8 millimeters 🎯
New analysis reveals a mind-blowing fact about Tiger Woods' iconic putter
Mike Ehrmann
In the pantheon of revered golf clubs, there's Ben Hogan's 1-iron, and there's Tiger Woods' putter. You'd be hard-pressed to find other clubs worthy of being mentioned in the same breath.
Tiger has won 14 of his 15 majors with his famed cherry bomb Scotty Cameron putter, a backup of which sold at auction for more than $393,000 last year. Perhaps the best part of Tiger's Elder Wand is how its appearance has changed over the years. Dents and dings have surfaced, as has an almost perfectly round wear mark squarely in the center of the face.
It's impressive to the naked eye, but a recent analysis by the The Putting Engineer via his Instagram account makes it all the more interesting.
As you can see below, Charles Market, better known on Instagram as The Putting Engineer, took the exact dimensions of Tiger Woods' putter and used an advanced program to measure the exact size of the wear spot in the middle of the clubface.
It comes out to just 8 millimeters, or about 0.3 inches. For context, that's about half the size of a dime, and within 2 millimeters of what Dave Pelz's putting robot "perfy" would hit putts at.
"Tiger is not far off from being a robot!" he says. "And that's over thousands of putts."
Aim small
As for how we can actually use this information to improve our own games, The Putting Engineer says it's OK to aim a little lower than the greatest of all time.
"For amateur players, if you can strike the majority of your putts in a dime on the front of your putter you are doing very well," he says. "If you can strike the majority of your putts in a [nickel] then you are doing OK. If your strike pattern is any bigger than that you will struggle with speed control in my opinion."
With the hope to do anything golf-related even half as well as Tiger Woods, I put a dime over the sweetspot of my own putterface and placed a set of Putt Dots on either side.
It took a few putts to adjust, but I started to get the hang of it. It gave me yet another new sense of appreciation for Tiger Woods, and something useful to practice this offseason.