Bullseye

How a $1 putter fixed solved years of frustration By Aron Carroll for Clubhouse Collective

It’s been said that good putters are born, not made. But what happens when someone who used to be a good putter seemingly loses all of their ability to get the ball in the hole? That’s what happened to me and it sent me on a journey into the past.

When I first started playing golf, all I could do was putt. Quite simply it was the reason I kept coming back to the course. I was all arms and legs as a kid and trying to sequence the body of a child that would eventually be six and a half feet tall proved to be difficult. I would hit these monster slices and want to either break my clubs, or take them home and bury them in the backyard.

My dad used to tell me that when he first started playing, he was a really good putter, but that one day it just went away. He usually would tell me this on the way home from the golf course where his lack of putting prowess had sabotaged what probably would have been a good score. I used to think that he was nuts. How could you stop being good at putting? Of all the things that we do on a golf course, shouldn’t putting be the easiest?

My view on his statements didn’t change until a few years ago, when every trip to a green complex was accompanied by a prayer to the heavens that I would be able to walk away having only spent two shots. Throw money at the problem! That was my first instinct. I searched high and low for different makes and models to help me unlock my lost ability.

Odyssey, Taylormade and Edel all had their cracks at the problem and all of them failed. I tried different lengths and grips. I studied endlessly about toe hang, but nothing seemed to work. All of the putters I tried had one thing in common though. They all had some form of an insert. I decided that had to be the issue.

A normal person would have just gone out and bought a regular putter that was solid steel and moved on with their life. But I was not a normal person, I was a man on the edge. I had grown sick of all the different types of putters too. Mallet, mid-mallet, Anser style all made me sick because I had failed so miserably with all of them. Then one day after playing putt-putt with my kids it hit me, I needed a bullseye.

When I told my dad my intention, he looked at me like I was crazy. A buddy of mine started to talk me out of it like I was a fifty-five-year-old man looking to buy a motorcycle. Was this the equivalent of a golf midlife crisis? There was only one way to find out.

I found it at a garage sale of all places, sitting all alone in a golf bag just begging to be plucked out of what certainly would be a trip to a landfill. On the sole of the copper-colored head the words “BARON MODEL 203” were stamped and it had a circular grip that had hardened into a plastic-feeling material. I decided that this would be the one and I paid the woman the dollar she was asking for it.

The grip was completely shot so I decided to put a Ping blackout grip on it. Why that grip? Two reasons: because it was cheap and because of Tiger Woods. All told this experiment would cost me less than ten bucks.

When the Baron, as I came to call him, made his debut he was met with jeers. I had decided to use it for the first time at golf league and word quickly spread about the newest addition to my bag. Those laughs quickly went away after the round though. You see after the round is when the skins money gets passed out, and the Baron was ready to collect.

It was like an out-of-body experience. Everything within ten feet went dropped and all of my lag putts seemed to settle around a two foot circle. That feeling carried on through the rest of the summer. It was the same thing almost every time I played. Someone would ask me if I stole it from a putt-putt course, and then they would lose.

The same mind that brought me to the loving arms of the Baron also made me question his effectiveness though. There’s a reason no one on tour uses a bullseye anymore. There is absolutely no technology in them and about the same amount of forgiveness. But I think that is what made it so perfect for me at that time. I couldn’t hide behind an insert or perimeter weighting. I had to focus and use the ability I had in my hands.

Like most golfers though I continued to tinker, and eventually the Baron was replaced. But the lessons I learned from that experiment still rattle around in my head. A wise man once said, “THAT BALL DON’T LIE”, and while he was usually issued a technical foul after saying it, the words still ring true. The golf ball isn’t moving so whatever it does is because of what you have done to it. So take the time to focus on it and don’t hide behind the technology you’ve been afforded.