Want To Be A Putter Designer? Read This First.

Convinced You Have The Next Great Putter? Design At Your Own Risk!

Janis Zichmanis would lie in bed waiting out the lonely moments of frustration, fear and fantasy that leave many of us with the cold sweats. He had to confront the demons that pry their way into the mind when there are too many bills to pay, nothing left to mortgage and nowhere else to turn. By late summer it was day to day; he was on the verge of being out on the street.

At 62, retired and living in Toronto, he should have been in his golden years after a successful career as an advertising copywriter. But all that Zichmanis had left (more than $100,000, he says) was invested in a mission, of sorts, an all-encompassing pursuit that almost no one is crazy or devoted enough to try.

“I can’t tell you how close I was, I must confess,” says Zichmanis, who even got to the point where he had to borrow “several tens of thousands of dollars” from a couple of school friends, whom he now calls minority partners. “I definitely would have had to move. I would have been living with someone else.”

What took Zichmanis down this road toward insolvency wasn’t gambling, bad investments or drugs. It was golf. Specifically, inventing a putter. And he is not alone.

Lurking in the fringe of the golf industry are more than a handful of these inveterate tinkerers, possessed by the pursuit of discovering the perfect putting implement. Their passion seems at first glance bizarre and yet admirable, almost inspiring. These are inventors, discoverers, dreamers. What drives them isn’t merely capturing a small piece of the estimated $195 million putter industry. More than that, they have the answer, and they want to share it with everyone.

Why are they so compelled? Ask Scotty Cameron, the celebrity-genius of wannabe putter designers and an indirect descendant of their patron saint, Karsten Solheim, the one-time General Electric engineer and the man who invented Ping.

“It’s about building a better mousetrap,” Cameron says. “We’re different people. Like Walt Disney, who went to 80 different banks before anyone gave him the money. He had a passion and a vision to believe. There’s no difference when you make putters. It’s believing in your talents. If you get shot down enough, you may have to do something else. But if you have a passion and a vision, you can succeed.”

These inventors are easily given hope, especially in a time when pros routinely choose odd grips and even odder-shaped putters to combat their putting woes. Zichmanis believed his Pure Pendulum System would surely draw interest from some investor, especially in the presence of his almost evangelical enthusiasm. Nevertheless, investors, golf manufacturers and even the PGA Tour (no credential) showed Zichmanis the door all too often. Interesting, they’d say, but not interested. By mid-2003, Zichmanis was close to losing his home.

“When you’re against it, it’s time to see what you’ve got,” he says. “It’s always the question you get in your mind. And depending on how you react then, you look at life differently.”

His fervor is a mixture of the unsettling (he will happily provide you with a copy of the 7,000-word prospectus for his putter) and the infectious (you can’t help but try it, especially if you haven’t made anything longer than a two-footer lately). More than just a putter, Zichmanis’ Pure Pendulum is a reinvention of putting itself. Its grip is nearly 1 1/2-inches wide, enough for most to use a side-by-side position with the thumbs. To hold the putter properly, the fore and middle fingers drape down the sides of the shaft, while the ring and pinkie fingers interlock on the underside of the shaft, promoting a straight-back and straight-through stroke, similar to a pendulum.

Looked at another way, Zichmanis’ grip takes the shape of hands folded in prayer.

A Dream (and one meal a day)

Walt Boettger has already refinanced his home in Folsom, Pa., twice. He jokes there isn’t a belt in his closet he hasn’t punched extra holes in. And after 12 years of running his tiny company, Straight 8 Golf, he had spent about $1 million to keep it afloat. He says he reached a turning point while developing his SteadiStroke putter last year. How much of one? The project’s success left him claiming a 2002 income of $500.

From thinking up the shape to refining the type of brass in the head to getting the right softness in the polymer inserts, Boettger says the SteadiStroke was an 80-hour, seven-day-a-week job without a steady paycheck. “I think about it when I get up in the morning, and I work on it all day, and then I think of it when I get to bed,” Boettger says. “I have the most incredible wife who ever lived. What I have put her through, this woman should be a saint.”

That woman, Judy, is as passionate about Walt and his obsession as he is about putters. They often eat just once a day, and it’s no exaggeration to suggest that a good portion of what would go to food goes to clubheads and putter shafts. She still believes, even when she rolls over in bed at 3 in the morning to find Walt gone. “He’s downstairs in the workshop,” she says. “That’s when he gets his ideas. “I know what he’s been through, and what I’ve been through is nothing compared to what he’s been through,” she continues. “Sooner or later, someone is going to know who we are.”

A Flood of Designs and Hopes

Veterans of the golf industry have many stories of people who show up at their doors with the latest revolutionary design. Putters lead the way. In his 26 years as technical director at the U.S. Golf Association, Frank Thomas estimates he made 5,000 decisions on equipment. “And half of them had to be putters,” he says.

Pete Samuels, the spokesman for Ping, says his company’s legal department handles at least one design submission a week. John Hoeflich, director of product marketing at TaylorMade, says there have been “hundreds” of offers for his company to consider, but few are worth the time. “Once in a while, there’s a Karsten Solheim, but those guys come along every 10 years, if that,” Hoeflich says. “Their odds are probably better on winning the Powerball than coming up with a good putter design. But it keeps them off the street and off the golf course, and both are good things.”

For all the money in putter sales, three companies–Ping, Titleist and Callaway’s Odyssey–control nearly two-thirds of the market. That leaves roughly $70 million in potential sales for all the other golf companies, as well as Zichmanis and Boettger and others working from their garages or their kitchen tables.

Every part-time clubmaker and equipment tinkerer has in the back of his mind the story of Solheim, who invented a putter after he hit upon the idea of heel-and-toe weighting by gluing some sugar cubes to a Popsicle stick. Solheim knocked on a lot of doors and tried to get players of all levels to try his loud-sounding, plumber’s tool-like putters in the 1960s. Eventually, he set out on his own, and today, as everyone knows, that company is Ping, whose putter designs are still being copied.

But the Solheim success story still happens today. In the early 1990s Bobby Grace was making 20 putterheads in his garage in St. Petersburg, Fla. It was hardly a high-tech operation. Grace would take 10 to PGA Tour stops and ask pros to try them and then take the other 10 and sell them in Japan. In the summer of 1994, Nick Price grabbed one of Grace’s designs, Fat Lady Swings. Price used it in a wire-to-wire victory in the PGA Championship at Southern Hills that August.

“The next day I had 27,000 orders,” Grace says. He had one friend helping him out. Business associates in Japan created a bidding war for the distributorship, and the next order went to 48,000 units. “Like the paper here in St. Pete put it,” Grace says, “I went from a Toyota to a Lexus overnight.”

Grace’s big numbers and a big-dollar deal to make putters for Cobra eventually went away, but he is getting attention again thanks to the success of Vijay Singh, Retief Goosen and Hank Kuehne.

Another putter tinkerer enjoying success is Kevin Burns of Sunnyvale, Calif., who got his start in the business by buying a milling machine with money he had saved for a house. He got noticed when Jose Maria Olazabal won the 1999 Masters using his putter and now has a design partnership with Bridgestone Sports in Japan.

“That’s the beauty of it–there’s plenty of room for everyone,” says Burns, who sells about 40,000 putters a year. “How big do I have to be to be successful?” Burns asks.

Not all that big, it turns out. Boettger says he did a market study and concluded that all he had to gain was “point eight of 1 percent of the avid-golfer market to make a real good living.”

Buried by success

Though a small-timer like Boettger seeks it dearly, even the heady moment of having a tour player use your unknown putter to win a major championship can have its downside. Jim Weeks, a longtime teaching pro in Southern California, designed the SeeMore putter in 1997 to help people get the right shaft angle at address. When Payne Stewart made a 15-footer on the 72nd hole to win the U.S. Open at Pinehurst in 1999, Weeks discovered what can happen: 55,000 orders. But, Weeks adds, he doesn’t know how many orders the company lost just because his small operation–two people at the time–couldn’t handle the calls. “It took us a year to catch up, and we really never did,” he admits. After that big year, though, SeeMore sales have returned to their pre-Stewart days. Now, most sales come from the SeeMore website, not from your local golf shop, although a recent win by the PGA Tour’s Zach Johnson has helped.

For the small entrepreneur, there are countless problems that designers at Ping or Odyssey never face, including something as simple and fundamental as raw materials. Alex Gammill, a business systems analyst in Austin, Tex., designed a putter he called the Railgun. After placing an order for 2,500 heads, the manufacturing plant in Taiwan promised delivery in six months. Gammill planned to market the Railgun as the putter with the most perimeter weighting in its face. His marketing story was that 70 percent of the total weight of the putter was in the heel and toe.

“The problem was, my order was so small it kept getting put on the back burner,” Gammill recalls. “So, instead of six months, it was more like a year and half. And when it came out [in 1999], another company already had come out with a putter whose perimeter weighting was 80 percent, so I couldn’t make that claim anymore.”

The sad result is that Gammill’s initial investment of $70,000 translated into sales of about 1,000 putters in four years for revenue of more than $100,000. He has invested another $30,000 in an operation he runs from his kitchen table, and estimates he has broken even in that time. If that’s true, Gammill is ahead of the game for the average tinkerer. Of course, sales have stalled, and he’s running out of money. Like others, he has shopped his design to larger companies, which have turned him down, and that’s where the bitterness comes in. Gammill says some companies entertained his ideas, said no thanks, and months later came out with similar models.

Although the designs and theories of the Gammills, Zichmanises and Boettgers of the world may vary, the inventors all share a common belief: The thing really works.

There’s David Matthews in Kingsport, Tenn., who came up with the Arjun putter, which features a small block with angled sides as the head. He has sold a little more than 100 putters. Why does he do it?

“I see something that can be changed, and then I want to change it. It’s an effort to help,” says Matthews, whose website tells his story in eight languages. “I see good tour players missing short putts; that’s when I wish they had my putter.”

There’s Jon Klyve, a former oil engineer from Bergen, Norway, who quit his job to come up with a putterface that contained a “cassette” that actually flexes. Klyve believes a flex dispels energy, allowing the ball to get rolling without skipping off the putterface. He has the backing of a large Norwegian development company, Prototech, to bring the “Clyve” putter to market.

Phil Albenze, a retired supervisor for General Motors, came up with the idea for his String putter in his sleep after a rough day on the greens. “I felt so bad it carried over into my dreams,” says Albenze. “In the morning I told my wife about the dream and drew it out on a napkin.” What he drew up was a putter that had strings similar to a tennis racket. What he eventually produced was a putter with milled grooves, a slot in the top and a brass insert. Now, he and his family are pursuing his dream together. It has cost them approximately $100,000, but there’s a website where you can buy it right from the Albenzes’ kitchen in New Port Richey, Fla.

“I hope everyone who has a dream pursues it. It’s so exciting to see it materialize,” Albenze says. “Someday I almost wish that someone would come up to me and say, ‘This is the dumbest putter I’ve ever seen, and you should throw it into the river.’ But we don’t. Everything we get is positive.

“Is it worth it?” Albenze continues. “To me, yes. I keep on trying. I’m sure, someday, someone will see it–a large company, or some pro will see it, and he’ll try it.”

It’s that belief that continues to fuel the guys in their garages. “There is hope for those guys,” says Cameron, whose million-dollar putting studio is the haunt of tour players and the source of his successful line of Titleist putters. Cameron should know. He started selling fancy putters in a little shop in Hawaii that were popular among Japanese golf tourists. As his reputation grew, Cameron would go on to sign deals and design putters with Ray Cook, then Mizuno and finally with Titleist.

“It’s a pipe dream for these small guys to have a big company to come along,” says Cameron. “Can it still happen? No doubt about it. There’s no school to tell you how to do it. But first you have to have the product. Without a good product, good luck. And when you first start out a lot of people will tell you you can’t do it. But you have to stick to your guns and show that you can. Where did Karsten Solheim come from? The garage.”

When the Payoff Comes

Back in his garage, Zichmanis was down to what had to be the end. But in early August of last year, a Toronto-based investor gave him $200,000 to develop the Pure Pendulum putter. It should be enough to keep the wolf away at least for a year. “When the payoffs come, it feels 10 times as good,” says Zichmanis, and Boettger and Albenze and all the others could say the same. “After you’ve been through the downs, and you get the ups, you learn you can live through it again. I’m not afraid of it. I don’t look for the downs, but they don’t keep me up at night. I don’t care if I have to live in a basement to see this thing through, because it will outlast me. I’m not in this for the money. I believe this is my legacy.”

by:Ted Johnson