Word: putters
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sixty years ago, Bobby Jones never mentioned dispersion factors. He kissed his putter and called her Calamity Jane. "Sixty years ago," says Gene Sarazen, still slickered down and knickered up and still playing golf at 86, "I had a rotten grip. If you ask me, that's why there are so many excellent players today. A good grip is like a solid hinge on an oak door." Sarazen goes back to hickory sticks that required shellacking in the rain, and is amused by the '80s fashion, which encompasses titanium shafts, tungsten fibers, beryllium-copper, manganese-bronze and high-modulus graphite...
...years ago this week at the Masters in Augusta, Ga., where anyone with a wet eye could see that his mother in the gallery and his son at his side had more to do with a sixth victory surging out of him at 46 than did the oversize putter he waved jubilantly. "I wanted something with the largest possible moment of inertia and the smallest dispersion factor," he said at the time...
...design of Slotline's "inertial weighted" clubs was inspired in part by the work of Karsten Solheim, the entrepreneur who developed the well-known Ping putter in the 1960s. Solheim found that if a putter's club face is heavily weighted in the heel and toe but light in the center, putts tend to go straighter. Even if the ball is not hit in the center of the club, the putter usually does not twist much. Duclos has taken Solheim's idea a logical step further. In Slotline's Big Moment putter, the weight difference between the tips...
...Skylab programs. Golf was his passion, and he became convinced that "clubs really weren't designed to take full advantage of the principles of physics." In 1975 Duclos took a leave from his job and began to experiment with club improvements in his home workshop. He first invented a putter with a slot and a white line in the center that helped golfers position their eyes directly above the ball. To finance the manufacture of this "slotline" club, Duclos ^ took out a $30,000 second mortgage on his home. His initial designs did not catch on, and the early years...
Slotline finally took off in 1982, when Duclos came out with his exaggerated version of the heel-and-toe-weighted putter. Duclos claimed he had measured his putter's superior performance and ran newspaper ads under the headline PUTT 2.5 TIMES BETTER. Since then Slotline has sold more than 400,000 putters. Last year the company introduced heel-and-toe-weighted irons and sold 12,000 sets in 15 months; 6,000 sets of its new metal woods were sold in seven months. In June, Slotline began construction of a new factory in St. Andrews, Scotland, the cradle of golf...