SMALL BATCH Pinehurst
Our mission in the creation of our latest Small Batch design was to pay tribute to one of the greatest golf tournaments ever contested — the 1999 United States Open at Pinehurst’s famed No. 2.
It has been 25 years since the duel of the 1999 US Open reached the 18th green with everything hanging in the balance. Many have called this US Open the most exhilarating ever. The scenes after the winning putt fell are etched into the fabric of professional golf. In this Small Batch creation, we aimed to capture the grace and spirit of the champion at one of the most iconic venues in American golf.
We started from there.
The Head
The ’99 champion used a variety of putters throughout his magnificent career, but he is best known for using a center-shafted blade, and it was the model used to win at Pinehurst.
We certainly wanted to pay tribute to this style of putter, but we also pulled inspiration from several of the putters he used over the years to create Small Batch Pinehurst. As always, we look to create a piece that is in beautiful proportions and is in harmony with size. This means the top line, blade length, and width — including the shoulders — must be in perfect proportions. This putter had to be purpose-built to be a center-shafted putter, meaning we could not simply take a design that would work well with a plumber’s neck.
The key to this design was the topline — specifically its shape, its width and the shape and blend of the hosel as it meets the topline.
We spent hours upon hours designing, redesigning, and repositioning the hosel to get it just right.We landed the hosel slightly rearward on the top line to give the golfer an unobstructed view of the full leading edge and to make it simple to align. The goal of this part of the design was to keep it simple, clean and uninterrupted.
We took that philosophy as we created the back shoulders and cavity. Most center shafted putters suffer from very low inertia and we knew we could improve this. Our back design was inspired by another putter the ’99 champion had occasionally used — though we changed it quite dramatically.
Carving massive amounts of weight from the center and moving it to the toe and heel helped make it more forgiving, but we continued to push. We also slightly increased both the blade length and the blade width to make this one of the most forgiving designs we’ve created to date.
The Sole
The ’99 champ famously wore his trademark knickers, but he also had a penchant for color. He was also a student of the game and loved its history. We fell in love with his love of tartan. We took this opportunity to create our own tartan and mill it slowly into the sole of the putter. To fully honor his love of color we painted a small area of the tartan in our Creamy Yellow, Vintage Blue and Vintage Orange.
