Long putters were front and center at last week’s Sony Open in Hawaii, where they were used by runner-up Ben An and Carl Yuan, who tied for fourth place. Young and talented Akshay Bhatia has also been using one. With PGA Tour Champions beginning its season today in the Aloha State, the age-defying Bernhard Langer and his broomstick model have a good chance to be part of the story. Last year, Lucas Glover, who had long struggled on the greens, switched to a long putter and resurrected his career, winning in consecutive weeks as his short game caught up to his consummate ball striking.
None of this might be happening if not for what occurred 40 years ago, on Christmas Day 1983. That’s when Charlie Owens first tried out a long putter that a machinist friend had built from his plans, a club designed out of desperation, as Owens explained in a 2007 Golf World story.
“I had the yips so bad,” Owens told me. “I would freeze up over a two-footer. Putting is a peculiar animal, and it works in mysterious ways. It’s mind over matter, but it’s hard to get over that hurdle. When you don’t think about anything but missing a putt, naturally you’re going to miss it. Some guys have nice calm hands, and some hands will be jumping like a pot of boiling peas. That's the way mine were."
But with the 52-inch invention held at the top by his left hand and anchored to his chest and swinging the club only with his right hand further down the shaft, Owens started making putts. The pendulum method was a balm against anxiety, and as he continued to refine the putter—eventually increasing its weight to 3½ pounds—it just got better. He had only 45 putts over 36 holes in winning a mini-tour event.
Others had employed extra-long putters before Owens, including a reinstated amateur from Durham, N.C., named Bobby Lutz in the early 1980s. Short-game wizard and two-time PGA champion Paul Runyan had experimented with a longer-than-standard putter anchored to his stomach decades earlier. As Runyan later wrote in Golf Digest, “An advantage I hadn’t expected is that this system minimizes the adverse effects of nervous tension.” One of Runyan’s pupils, Phil Rodgers, won two PGA Tour events in 1966 with a belly putter. Other elite players battling the yips, including multiple LPGA major champion Mary Mills, also tried it.
Twenty years after Rodgers’ twin victories with a belly putter, Owens won twice on the Senior PGA Tour with his anchored long putter. “I found the key to the lock,” Owens told People magazine in 1986. “With this putter, you can’t jerk the ball when you’re nervous. It might look funny, but missing putts can make a brave man cry. I just had to find my own way.”
Other struggling putters took note. I was in my late 20s at the time and battling the yips to the extent that I hit a few three-footers fat when I bought the Owens-inspired “Slim Jim,” whose head was described by its creator as “almost like a flying saucer with a square face.” I putted much better; my nerves had been soothed the way Owens’ were. After a couple of years, I was able to return to a conventional putter.
Orville Moody, the surprise U.S. Open champion in 1969, a great ball-striker but notoriously lousy putter, won the 1989 U.S. Senior Open anchoring a 48-inch putter to his chest. It did not go unnoticed by the authorities.
“It isn’t golf,” said P.J. Boatwright Jr., who had worked for the USGA for 30 years and was its longtime executive director of rules and competition and regarded by many as the world’s preeminent rules expert. There was much talk that summer about anchored long putters and whether they would be disallowed in the wake of Moody’s victory. After all, in the 1960s, the USGA had acted quickly to ban another unusual attempt to circumvent putting nerves. At that time, 54-year-old Sam Snead was the high-profile practitioner, finishing in a tie for sixth in the 1966 PGA Championship and tie for 10th at the 1967 Masters. The method didn’t sit well with Bobby Jones nor Joe Dey, the USGA’s longtime executive director.
A ban on the croquet style took effect in 1968, despite defenders of the technique such as former USGA president Prescott Bush, who stood astride the line to combat his own putting nerves. “We made the decision with great reluctance,” Dey said then, “but we felt it was the only way to eliminate the unconventional styles that have developed in putting. The game of golf was becoming bizarre.”
But after meeting in August 1989, the USGA and R&A did not do to anchored long putters what they had done with croquet putting. There was no prohibition, the USGA deciding that they “are not detrimental to the game.”
It would be years until golf’s governing bodies acted on anchored strokes. After a flurry of belly-putter major success (Keegan Bradley at the 2011 PGA Championship, Webb Simpson at the 2012 U.S. Open and Ernie Els at the 2012 Open Championship), the USGA and R&A in November 2012, announced a proposal to ban anchored strokes beginning in 2016, the year before Owens died at age 85. That Els had used the belly style to win his fourth major title was ironic considering that years earlier he had criticized anchoring, saying: “It’s become such an easy way to putt. Els said at the time. Nerves and skill are a part of the game. Take a tablet if you can’t handle it.”
Long putters have never been a cure-all, as evidenced most recently by An missing a four-footer to extend the Sony Open playoff won by Grayson Murray. Still, it’s interesting to consider what would have happened had the governing bodies sided with Boatwright’s view when the big decision was made 35 years ago.
Unanchored long putters might be an over-the-counter pill compared to the prescription-strength doses of their fixed-to-the sternum predecessors, but they are still medicine for the afflicted.
Great column, Bill. My wife Marian (whom you know) played a lot of golf with Charlie Owens when she was in school at USF in Tampa. She has always told me that he was both a great guy and an unbelievably good player. As you probably know he had a fused left leg (couldn't bend it at all) and also played cross-handed. Sam Snead said that Charlie Owens was the best long iron player he had ever seen.