter fitting at Ping headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz.
Maroun co-host, Kris McCormack, was along for the ride and he explained how Maroun and Ping Master fitter Alex went about the testing process and how it helped Maroun achieve such good results.
“I like the approach that you were talking about that Alex has where you gather all the data and do all of the initial adjustments in a vacuum in a laboratory-type setting where you can control all the variables,” McCormack said on this week’s episode. “But the secondary part of that confirmation on the putting green.”
McCormack unpacked that thought a little further.
“Ever heard of parallax distortion?”
“Absolutely not,” Maroun said.
“Perfect,” McCormack said. “So essentially it is the players’ interpretation of their environment and how they will subconsciously start to adjust to external linear influences.”
In layman’s terms, that means golfers don’t play golf on perfectly conditioned ranges or flat putting greens. They play on a course that is going to present them with a unique shot, target, wind and many other variables. How you hit a club or a putter in a controlled environment isn’t exactly how you hit it in real life.
“You’ll see this a lot in an indoor fitting environment,” McCormack said. “So you’ll have a square screen and a square turf that you’re hitting off of. And it’s just everything is square, square, square, square. And same kind of thing in a putting environment, you have all of these external linear influences that start to manipulate things.”
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That’s why, McCormack said, a fitting isn’t complete until you go out onto a real green and validate what you saw in the controlled environment.
“It’s not real, because you’re on a perfect mat. Right?” Maroun said. “There’s always a little groove, so everything goes dead straight. So you’re like, ‘Heck yeah, how am I hitting this straight every single time? This putter is amazing.’
“It’s when you get out and the variables come into play. A straight putt in real life is one of the hardest things to hit on a golf course.”
Maroun’s fitting experience will be coming soon to GOLF’s social channels, and you can watch the whole episode of GOLF’s Fully Equipped below.
Want to overhaul your bag for 2024? Find a True Spec fitting location near you.
