Is Cobra’s new 3D-printed putter the real deal, or just hype?

I just read an article on an online golf outlet about Cobra Golf’s new King Supersport-35 Putter, touted as the first 3D-printed putter. Unfortunately, like so many equipment “reviews” in both print and online golf media, this article reads more like a press release from the club manufacturer than a meaningful evaluation of the product. I have met the author of the article, and played golf with him, and he’s a very nice guy – but he’s not an engineer. I, on the other hand, am—a mechanical engineer as it happens, and I have just shy of 40 years’ experience in the design and manufacture of mechanical equipment, so I have the background to call out the club manufacturer, Cobra, on some of the claims that are repeated in that article.

The first thing that struck me as wrong is that this is not the first 3D-printed golf club to hit the market. Admittedly, the others of which I am aware are from much smaller boutique brands with very little market penetration; for example, Round4 Putters, which was making some noise online a couple of year ago but which seems to have disappeared from the landscape since then.

Callaway and Ping—both major manufacturers—have experimented with 3D putters. Back in 2015 Ping marketed a soup-to-nuts custom design and fitting process for a 3D-printed putter that would result in a personalized one-off putter at a cost of something like $7,000 to $9,000, but have yet to bring one to the retail marketplace. So Cobra are the first to bring out a mass-market (but still pricey, at $399 MSRP) putter, but not the first 3D-printed putter on the market.

On the technical side, Cobra states that 3D printing allows the formation of a latticework of metal that allows mass to be relocated from the middle of the head to the perimeter resulting in, they say, “the highest MOI without the need for additional fixed weights.” Now, it is true that that fancy-looking lattice structure would be extremely difficult to produce by conventional manufacturing methods, but is it really necessary? Or effective? Why not just hog that space out by CNC milling machine, removing the same amount of material, or even more, to get the desired effect?

You see, that fancy lattice isn’t structural; it doesn’t provide support for the upper portion of the club head, or stiffen the face of the putter—it’s just there to look fancy and justify the use of 3D printing. And while fixed weights may not be as sexy as a 3D-printed lattice, they are easily installed by conventional means. For that matter, removable weights allow adjustment of the mass distribution of the putter by the use of heavier or lighter interchangeable weights, yielding a wider range of performance and fitting options in the same basic putter head with very simple manufacturing methods.

To their credit, Cobra is utilizing a new, advanced 3D-printing method developed by Hewlett-Packard that delivers the precision and complexity of high-resolution 3D metal printing at higher production rates, and thus at lower cost, than the powder-bed fusion methods that have been used previously.

Rather than use a laser to sinter metallic powder layer by layer, HP’s 3D Metal Jet process “prints” a binding agent into a matrix of metallic powder, building up the desired shape a layer at a time. The binder is cured by a heat source, producing a high-strength “green” part which is then sintered (essentially, baked at high temperature to fuse the metallic powder matrix) to create the final part. After some cosmetic finishing and CNC milling of the most precise finished dimensions, as necessary, the part is complete. This process is faster than powder-bed fusion, and has been shown to produce more uniform material properties in the final part.

That’s all well and good, and there are any number of applications for which this process would be a manufacturing godsend—but does it really bring any performance advantages to the world of golf?

As I mentioned previously, the one real justification for the 3D printing process which is touted by Cobra’s ad copy, the internal lattice, is advertised as a means to increase MOI (it’s y- or vertical-axis MOI they’re talking about, which they don’t specify, but when considering the dynamic properties of a shape, it is important to know, and specify, which axis—X, Y, or Z— is being considered). Looked at realistically, however, the same mass distribution could quite easily be achieved by more conventional methods, so why bother with the whiz-bang 3D-printing method?

It all comes down to one word: hype (also “marketing”, which is far too often the same thing.)

Let’s face it—golf clubs, especially putters, being sturdy metal objects which don’t wear out quickly, and whose one wear-prone component, the grip, can be easily renewed, don’t support model turnover. Not, at least, unless the consumer can be convinced that the latest model will take strokes off your game by allowing you to hit the ball farther, straighter, with more precision (or some combination of the three).

Real, meaningful advances in golf club design are rare—the last one which really struck me as innovative and with real performance advantages was Callaway’s “Jailbreak” technology, which is kind of a hokey name for their use of a pair of vertical reinforcing rods which connect the crown and base of the head of a driver, fairway wood, or hybrid,  isolating the face so that it can do its job more efficiently by allowing the face of the club to flex and rebound without distorting the body of the club head.

So, to my rather cynical (but knowledgeable, if I say so myself) eye, Cobra’s new 3D-printed putter, while sexy and cool, and produced using a very interesting new manufacturing method, is just another hyped-up golf product that is being sold to the golfing public on the strength of some whiz-bang new technology, when it is really just a lot of smoke-and-mirrors marketing designed to generate another product cycle. It is another example of a golf club manufacturer selling golfers more new clubs they don’t need, when said golfers would benefit more from practice and instruction than they will from dropping a load of cash on the latest fancy new club design.

Read greens like a pro with the help of a GolfLogix Green Book

If you have watched much, or any, golf on television in the last couple of years, you have probably seen the pros reach for their back pocket when they get to the green. What they are reaching for is a green book, the logical follow-on to the ubiquitous yardage books that pros and their caddies have consulted during their rounds for many years. Made possible by the development of laser mapping technology that has been used to read the putting surfaces of golf courses all over the world, these books depict the contours of the green with contour lines like a topographical map, and the slopes as colors, or with arrows indicating direction and relative speed, or sometimes both.

Until recently these handy references weren’t widely available, but now, thanks to companies like GolfLogix, the makers of a smartphone golf scoring app, every recreational golfer with a few bucks to spare can have green books for many of their favorite courses.

The GolfLogix folks have mapped the greens of 528 golf courses in California at last count, and as near as I can tell from a rough count of the list on their website (https://store.golflogix.com), they have produced books for about 85% of the courses in the Bay Area/Monterey Peninsula region, so the chances are good that they will have a book for whatever course you want to play.

I have always contended that the putting stroke is the least difficult skill to master in the game of golf; the problem is, determining the proper line to hit the ball on, and how hard to hit it, are the two most difficult skills to master in golf—which is why putting befuddles so many golfers.

Here is where, if I were a pitchman for this product, I would start the spiel about how the GolfLogix green book will transform your game, drop strokes off your score, and turn you into the golfing god you always knew that you could be—but I’m not, and I won’t. What I will say is that these books are a handy on-course guide, as well as a great teaching tool.

The GolfLogix green books include standard yardage book features—diagrams of each hole with yardages and features depicted—with two diagrams of each green: a heat map which depicts the area and severity of the slope of the green with colors ranging from white (dead flat) to red (steepest), and a slope map with arrows which show the direction, and by their length the severity, of the slope of the different areas of the green. A handy YouTube video on their website will get you up to speed on how to use all the features of the book.

Of course, reading the extent and severity of the slope is just the start. Grain, surface dampness, and the type of turf you’re rolling on are also significant factors—but knowing the slopes is a good start.

It may take you a few rounds to get the hang of correlating the slope markings on the heat maps and slope maps to the contours of the green that you see with the naked eye; but honestly, after you do you may find that you are reading the greens better than you were before you started using the book—and may just leave it in your pocket when you pull the putter from the bag. Whichever way you go—using the green book as a teaching tool to boost your green-reading skills, or as a regular on-course guide, your game is sure to benefit from the addition of this arrow to your golf-skills quiver.

“Young Guns” lead the way at Champions Tour ’s Pebble Beach stop

The PGA Tour Champions Northern California stop, the PURE Insurance Championship, usually finds the fairways and greens of Pebble Beach Golf Links and Poppy Hills Golf Course inhabited by pairings of youth players from First Tee chapters around the country playing with Champions Tour pros, but like everything else in this pandemic year, things have changed. This year the event is playing as a pro-am, with First Tee teens replaced by well-heeled amateurs, and all three rounds are at Pebble Beach. There is still a “youth movement” of sorts underway at the 2020 event, though, as Champions Tour rookies are dominating the leaderboard.

Of course, “rookie” is a relative term in this case, as every player in the field has a wealth of experience behind them, and some are very familiar names, but the first-round leader and two of the three players who were tied for second after 18 holes are 50-year-old rookies on the tour, and the three players who rounded out the rest of the top-five spots are aged 51.

First-round leader Jim Furyk, one of those 50-year-old “rookies”, is a former FedEx Cup champion (2010) and the 2003 U.S. Open champion, and has an additional 16 PGA tour wins on his CV. Another familiar name near the top of the leaderboard is Ernie Els. Probably the second name, after Gary Player, that comes to mind when South African golf is mentioned, Els has two U.S. Open victories to his credit (1994, 1997), two Open Championship titles (2002, 2012), and 15 additional PGA Tour wins—not to mention his 47 international victories.

Less well-known, except perhaps to the deep-knowledge pro golf cognoscenti, is the remaining 50-year-old who was sitting T2 after 18 holes—Cameron Beckman. A three-time winner on the PGA Tour, Beckman turned pro in 1993, played on the Nike Tour (now the Korn Ferry Tour) developmental circuit, Beckman went to the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament 10 times before locking up his card for the 2008 season with a T20 finish at the Children’s Miracle Network Classic.

After 18 holes Furyk, Els, and Beckman were sitting just ahead of another 50-year-old, Stephen Leaney of New Zealand, and a couple of 51-year-olds, Dicky Pride and Gene Sauers. By the end of the second round they had been joined by another 50-year-old, Canadian lefty and 2003 Masters champion Mike Weir; and 60-year-old Fred Couples had snuck into the mix.

In the second round Weir, who has battled elbow problems for many years after an ill-advised change to the “stack-and-tilt” swing method, found a gear that he might not have known he had, and after a 1-over 73 in the first round, ascended the leaderboard at nose-bleed speed, picking up 38 spots on the strength of a clean-card 7-under 65 that included a string of three birdies in a row on holes 14 – 16.

Fred Couples, the only player over 51 years of age to crack the top seven after 36 holes, woke up from something of a trance, it seems, after Friday’s desultory four-birdies, two-bogeys, two-under 70, and knocked together a bogey-free five-under 67 to vault 15 spots up the leaderboard into a five-way tie for third.

The field, including the twelve amateurs who made the pro-am cut, will assemble Sunday starting at 7:35 to decide the issue.

PURE Insurance / First Tee event deserves some love—even up against the U.S. Open

It has been a tough couple of years for the PURE Insurance Championship at Pebble Beach, the PGA Tour Champions event that benefits the First Tee. In 2019 the tournament was scheduled against the Safeway Open, the PGA Tour’s opener that is held 2-1/2 hours north of Pebble Beach, at Napa Valley’s Silverado Resort and Spa. The two events effectively bracketed the Bay Area, and despite the obvious attraction of Pebble Beach, the big names/big hitters of the main tour are perhaps a little bit sexier for the mainstream golf fan. Then came 2020—the year when everything changed.

The panorama that greets you as you walk from the Lodge at Pebble Beach down to the 18th green is one of the finest views in golf. (photo by author)

As shelter-in-place kicked in and sports, along with everything else, shut down, the whole schedule was up in the air. The possibility of events being cancelled, even events that were months in the future, loomed large. Eventually golf came back—the first pro sport to do so, with extensive, comprehensive safety measures in place—though with big changes in the schedule, and the biggest change was the rescheduling or cancellation of the majors.

The grandaddy of them all, the Open Championship, was cancelled outright for 2020, as the British Isles struggled to get a handle on the pandemic and lagged behind the United States in reopening golf courses for recreational play. The PGA Championship was pushed back from March to August—a gloomy time of year for its venue, TPC Harding Park in San Francisco, but the change produced a thrilling, much-watched tournament. The Masters—that odd championship of nothing which is pretty much a major just on the strength of the memory of Bobby Jones, and because the green jackets of Augusta National want it to be—was delayed to November, and the United States Open, which is a championship, was pushed back to September.

Therein lay the rub, at least as far as the PURE Insurance Championship was concerned, because the USGA settled on a week in mid-September, the same week in which the PURE Insurance/First Tee event was scheduled, to put on their national championship. In a week that could have belonged to the PGA Tour Champions on the basis of the tournament venue alone, the spotlight was stolen by the national championship.

No offense to the rest of the PGA Tour Champions schedule, but the PURE Insurance event is pretty much the class tournament of the tour. I mean, come on—the venue, the charity… the venue (pardon my bias, but I am a Central California local, born and raised in Steinbeck Country.)

In a normal year play in this event is split between Pebble Beach Golf Links and Poppy Hills, the home course of the Northern California Golf Association, and the pros play with junior playing partners from First Tee chapters all across the country; but even scaled back in this pandemic era, playing as a pro-am, no juniors, and only at Pebble Beach, the event is worthy of the golf world’s attention.

Except for a two-year period (2011 and 2012) when the event was held in early June under the generally overcast “June gloom” skies that locals know so well, this event has reveled in the glorious late summer/early autumn weather that the Monterey Peninsula and the Central Coast basks in after enduring the chilly gloom of summer. There’s pretty much no finer place to be than the Monterey Peninsula at this time of year, and that might have something to do with the star-studded field that the tournament has drawn this year.

Els, Furyk, Couples, Love, Montgomerie, Langer, Singh, Jiménez, Cabrera—these are just some of the names that appear on the leaderboard this year. Major champions during their PGA and European Tour careers, most of them, along with other players who hit their stride later in life and have enjoyed great success in the post-50 era of their careers.

Don’t get me wrong, I love our national championship—but even setting aside my local bias, this is a tournament that deserves some love. Like every professional golf tournament on every tour, this event provides a great boost to local charities—even without the income from ticket sales besides benefitting the First Tee, the Monterey Peninsula Foundation distributes profits from this event and the AT&T Pro-Am to a wide variety of worthy causes in the Monterey Peninsula area.

It’s a tremendous shame that this event isn’t able to have spectators on site this year, but with any luck this tournament, and all the others on the schedule will be back to something like normal next year. It’s a great venue, with a great charitable footprint, and a slew of recognizable championship-level names on the scoreboard—with all that going for it, if the PURE Insurance Championship doesn’t deserve some of your viewing time, this week, even when the U.S. Open is on your TV and/or computer screens, I don’t know what does.

Mixed results for NorCal golfers on opening day of 2020 U.S. Open

There are half a dozen NorCal-associated golfers in the field at the 2020 U.S. Open at Winged Foot Golf Club, and at the end of the first round the results they posted range from a respectable 1-under to a worrisome 8-over.

Collin Morikawa plays a shot from the greenside rough on the third hole during the first round at the 2020 U.S. Open at Winged Foot Golf Club (West Course) in Mamaroneck, N.Y. on Thursday, Sept. 17, 2020. (Darren Carroll/USGA)

Happily for we natives of NCGA territory, the two top scorers among the group are Northern California-born—Clovis’ Bryson DeChambeau, and Sacramento native Cameron Champ.  This pair of long-ball hitters from the Central Valley carded rounds of 1-over (DeChambeau) and 3-over (Champ) on the venerable Winged Foot GC layout.

The group of four remaining players of special interest to NorCal golfers comprises two SoCal golfers and two out-of-staters, all with college golf connections to the Bay Area.

Cal Men’s Golf is represented by Southern California natives Collin Morikawa and Max Homa; former Stanford golfer Brando Wu, of Scarsdale, NY, and Colorado-born 2011 San Jose State grad Mark Hubbard are also in the field.

Wu, a 2019 Stanford grad, is playing in his second U.S. Open—his first as a professional—after topping the points list of the developmental-level Korn Ferry Tour series in 2019. He claimed the “best of the rest” title among NorCal affiliated players with a 4-over 74. Opening with a 2-under 33 on the front nine, Wu fell prey to the Winged Foot rough on the homeward nine after hitting only four of eight fairways.

Wu may be remembered for receiving his Stanford diploma on the 18th green of Pebble Beach Golf Links at last year’s U.S. Open—nice compensation for having to miss his graduation ceremony at the Palo Alto campus.

Cal Men’s golf standout and 2020 PGA Championship winner Collin Morikawa found the venerable Westchester County golf course heavier sledding than TPC Harding Park, where he hoisted the PGA’s Wanamaker Trophy six weeks ago after taking the 2020 PGA Chmpionship. The SoCal native seemed never to entirely get his feet underneath him on Winged Foot’s turf, going 36-40–76 largely due to a fall-off in his usual masterful iron work (-1.08 SG:Approach), around the greens (-2.37 SG) and weak putting (-0.83 SG:Putting). 

Mark Hubbard, a former San Jose State golfer, found himself in a similar position to Morikawa at the conclusion of his first round, with a 6-over 76 on one birdie and seven bogeys. Hubbard had his own 18th-green moment at Pebble Beach Golf Links in 2015, when he proposed to his girlfriend, Meghan, after completing the first round of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.

Of course someone has to be last, and in this accounting of NorCal-affiliated golfers, that dubious honor falls to former Cal Men’s Golf stalwart Max Homa. A decently strong performance off the tee (+1.12 SG – 9 of 14 fairways) wasn’t enough to carry his round in the face of numbers like -2.17 SG:Approach, -2.38 SG:Around the Green, and -2.03 SG:Putting. 

Homa can take heart (I suppose) from the fact that he closed out his first round one stroke better than fellow SoCal native Phil Mickelson, and saw a lot more of Winged Foot’s fairways than the veteran southpaw, who only found two of 14 in the first round.

PGA Tour season opens in the Napa Valley under orange-tinted skies

 Advocates of a PGA Tour off-season got no satisfaction this week as the 2020–2021 season opener got underway at Napa’s Silverado Resort and Spa on Thursday – hard on the heels of the Labor Day Monday finish of the 2019–2020 Fedex Cup final.

Ominous orange-tinted skies brought back memories of the 2018 event, which closed out its final day in blustery conditions that, later in the evening, played a part in igniting wildfires in the nearby hills that swept across the tournament venue destroying at least one grandstand complex. Though not directly threatened by any of the wildfires currently raging across the state of California, the Napa area, like much of Northern California, is suffering the worst air-quality conditions the region has ever experienced.

This year’s field for the event is a disparate collection of young guns and established stars, with a healthy dose of major winners—Sergio Garcia, Jordan Spieth, Jim Furyk, Shane Lowry, Charl Schwartzel, Keegan Bradley, Jason Dufner, and the ubiquitous Phil Mickelson (whose representing agency, Lagardère Sports, is the event organizer), and one former World Number One, Luke Donald.

You had to look a ways down the leaderboard after the first round to see any of those names, however, as Schwartzel, the 2014 Master champion, Shane Lowry, 2019 Open champion, and Keegan Bradley, the 2013 PGA champion, had the best first rounds of their major-winning peers, all opening at T11 with 4-under 68s.

Dufner and Mickelson were next among the major winners in the field at 2-under and 1-under, respectively, while none of the rest managed to break par: Garcia and Furyk at even par; and Jordan Spieth, whose struggles continue into the new season, at 1-over. Luke Donald, whose tenure as World #1 lasted for a mere four weeks in 2012, struggled to 6-over 78.

The leader after Round One was Scotsman Russell Knox, who opened with a clean-card 9-under 63 on the 7,203-yard North Course at Silverado, followed by Sam Burns, Bo Hoag, and Cameron Percy, all one shot back at 8-under. Two-time Safeway Open champ Brendan Steele opened with what for him was a typical opening round on the wine-country course, a 7-under 65. The 2017 and 2018 champion in the event carded opening rounds of 67 and 65 in his recent back-to-back victories here.

“The Golf Round I’ll Never Forget”, by Matt Adams ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆

Matt Adams, the author of The Golf Round I’ll Never Forget, has a great reputation as an interviewer, and before I got my hands on a review copy of this volume I assumed that I would be reading interviews, or at least some interview content, from fifty champion golfers. (If a little alarm bell went off in your head when you read the word “assumed” in the previous sentence, you get a gold ⭐️.)

The subtitle of this book—Fifty of Golf’s Biggest Stars Recall Their Finest Moments—gives the impression that the players whose “finest moments” are recounted here were interviewed for this volume, but alas, this turn out not to be the case. The chapters draw on previously published material which includes quotes from the players involved, but that’s the extent of it. That caveat aside, this is a nicely curated compendium of memorable golf rounds which any avid golfer would find interesting.

The book is divided into six chapters, collecting anecdotes into such classifications as “History In The Making”,which includes Gene Sarazen’s eagle on the 15th hole of Augusta National in the final round of the 1935 Masters; Johnny Miller’s record-setting 63 in the fourth round of the 1973 U.S. Open at Oakmont; and Al Geiberger’s groundbreaking 59 in the second round of the old Memphis Classic in 1977. (Little-known fact: Geiberger used the same ball for the entire round, almost unheard of in the days of the wound balata ball.)

Among the other sections are “Big Shots and Defining Moments”, with the story behind Hal Sutton’s famous “Be the right club!”call at the 2000 Players Championship; “Great Comebacks”, which includes the story of Arnold Palmer’s legendary come-from-behind victory in the 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills, and more. Most of the stories included in the book will be familiar, at least in outline, to golfers with a sense of history, though a few are less well-known, and all the more welcome additions to the book for that. For example, how many of us are familiar with Kathy Whitworth’s record-setting victory in the 1965 Titleholder’s Championship?

A few shortcuts are taken in some of the stories—for example, Arnold Palmer’s bogey on the 16th hole in the fourth round of the 1966 U.S. Open at the Olympic Club, a key factor in Palmer’s eventual loss to Billy Casper in a Monday playoff, is skimmed over as just another bogey—but each section includes anecdotes and background that will make for fresh reading, even for knowledgeable golf fans.

Presented in a handsome full-color 9" × 11" paperback format, with plenty of photos, The Golf Round I’ll Never Forget makes a nice gift for the golfer in your life—or for yourself.