at Club Champion where he wrote the training manual for the fitters at the company’s 143 facilities, also has seen the shift towards mallets. “Teachers and teaching aids have pushed folks away from an arcing stroke to more straight-back, straight-through, which lends itself better to a mallet,” he says. In addition, today’s mallets can have more of the feel you’ve previously had only with blades while building in more features for aim and consistency. That’s what we’ve seen with Scheffler’s switch to a mallet that helped key his run to a dominant position as World No 1. Schef- fler’s TaylorMade Spider Tour X L-neck helped give him a similar control that he had in a blade, plus more forgive- ness. The result was an 87-spot jump in his rank in strokes gained putting. Of the top 30 players in the world right now, 23 use mallet putters, includ- ing five of the top 10 and three of the top five, a fundamental shift from 20 years ago, when 17 of the top 20 players in the world preferred blades. Is there something that has made mallets a more fashionable go-to? A look at our Hot List scoring shows a slight preference overall for mallets. Specifically, when our players provide scores for putters, they give us a 1-5 preference for Look, Sound/Feel and Performance, where “1” is worst and “5” is best. If you look at the average Perfor- mance scores for all players for all mal- lets that made the Hot List, that score is slightly higher than the score for blade putters that made the list. The median Performance score for any mallet from our players’ ratings was 4.02, and the median for all blades was 3.96. That’s not a huge advantage, but what makes it more telling is that our players were giving a significantly higher Look score to blades than they were mallets (3.88 to 3.76). In other words, our play- ers might not have been in love with the appearance of a mallet, but they were very much smitten by the results. Mallets may not have the jewellery- like appeal of a classic blade, but their versatility is an overwhelming benefit. If you were to make a switch, we can’t promise Scheffler-like results, but we don’t think you’d be giving up any- thing, either.
a new putter shouldn’t be about decid- ing once and for all that you are a blade fan or a mallet fan. One shape will pro- duce results that give you more confi- dence. The right tool for you should be dialled into your length and alignment requirements. Then, it’s a matter of un- derstanding results (distance control, consistency of contact, truer roll, etc.), not simply leaning on the model that you’ve holed the most putts with. There have been some long-standing thoughts about whether the blade – generally with its hosel attached in the heel, creating what’s called “toe hang” – works better with strokes that have more arc to them. Conversely, some say the mallet – generally with a more face-balanced orientation – fits strokes that are more straight back and straight through. But because of new methods of internal weighting, mallets now
Golf Galaxy and chief fitter at the Hot List, doesn’t think the differences are clear-cut anymore. “We’re starting to look at what kind of putter works with what kind of stroke, and we’re seeing evidence that it’s not even the case most of the time that face- balanced putters work with one kind of stroke and toe-hang putters work with a different kind of stroke,” Marchini says. There are, he says, a lot of variables in play, including how far back the centre of gravity might be on one putter ver- sus another, and whether that internal weighting better aligns itself with a par- ticular stroke. Nick Sherburne, founder Today’s mallets can have more of the feel you’ve previously had only with blades while building in more features for aim and consistency.
can feature toe hang and work well with an arc stroke. Chris Marchini, director of golf experience for
BEAUTY IS AS BEAUTY DOES Blades have the classic looks, but mallets often perform better.
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 87
MARCH/APRIL 2025
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