The Ben Hogan name disappears—again—from the golf equipment landscape

I have some sad news for fans and aficionados of Ben Hogan golf clubs—the Ben Hogan Golf Equipment Company is no more.

Sometime around the middle of July (I learned of it on the 19th), the Ben Hogan Golf Equipment Company’s website started displaying a banner which stated that they were experiencing problems with their website and were unable to process orders.

The iconic Ben Hogan signature script logo has again
disappeared from the golf equipment landscape.

In the days that followed, the news broke that the company had closed its doors and laid off all of its employees. As it turns out, they had lost their funding partner, a company called ExWorks Capital, LLC, which was the majority shareholder and manager of the board for the Ben Hogan Golf Equipment Company. Risky investments during the pandemic, it is said, led to ExWorks ceasing to provide funding support for Ben Hogan, and in March 2022 ExWorks declared bankruptcy. The BHGEC had been in the process of expanding its offerings, including the return of a Ben Hogan golf ball, but without the funding support of ExWorks—so the story goes—the company didn’t have the capital to weather lean times between surges in equipment sales. After trying and failing to secure funding from another source, the company was shut down.

The Ben Hogan name is actually owned by Perry Ellis International (PEI), an apparel company, and was used by the BHGEC under a license agreement with them. PEI have issued a press release, hosted at the former website of the BHGEC, which states that they are seeking “a new licensee for this golf equipment product category” and that they are “exploring options for a new club manufacturing partner while exploring the current market for future opportunities.”

Call me paranoid, but to me this smacks of a business maneuver designed to slap down the existing golf equipment company, which had been flourishing under the leadership of Scott White, so that PEI could pull the manufacture of hard goods under the Ben Hogan name beneath their umbrella, and I fear that their “new club manufacturing partner” will be some Chinese knockoff shop whose cheap labor and government-supported facilities maximize profits at the expense of the design excellence and build quality that the Ben Hogan name has always stood for.

I feel lucky, now, that I decided last fall to purchase a set of the Ben Hogan Edge Ex irons that I reviewed around this time last year, and most recently, one of their excellent utility clubs, the 22˚ 4UiHi driving iron, clubs which joined my Ben Hogan GS53 Max driver and classic Sure Out 60˚ lob wedge to make my current bag 64% (9/14) Hogan clubs.

Whether the iconic sunburst and script signature logos ever return to the golf equipment landscape remains to be seen, and if they do I sincerely hope that they do so in a manner, and with equipment, that does justice to the name and legacy of one of the greatest that has ever played the game of golf.

Why your putts skid, and what you can do about it

As I wrote in my previous article, despite the nonsense that you see and read online, or may even get from a teacher in an in-person lesson, you are not missing putts because you are putting spin on the ball. What you are absolutely doing, however, is skidding the ball. In order to understand why the ball skids, and how you can minimize skid and have better control of your putts, we have to take a look at the forces that are acting on the ball when it is struck by the putter, and after.

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There are two main forces acting on a putted ball which determine how the ball moves: the impact force which the putter imposes on the ball (which becomes momentum once the ball leaves the club face) and the friction between the ball and the putting surface*. These two forces are opposing; that is, they act in opposite directions—but more importantly, they act at different points on the ball.

Because the contact between the club face and the ball when putting is so close to the equator, or midline, of the ball, the impact force is very closely aligned to the ball’s center of mass (sometimes referred to as the center of gravity, or CG), so the impact force (and after impact, momentum), acts at the center of the ball, while the friction force, as shown in the illustration below, acts at the periphery, or outer surface, of the ball.

Impact force or momentum, opposed by friction, causes the ball to roll

The force of impact, and then momentum, translates the ball, while the tangential friction, acting at the periphery of the ball much like a hand on the steering wheel of a car, turns the ball around its center, causing it to roll. If a ball were struck while sitting on a hypothetical frictionless surface, without the opposing force of friction acting at its periphery, the ball would simply slide, translating without rolling, so the friction between the ball and the putting surface is an important factor in the launch conditions of a putt.

If impact force or momentum is not opposed by friction the ball will translate without rolling.

It is effectively impossible to achieve instantaneous roll at contact except in a very short, very lightly struck putt—a tap-in, or a steep downhill putt. For a putt of any distance (depending, of course, upon the friction characteristics of the putting surface), where the force of the initial impact is greater than the frictional force between the ball and the surface, the ball skids, slipping on the putting surface until the torque imposed by friction increases the spin rate to match the translational speed of the ball. This happens on nearly every putt, to some extent, and to improve your putting performance you have to understand why it happens, and what you can do to minimize it.

The length of the skid phase depends upon several factors: the delivered loft of the putter face (that is, the vertical angle of the club face at impact with the ball: static loft + dynamic loft); how hard the ball is hit; and the amount of friction between the ball and the putting surface and between the club face and the ball.

The illustration below shows a putter with 2˚ of effective loft at the moment of contact with the ball. The angle of the face places the impact point approximately 30 thousandths of an inch below the equator, or horizontal midline, of the ball (that’s about 1/32 of an inch; you know, those divisions on your scale that you can just about make out without putting on your reading glasses? Or maybe that’s just me.) The red arrows in the illustration depict the impact force vector and its horizontal and vertical components.

The slight positive loft on the putter face tends to lift the ball at impact.

The vertical component of the impact force, though small, is important. Its presence means that the ball is being nudged upwards slightly by the impact of the club face. There are those who will tell you that this upward nudge is necessary to get the ball out of the slight depression it creates in the putting surface by its own weight (including the folks at Scotty Cameron, who cite in-house studies that they say confirm this. Color me skeptical.)

What that upward nudge will do is off-weight the ball slightly at the beginning of its movement—if not lift it entirely free of the surface momentarily. The effect of this reduction in the contact between the ball and the putting surface is a reduction in the frictional force which induces roll, and therefore an increase in initial skidding.

Because positive loft, even in amounts as small as the standard 3.0˚ to 3.5˚ found on most putters, places the point of impact below the ball’s equator, it also adds a small counter-spin rotational force component to the motion of the ball, which works against the friction-induced force that creates forward rotation. The combination of upward nudge and counter-rotational force contributes to the ball’s tendency to skid, and must be reduced to minimize skid and optimize launch conditions.

I wasn’t able to find any studies which examined skidding with regard to control—that is, staying on line, but it has been shown to be important to achieving consistent distance control.

There was an interesting study** done in 2014 by Jeremy Pope, Paul Wood, and Erik Henrikson, of Ping Golf in Phoenix, Arizona, and David James of Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, England, which primarily focused on the effect of skidding distance on distance control. Utilizing putters with loft angles of 5˚, 3˚, 1˚ and –1˚, this study found that the putter with –1˚ loft performed best in terms of minimizing skid distance and producing consistent total putting distance, on both natural and artificial turf surfaces. (Take that, Scotty Cameron.)

I did a quick survey of putter manufacturers as background for this article, and learned (as mentioned above) that the standard loft for off-the-rack putters is around 3.0˚ to 3.5˚, with customization available from some manufacturers of from +3˚ to -2˚ (note that none of these number yield the negative loft which performed best in the 2014 study.)

Setting aside variables like turf type, turf condition, moisture, mow height, etc., one thing that can be stated with certainty is that a too-high delivered loft will increase skid distance, and can even result in a ball that lifts off of the putting surface slightly as it leaves the club face, resulting in a bouncing motion. This is bad for both distance and direction control.

Some studies cited in the book The Science of the Perfect Swing, by Peter Dewhurst—a rather dense little volume that will test your math and physics knowledge, your patience, and your eyesight (8-point type? Really?)—claim results that showed that the skid phase of a putted ball is typically one-seventh of the total distance of the putt, regardless of the length of the putt. Honestly, I find that hard to believe, and I have to wonder at the test conditions and methods that led to such conclusions.

My own home-grown testing, on a firm industrial carpet surface that stimps at about 13 to 14 (at a guess), using my stable of four putters which are all bent to a loft of approximately –1˚, showed mostly pure skid for the first two to four inches from contact, as shown on slow-motion video, with full rolling contact occurring at between six and eight inches on eight-foot putts.

As is always the case in putting there are a number of variables that affect the results, and the friction characteristics of the artificial putting surface I practice on is certainly one of them, but scientific studies and my own on-course experience have convinced me of the effectiveness of a slight negative loft.

(No brag, just fact: At the media preview for the 2019 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, I managed four one-putt greens and eleven two-putts† in near-U.S. Open conditions with my mongrelized Tight Lies Anser-clone putter, counter-weighted and bent to a –1˚ loft. )

If warranted by on-course conditions, such as a soft, slow putting surface due to mow height or moisture, it is always possible to increase dynamic loft by moving the ball forward in your stance, thus increasing delivered loft.

Because there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing, reducing loft too much, for example by using excessive forward shaft lean or moving the ball back in your stance, tends to cause the ball to bounce because it is being driven into the putting surface at contact. This is also an undesirable result, because it starts the ball on its path in an unstable mode.

The Bottom Line

Of the factors other than impact force that affect the launch condition of a putted ball—delivered loft and the friction conditions of the putting surface—the one that the golfer can control is delivered loft. Based on proven studies, and my own personal experience, the first step is to reduce the loft on your putter (you can experiment with it, but –1˚ is a good starting point) and you can make adjustments, as conditions warrant, by varying the placement of the ball with respect to the vertical arc of your swing.

I started this article series with the intention of discussing why, like crying in baseball, there is no spin in putting—and why that spinning ball video clip on Instagram was a pointless demonstration based on misconception and ignorance. The scope of the article grew as I wrote, and then it split into two, despite my having held back a great deal of detail that I could have included.

I hope that I have been able to educate the reader a bit about the realities of an important aspect of putting—how the ball transitions from a static position to forward roll—and also in how you can go about maximizing the roll quality of your putts for more consistent distance control. (The importance of speed—and therefore distance control—was the subject of another putting article that I wrote about four years ago. My how time flies.)

Maybe if I get ambitious at some point in the future, I will take on the subject of the break.

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* As I mentioned, briefly, in the previous article, gravity affects the ball when the putting surface is slanted, but that is a subject for another discussion.

** Jeremy Pope, David James, Paul Wood, and Erik Henrikson, The effect of skid distance on distance control in golf putting (The 2014 Conference of the International Sports Engineering Association)

† I see you counting on your fingers, and yes, that’s only fifteen greens. The other three holes, including my nemesis, #6, are better not spoken of.

Debunking the myth of spin in putting

A while back I saw an Instagram post which consisted of a short video clip of a bi-colored golf ball spinning, top-like, around its vertical axis, on an artificial putting surface—but not otherwise moving. The text accompanying the clip says, “This ball has side spin and yet it stays on the spot... but I thought side spin makes the ball go off line. 🙂”

The post, by a UK-based putting coach named James Jankowski, was obviously trying to make some sort of point, in an amusing way, about the movement of a putted ball, but the video clip was both pointless and useless from the standpoint of presenting useful information. “Why?”, you ask—well, the spinning motion couldn’t make the ball go off line because there was no “line”—the ball was not moving along the putting surface. Since the ball was just rotating in place about its vertical axis, the frictional and inertial forces generated by this motion were balanced and did not produce a resultant force that would displace the ball from its position.

A certain amount of back-and-forth discussion ensued when I commented on the pointlessness of the video and its accompanying narration; in this discussion there was talk of skidding and sidespin as the ball comes off of the club face—which was not mentioned or demonstrated by the original video clip—and an unfortunate descent into the ridiculous notion of “rifle spin”. I decided, then, that it was pointless to argue, or even attempt to discuss the complexities of the motion of a putted golf ball on Instagram, especially with a self-defined expert who has obviously had no education or training in the physics of objects in motion. What I decided to do, instead, was to take the matter long form, as it deserves, and write an article about it.

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Before we get into a discussion about the movement of a putted golf ball, there are some important terms which we must define: rotation, translation, rolling, spin, and skid.

The first three terms are very closely related. Roll occurs when the ball is moving across the surface, or translating, and frictional contact causes the ball to rotate about an axis that is parallel to that surface. When a ball is rolling the translational and circumferential speeds are equal; that is, the ball is moving across the surface with a one-to-one relationship of surface contact to forward motion. A rolling ball travels a distance equal to its circumference—about 5.28 inches—for every full turn.

A ball that is both rotating—with one-to-one contact with the surface—and translating, is rolling.

Spin, on the other hand, means that the circumferential speed is higher than the translational speed; there is slipping, rather than one-to-one contact at the point where the ball touches the putting surface. If a ball is spinning while in contact with a surface it travels a shorter distance along the surface than the length that the circumference of the ball has turned.

Skidding is the opposite of spinning; the translational ball speed is higher than the circumferential speed. When the ball is skidding it travels farther along the surface than the length that the circumference of the ball has turned.

In short:

• Roll – the ball rotates at the same speed at which it translates.
• Spin – the ball rotates faster than it translates.
• Skid – the ball translates faster than it rotates.

Be aware that many of the coaches and self-appointed “golf gurus” whose lessons you will find online use the term “spin” incorrectly when talking about putting. They refer to putting “topspin” on the ball—that is, hitting the ball such that the top of the ball is moving forward in the same direction in which the ball itself is moving. What they are referring to is roll, and as I will explain in the next article in this series, it is not an action by the golfer that induces the forward rotation that constitutes roll.

The truth is that referring to spin at all when talking about putting is misleading and incorrect. For spin to occur when a ball is putted, with the ball in contact with the putting surface, the tangential force applied to the ball by the club face—the force that would cause the ball to rotate—must be greater than the frictional force applied to the ball by the putting surface in the opposite direction. Even if the ball leaves the surface momentarily, whether because of a high-lofted putter or a poor stroke (with backwards shaft lean adding loft to the club face), the near-vertical attitude of the club face and the generally low force applied to the ball (compared to full-swing shots) will not produce spin; i.e., rotational speed that is higher than translational speed.

Think of an approach shot to the green with a well-hit wedge, then compare, in your mind, the club head speed of that shot, and the loft of the wedge, to the speed and loft of the putter—and consider that the approach shot is traveling through the air, and not dealing with the friction of the ball-to-turf interface.

Trust me, you are NOT spinning the ball when you putt.

Now that we have (hopefully) put the idea of spinning a putted ball behind us, let us now address the concept of “side spin”. While it is physically impossible to spin a putted ball, this term is also used to describe the movement of a ball hit through the air—but it is a misnomer.

The proponents of “side spin” would have you believe that the golf ball is simultaneously spinning backwards, about a horizontal axis, and either clockwise or counter-clockwise, about a vertical axis (like the spinning ball in the Instagram video.). The truth is that a sphere can only rotate about one axis. (If you don’t believe me, read up on Euler’s Rotation Theorem and argue with Leonhard about it – (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_rotation_theorem.) The golf ball cannot simultaneously have back spin, which all balls hit with a lofted club have, to some extent, and “side spin”. Even if a way could be contrived to simultaneously induce spin in these two different modes, the inertial forces acting on the ball would resolve themselves into rotation about one axis that is neither purely horizontal nor purely vertical.

What has happened when an airborne ball does not have ideal, pure back spin (as in the case of that slinging banana hook that just took your Pro-V1 on a one-way trip to O-B Land) is that the characteristics of the contact between the club face and the ball—a combination of club head path and face angle relative to path—has produced spin about a single axis that is tilted with respect to the horizontal. When that happens, the Magnus Effect, an aerodynamic phenomenon that produces an imbalance in the forces acting on a ball in flight, will cause it to curve to the left or the right, depending upon the direction of the tilt of the rotational axis.

On the other hand, a ball that is in rolling contact with the putting surface is rotating about an axis that is parallel to that surface. It will react to the angle of tilt of that surface (the break), if any, by moving right or left, but that movement is not induced by spin; it is a combination of the effects of momentum and gravity that makes a rolling ball “take the break”. Depending upon the loft angle and the force of the strike when the putter contacts the ball, and the relative frictional characteristics of the club-to-ball and the ball-to-putting-surface interfaces, the ball will skid for some distance before settling into rolling contact, but that is not only not spin, it is the opposite of spin—it is skid.

Since I have already gone on for well over 1,000 words debunking spin in putting, I will break here so you can catch your breath before we move on to the next subject—and the real bugaboo of putting—skid.