Leave it to Tiger Woods to start the week of the British Open Championship with the so called “shock news” that he is changing his putter from his faithful Scotty Cameron to the new and highly regarded Nike Method Putter. Why is this big news in the golf world? Well let us putt it this way when a club has been with you long enough to clock up $90 million in prize money, saying goodbye to it going into a major competition is fairly big news in the industry.
Luckily for me last week I took the Nike Method Putter for a spin, alas not a brilliant deduction into the way the mind of the Worlds #1 works but it is the same putter the Stuart Cink used to win the exact same competition this time last year. So below is a quick golf club review on the Nike Method Putter.
When you choose your putter it should be the club that you are most comfortable with in your entire bag. Lets face it most of us play nearly 40% of all our shots with a putter but we spend more money on our drivers and irons. When you look at the number of putters that are available the sheer multitude of what is available can be a little daunting but when it comes to precision my personal opinion is that a putter where you can put the shaft of the club over the top of the ball and the blade of the putter behind the ball gives the cleanest strike. The Nike Method 001 Putter pretty much offers all of that and of course being from the swoosh a little more.
The sales bumph on the Method Putter range is immense especially as there are five versions of the club to meet the needs of any golfer. As my personal preference is the design inventively named the Nike Method 001 that was the one I took for a few hours on the practice green and then 18 holes.
Nike are using the fact that they have two (three if you now include Tiger Woods) big winners on the US PGA Tour as a major player in their advertising and it isn’t much of a shock to be honest. Looking back at the way Stuart Cink was putting at last years British Open, especially that putt on the 18th to get the play off with the ageless Tom Watson, there had to be something to it and Cink openly talks about how the putter improved his game.
Nike have done a good job of curing one of my major ills on the green, the addition of the “Polymetal Grooves” mean there is a greatly reduced skip of the ball as it leaves the club face. This removes the skip as teh ball is struck and takes away the skidding as the ball rolls true along the green. The benefit of this is that the roll along the green is now as you read it, where before the skip and skid would cause a discrepancy in even the most experienced of golfers putts.
So after having this club with me on the practice green for a little longer than normal and taking the advice of the club pro on a few things, I started to get to grips with the Nike Method Putter. Normally I wouldn’t take the advice of the club pro before going out on the course but I was having a few issues with my putting with this club, I was going 3 feet long on pretty much every putt and it wasn’t because I was putting badly. The reason I was hitting long was because of the reduction in the skip and skid, because the ball was rolling straight off of the club face I didn’t need to hit the ball quite as hard to get a smooth roll.
Overall this caused me a few issues out on the course and I would say that the club would need a few more hours (well quite a lot actually) for me to get used to over my beloved Scotty Cameron but having said that I do see a massive benefit in getting a true roll on the ball in the way that the Nike Method 001 Putter does. I was struggling with putts between 6 to 10 feet but it would seem that the advantage I had with this club was at the greater distances and my putting nemesis the uphill putting!
Uphill especially I was hitting either into the cup or much closer than I normally would, meaning I was finding it a lot easier to make less mistakes on the green! Would I recommend this putter for a higher handicap golfer? Many of the clubs I review I think they are designed with the tour pro in mind and not the average Joe looking to enjoy his game, when testing this for this golf club review I had with me my long suffering buddy who also used the putter and he managed to drop from his average of 34 putts in that round to 29.
Now before this became Tiger Woods new putter I was already convinced about this being a fantastic club but I guess with the endorsement of the worlds best golfer and the benefits to all levels of golfer, adding to that the huge amount of increase in accuracy and control on slower greens, this is a great leap forward in technology as well as club development.
The price tag is a little expensive but again as previously mentioned if you are going to be using this more than any other club in your bag it is worth shelling out for the extra control. Oh yeah one more thing I love the grip on this club! Seriously comfortable to grip and even after a number of hours on the practice green I was still happy to continue.
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