Pistol-style putter grips from Super Stroke may be right for you

You are probably familiar with Super Stroke putter grips, the fat grips designed to help minimize wrist motion for a more consistent putting stroke. You may have discounted their straight, constant-diameter grips if you are, like me, a pistol-style putter grip aficionado, but if you are in the market for a change in your putter grip the lineup of Super Stroke pistol-style grips may be worth a look.

There are three models in the Super Stroke line of pistol-style grips: from slimmest to fattest they are the Pistol Tour, Pistol 1.0 and Pistol 2.0. The Pistol Tour weighs in at a nominal 69 grams, the 2.0 at 83 grams, and the 2.0, though the widest grip in the lineup at 1.32 inches, comes in at the lowest weight – a positively svelte 51 grams.

The Zenergy Pistol Tour is the slimmest of the
three pistol-style putter grips from Super Stroke.

Besides the larger grip diameter, the other notable feature of the Super Stroke putter grips is what they call the Tech-Port – an internally-threaded plastic insert located in the butt end of the grip that allows the installation of the Super Stroke putter weights. The weights come in 25-, 50-, and 75-gram sizes, and are very handy for fine-tuning the balance of your putter. If you are a regular reader of this blog you will be familiar with my thoughts on counterweighting in putters – this is a feature that I am very enthusiastic about.

I recently did a trial run with the Super Stroke Pistol Tour, the slenderest model in their lineup of pistol-style grips, to get a feel for what these grips, with their compromise position between standard grips and the really wide-girth constant-diameter grips, can offer to the golfer who is looking for a change. Compared to my usual putter grip, the standard Odyssey White Hot Pro pistol-style grip, the Pistol Tour is nearly identical in weight, with only a couple of grams difference between the two examples of each grip that I measured; the main difference between the two lies in the shape of the grip rather than the weight.

While the Pistol Tour has the contoured shape that you would expect in a pistol grip, it has a noticeably greater girth than the White Hot Pro. I measured the Pistol Tour at 1.07-inch wide at the butt end of the grip, with a width of .95-inch at the bottom end. Compare this to the White Hot Pro’s .87-inch and .70-inch dimensions for the same locations – a 20% taper compared to the Pistol Tour’s 11% taper. The Pistol Tour also tapers less front to back than the White Hot Pro, from 1.25-inch to .88-inch at the bottom, compared to the White Hot Pro’s 1.17-inch to .70-inch (it is circular at the bottom end.)

That small amount of taper is the reason for the most noticeable difference that I found in the “Before ” and “After” configurations of my Odyssey Works Tank Cruiser 1 putter when I swapped out the White Hot Pro grip for the Super Stroke Pistol Tour: despite a 2.5-gram difference in weight between the two grips (the Pistol Tour is heavier), and a minus 1-gram difference in weight after the swap (there was some tape buildup under the old grip), the swing weight of the putter with the Super Stroke grip went from D4 to D8 – a noticeable shift toward a head-heavy setup.

The reason for this significant change lies in where the weight is located; the more uniform thickness of the Pistol Tour grip places more of its mass down the shaft, farther from the butt end, with a commensurate increase in swing weight. This characteristic of the Pistol Tour is not necessarily a negative, it is just something that you need to be aware of if you are contemplating changing from a more conventional grip to a Super Stroke model.

Another grip characteristic that is very important, of course, is feel. The Super Stroke putter grips use a rubber material with a soft surface that is grippy but not tacky, and which holds up well with a bit of regular cleaning. In addition, there is a simulated stitched seam down the back side of the grip that acts as a position reference to help you place your hands on the grip consistently shot after shot.

If you are looking for a change in your putter setup, but aren’t ready to jump from your standard pistol grip all the way to a full-on constant-diameter grip, the Super Stroke line-up of pistol grips might be just what you are looking for – with the added bonus of being able to fine-tune your putter’s end-to-end balance with the Super Stroke putter weights.

Graphite putter shafts, Part I: Why the big manufacturers with skin in the game are doing it wrong

I spend more time practicing putting (on the carpet in my office, which stimps at about 13, I figure) than any other part of my game, and I read with interest all the articles about putter design and the putting stroke that I come across. I also follow new developments in putter design, many of which turn out to be pointless, ridiculous, overhyped, or just plain wrong (see my review of the Stability Shaft by Breakthrough Golf Technology, on which more later in this column.)

In pursuit of better putting I have experimented with counterweighting by adding grip weights to my putters, for which there is a factual physical basis, unlike many of the spurious putting “innovations” which are touted in Golf Channel infomercials and even by big-name manufacturers. Extrapolating the concept of increasing stability by redistributing mass from the shaft to the ends of the club, the next thing that I wanted to do was to replace the steel shaft in my putter with a graphite shaft.

Changing from a steel putter shaft to a graphite shaft can save as much as 100 grams, freeing up that mass to be moved to the head and the grip end of the club while keeping the same total weight; a change which, as I explain in the counter-weighting article, increases the club’s stability in the long axis, which benefits speed control.

But before I talk about my putter-shaft experiment, let’s look at the current state of the art in graphite composite and multi-material putter shafts.

Who is making graphite putter shafts, and why?

There are three manufacturers that I know of that are currently marketing graphite-composite shafts, or shafts incorporating graphite-composite, for putters: Odyssey, with their Stroke Lab shafts (though not available as a retrofit item); Breakthrough Golf Technology (BGT) with their so-called Stability Shaft (retail cost $129.99 to $299.99); and LA Golf, which markets a line of graphite shafts up and down the bag, including three for putters (retail cost $419.00).

Of those three companies only Odyssey specifically cites the redistribution of mass as a benefit of the use of their graphite-composite shaft, and their Stroke Lab line of putters include the use of additional weights in the head and the grip of the club to redistribute the mass saved in the shaft. Both Breakthrough Golf Technology and LA Golf, however, cite the so-called “low-torque” characteristics of their shafts in preventing “head wobble” as the prime benefit.

These three manufacturers differ not only in the claims they make for the benefits of their composite shafts, but in the details of their construction. The Odyssey Stroke Lab shaft and the BGT Stability Shaft are multi-material units which combine a graphite-composite tube for the upper portion of the shaft with a length of conventional steel shafting for the lower portion which mates with the putter head. The Stroke Lab shaft uses unspecified means to bond the steel and graphite sections of their shaft together; the BGT design uses both an aluminum stiffener and a separate aluminum connector between the two sections.

The LA Golf putter shafts, on the other hand, are 100% graphite composite material, but like BGT, their advertising cites the “stiff, low torque” characteristics of their shafts in preventing head wobble or deflection that is “caused by traditional shafts” as the advantage of their product.

So let’s break it down:

Manufacturer            Construction Type                    Claimed Benefit

Odyssey                   Graphite upper/steel lower        Improved mass dist'n

Breakthrough Golf     Graphite upper/steel lower        Improved head

Technology                w/aluminum stiffeners and       stability

                                connector midshaft

LA Golf                     100% Graphite composite         Improved head

                                                                              stability

Both BGT and LA Golf claim that conventional steel putter shafts are weak—weak enough to twist in response to the forces exerted on them by the inertial forces resulting from the movement of the club acting on the mass of the club head.

The following quote is from the LA Golf website:

“Recent data shows that outside 12 feet, when a player begins forward motion the head wiggles slightly and that instability can change your putt line even if you read the line correctly and put the perfect stroke on it.

The head also wiggles when you strike the putt even fractionally off center (which everyone does) causing you to lose distance on the roll.”

It is, of course, utter nonsense to attribute the motions described in that quote to flex in the shaft; to do so is to reveal a complete lack of understanding of the magnitudes of the forces involved, and the ability of the structures being discussed to handle the forces to which they are subjected.

Of course, the people who want you to shell out anywhere from $130 to over $400 for a new putter shaft are counting on the average golfer taking their quasi-scientific marketing jargon at face value—but if you keep reading you will learn how they are leading you astray.

What do they mean when they say “torque”?

What the ad copy for golf club shafts refers to, incorrectly, as “torque”, is the torsional stiffness of the golf shaft. It’s measured by clamping the butt end end of the shaft in a fixed position and applying one foot-pound of torque—that is, a force of one pound acting at a distance of one foot from the center of the shaft—at a point further down the shaft and measuring how much the shaft twists. (The results obtained from this test can be greatly affected by the testing method—especially by the length of shaft between the clamping point and the point at which the force is applied—so comparisons between the data given by different manufacturers are not necessarily valid.)

This “torque” number can range from three or four degrees for a steel shaft to upwards of eight degrees for the more flexible graphite shafts—but these numbers are only really relevant for full-swing clubs: wedges, irons, hybrids, and woods; clubs in which the club face contacts the ball at speeds of up to 125 miles per hour (Note: PGA Tour pros average about 110 mph of club head speed with driver, and some go much higher.) Those high club head speeds produce very high resultant forces on the club head, and therefore, significant torsional forces in the club shaft.

For putters the force acting on the shaft, even as a result of impact with the ball, is orders of magnitude lower than for full-swing clubs, and the torque input to the shaft resulting from inertial forces acting on the club head before contact with the ball are so far below the threshold which would result in deformation of the shaft that they can be ignored.

The bottom line…

The claims that are being made by Breakthrough Golf Technology and LA Golf—that larger, heavier modern putter heads “overpower” a conventional steel shaft, and thus require their expensive, over-engineered offerings, which are actually no stiffer in torsion than a generic $9 steel putter shaft—are complete nonsense.

The all-graphite composite shafts from LA Golf are the right idea, but they appear to be doing the right thing for the wrong reason—and they cost waaay too much.

The sophisticated multi-component shafts such as the BGT unit and the Odyssey Stroke lab shaft introduce complexity where simplicity will do; the complexity adds no value, and actually compromises the potential effectiveness of lighter-weight graphite composite construction by the use of a steel lower shaft. The BGT Stability Shaft is the most egregious offender of the two, due to their use of two aluminum components mid-shaft, at the junction of the graphite and steel portions, which returns mass to the middle of the club.

In Part II of my look at graphite-composite putter shafts I will walk you through my home-workshop experiments, in which I modified my bargain-bin Tight Lies Anser-style putter as an experimental test bed.

Stay tuned.