For years, golf equipment has followed a familiar path. Drivers have become more forgiving, irons promise greater consistency and putters boast ever-higher MOI figures to help golfers keep the face square through impact.
But has the pursuit of forgiveness gone too far?
Dan Landman, founder of Spoiler Putters, believes the focus of golf brands should lay elsewhere. He notes golfers may have become conditioned to expect equipment to compensate for poor technique rather than helping them improve it.
Speaking on the NCG Your Golf podcast, Landman argued that many golf club brands and manufacturers are focusing extensively on technology as a way to help improve a golfer’s game, rather than promoting lasting change from a technical standpoint.
“I think that most big golf brands want to sell clubs,” he said. “I mean, we do too. Everyone wants to, but that’s their main goal. Sell as many clubs as you can versus actually help golfers get better, and most of the time we’re trying to build more MOI, more forgiveness.
“All these marketing buzzwords to try and basically make you become a robot and hope that the club does all the work for you.”
It’s a bold claim at a time when forgiveness has become one of the biggest selling points in equipment marketing. Whether it’s perimeter weighting, face technology or higher MOI, manufacturers have spent years trying to make clubs perform better on off-centre strikes.
Landman, however, believes putting should be treated slightly differently. Rather than designing a putter that masks poor strikes, he and Spoiler Golf, have gone down a different route.
“We’re kind of flipping that on its head, saying no,” he claimed.
“We’re designing something to where you can actually improve your craft, improve your skill, and the more you use it, the better you’re going to get at it (putting), and that actually breeds confidence.”
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The putters from Spoiler Golf are all about creating something that promotes a pure, forward roll. Additionally, they help golfers understand their stroke more comprehensively through the feedback in becoming better on the greens.
Landman isn’t convinced that performance can be just as good on poorer strikes. Instead insists, performance is relative to how the ball is rolling.
“When we talk about putting, everyone talks about the aesthetics or the new face insert etc, and it’s like, yeah, but all that matters is what happens after you hit it. How is that ball rolling?
“That’s what we’re doing when we’re putting, and so much of marketing is not about what happens when the ball rolls. It’s all about the new stabilization of this face or that face or whatever’s happening here. You still need to hit it in the middle of the face.
“I don’t buy into you can hit it on the heel, you can hit it on the toe, and it still goes in. Not really. That’s you’re gonna lose energy transfer one way or the other.
“It was fun to hear Rick Shields you know say big golf brands need to be scared of this brand because they’re doing something different.
“I mean I can’t blame the big brands. They know what works they know what consumers want, and they want to make the game easier for people. We’re small, we can do this because we’re trying to do something different in the industry, which is generally not changing very much.”
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