Why the Best Putters Look Nothing Like They Used To

Take a look at the history of golf putters timeline iconic designs by year, from hand-carved wooden cleeks to heel-toe weighted mallets, and what each leap forward means the next time you stand over a putt at X-Golf Rockwall.

The first putters were just sticks of wood

In the 1500s, a putter was a “putting cleek” carved out of beech, with a shaft of ash or hazel. It looked like a hockey stick more than a piece of golf equipment. There was no face insert, no moment of inertia (MOI), no alignment line. There was a player, a stick, and a featherie (a leather ball stuffed with wet feathers).

From Wood to Iron

The wooden head had to go because the ball changed. In 1848, the gutta-percha ball replaced the featherie. The new ball was harder, heavier, and rounder, and it punished soft wooden heads. By the late 1800s, Scottish clubmaker Robert Forgan was producing putters with iron heads, and the modern flat stick started taking shape.

1900: the year the shaft moved to the middle

Until the turn of the century, putter shafts attached at the heel, causing a tendency for the club to twist. Inventor Arthur Knight, working out of the Mohawk Golf Club in Schenectady, New York, fixed that in 1900 with the first center-shafted putter.

The same year Knight’s invention took over America, William Mills changed the head shape too, casting an aluminum putter called the Standard Mallet. Two of the design patterns we still use today, center shafting and mallet heads, are both 1904 inventions.

Calamity Jane and the rise of the named blade

In 1920, after losing a U.S. Amateur match, Bobby Jones picked up a goose-necked blade putter from his friend Jim Maiden. Maiden had named it Calamity Jane. Jones won 13 majors with it, including the Grand Slam in 1930.

Jones is the reason a putter started getting treated like a personal possession instead of a tool you grabbed off a rack.

The Bulls Eye and the heel-toe blade era

In the 1940s, John Reuter Jr. introduced the Bulls Eye. It was a brass blade, center-shafted, with a thin and symmetrical face. Pros loved it because it felt soft, looked clean from address, and forgave a slight pull or push better than a heel-shafted blade.

The Bulls Eye is where the idea of heel-toe weighting started to enter the conversation. The head wasn’t perimeter-weighted by modern standards, but the symmetrical mass distribution made it more stable on off-center strikes. That principle of mass spread away from the center, is the seed of every forgiving putter built since.

1966: Karsten Solheim invents the modern putter

After its conception in 1966 in Scottsdale by Karsten Solheim, the Ping Anser changed putting forever.

What Solheim figured out, in plain language, is that a putter doesn’t have to be a single block of metal. Pull the weight away from the center of the face, and the head twists less when you mishit. That resistance to twisting is called moment of inertia, or MOI. Higher MOI means a putt struck off the toe still rolls close to the right distance and line. Every modern putter borrows that idea.

The 1990s: Scotty Cameron, milled steel, and tour cred

Scotty Cameron grew up making putters in his father’s garage. By 1991, he was building one-off putters for tour players. In 1993, Bernhard Langer slipped a Cameron prototype into his bag mid-Masters, won the green jacket, and put Cameron on the map overnight.

In 1994, Titleist signed Cameron to make putters exclusively for them. Three years later, a 21-year-old Tiger Woods won his first Masters with a Scotty Cameron Newport 2 GSS prototype, and the brand became the gold standard. The Newport’s face was milled, not cast, which meant tighter manufacturing tolerances and a softer, more responsive feel at impact. “Milled” became the prestige word in the putter world, and it has stayed that way for 30 years.

2001 and the alignment revolution

Odyssey released the White Hot 2-Ball in late 2001, and it looked a little odd at first. A fat rounded mallet, two white circles painted on top, positioned so they’d line up with your ball at address to form a row of three. If the row looked crooked, your aim was crooked. Simple as that. The putter brought high-MOI design and alignment aids to retail for the first time, and once weekend golfers figured out a wide-body mallet could help them aim better and survive an off-center hit, the blade didn’t have the same lock on the market anymore.

Modern mallets and the high-MOI era

TaylorMade’s original Spider came out in 2008 looking like a cell phone someone accidentally left on the green. Two tungsten weights set way back behind the face, a shape unlike anything else in the category, and MOI numbers that made the Anser look old. By 2025, every player in the world’s top 10 uses a mallet. Scheffler, McIlroy, Fleetwood, MacIntyre. Ping, Scotty Cameron, and Odyssey all have their own versions now, and faces are AI-optimized to keep ball speed consistent even on mishits.

The trade-off is feel. A blade tells you where you missed. A mallet doesn’t. Most golfers, looking at their scorecards, are fine with that.

Does putter design matter for your game?

Putter design matters more than almost any other club in the bag, because more than a third of your strokes happen on the green.

A blade gives:

• Smooth arc stroke
• Sharp feedback on a mishit

Which is perfect if you:

• Putt by feel
• Have distance control issues
• Want more information and feedback when you putt

A mallet gives:

• Forgiveness
• Easier alignment
• More consistent distance on off-center strikes

Which is the right choice when:

• You tend to push or pull short putts
• Extensive feedback is not what you need/want

The right shape is the one that fits your stroke and your eye, and the fastest way to figure out what suits you is to roll putts with both styles on a green that gives honest feedback, then look at the numbers the simulator hands back. If you want a coach pointing at the screen with you, book a first simulator lesson and walk in with a goal.

See the difference for yourself at X-Golf Rockwall

You can spend an afternoon reading about putter history, or you can spend it putting on the simulator at 2455 Ridge Rd. The X-Golf system tracks the short game with real accuracy, not approximation, so what you see on the screen matches what just happened on the green. Bring your own putter, or use one of the rental putters in the bay. We don’t sell clubs at X-Golf Rockwall, so this is a way to build some confidence without the pressure.

Want to put the Anser, Newport, or Spider lineage to work on your own scorecard? Book a tee time or sign up for a league and bring whatever flat stick you trust. League night and a week of green-reading data will tell you more about your putter than any blog post.