Putter Sessions · 60 minutes
Twenty Minutes of Measuring
Before You Roll a Ball.
Putter fitting is mostly geometry. Get the eyes in the right place relative to the line, get the loft matched to how much the shaft leans at impact, and stop treating an arcing stroke as a fault to be corrected. Most of the rest is preference, and preference is legitimate.
Length First, and It Is Usually Wrong
The standard retail putter is thirty-five inches. It has been thirty-five inches for decades, for reasons of manufacturing convenience rather than human anatomy. A large majority of the golfers we measure are better served somewhere between thirty-two and thirty-four.
Length that is too long forces the hands away from the body and pushes the eyes inside the target line, which makes the golfer aim right and compensate by pulling. It also makes the putter sit on its toe, so the effective loft and the face angle at address are both wrong before the stroke begins.
We measure where your eyes actually sit with a laser line, then set length so the eyes land on or marginally inside the ball. Then we check the sole sits flat. Then, and only then, do we start rolling putts.
Shortening a putter is a fifteen-dollar bench job. Together with a regrip it is comfortably the highest-value change available anywhere in a golf bag per dollar spent, and it is the reason a proportion of putter sessions end with the golfer keeping the putter they arrived with.
What Gets Measured
- Eye position relative to the ball, with a laser
- Sole contact at address, checked on a flat plate
- Shaft lean at impact, from high-speed capture
- Face angle at address and at impact
- Stroke arc, measured over the full length of the stroke
- Launch, skid distance and time to true roll
Why Your Putter Has Loft at All
A ball at rest sits slightly down in the grass. Loft on a putter face lifts it out of that depression so it can begin rolling rather than bouncing. Too little and the ball is driven into the turf and hops; too much and it launches, skids further and takes longer to settle onto its line.
The complication is that the loft delivered at impact is static loft plus or minus your shaft lean. A golfer who presses their hands well forward is delivering two or three degrees less than the number stamped on the sole. That golfer needs a higher-lofted putter, not a lower one, which is counterintuitive enough that it catches almost everybody out.
We measure lean, calculate delivered loft, and bend the putter to suit. It is a ten-minute bench job and the difference in how quickly the ball settles is visible on the roll surface without any instrumentation at all.
The Arc Argument
Every putting stroke arcs to some degree, because the club is swinging around a body. How much it arcs varies enormously between golfers and it is largely a function of posture and shaft plane rather than of technique.
Our position is that the head should be matched to the stroke rather than the stroke retrained to the head. A strong arc pairs with more toe hang; a nearly straight stroke pairs with a face-balanced mallet. Fighting your natural arc with the wrong hosel configuration produces exactly the inconsistency the golfer came in to solve.
Weight, Grip and Head Shape
Head Weight and Green Speed
Heavier heads suit slower greens and shorter strokes; lighter heads suit fast greens where touch matters more than momentum. Most central Ohio public courses run in the eights and nines through summer, which sits comfortably in the middle of the range.
Grip Size and Shape
Larger grips reduce wrist action, which helps golfers whose miss comes from a flicky release and hurts golfers who rely on feel. There is no correct answer. We give you three sizes and look at what happens to face angle at impact.
Head Shape and Alignment
Blade, mid-mallet or mallet is partly a moment-of-inertia decision and partly an aiming one. We check where you actually aim each shape with a laser, because a putter you aim correctly beats a putter that is theoretically more forgiving.
Distance Control Is the Real Test
Nobody three-putts because they missed the line by half an inch. They three-putt because the first putt finished six feet short or eight feet long. The last twenty minutes of a putter session is spent on lag putting from thirty and forty feet, and if a configuration does not improve your leave distance there, it does not go home with you regardless of how good it looks.
Sixty Minutes, $95
Tess runs these. Bring your current putter and, if you have one gathering dust in the garage, bring that too — the one you gave up on is often closer to correct than the one you replaced it with.
A good proportion of these sessions end in a bend, a shortening and a regrip on the putter you already own, which comes to well under a hundred dollars including the session fee credit.
- Length, lie and loft recommendation with measured reasoning
- Delivered loft including your shaft lean
- Stroke arc measurement and matching hosel configuration
- Aim test results across three head shapes
- Lag putting leave distances, before and after