Everyone Wants One of Scotty Cameron's Flat Sticks
The relationship between golfer and putter might be the most intimate, emotional, downright spiritual in all of sports. Save for the rare hole-in-one, it’s the only club you use on every hole. The one you use to seal a victory, or score an all-time low. Scotty Cameron understands this better than anyone. After all, he makes golf’s holiest grails.
Cameron’s sleek, sexy, handcrafted stainless-steel putters are revered by golfers at every skill level. Gaze at one in all its contoured glory and you’re compelled to pick it up. “When you are introduced to a new putter and it speaks to you, you have a bond,” says Cameron, who swears “the greats” treat their putters like their friends. “I believe you talk with it.” For Cameron, fifty-eight, feel is everything. He says it constantly. Feel. Of course, he shows his team—guys who forge horseshoes and work on cars; they aren’t golfers—how a putter should look. Feel is something else. It lives not in a putter or a golfer but in the moment you wrap your hand around the grip, feeling the weight of the head, feeling the knock of the ball. You can feel when you push a putt outward, or pull one inward, or hit the sweet spot squarely.
The best golfers in the world kneel at the altar of feel. And they take it to the bank. In April, Hideki Matsuyama tapped in a two-footer on the 18th at Augusta to clinch the 85th Masters Tournament and become the first Japanese man to win a major. His putter? A Scotty Cameron Newport 2 Tour Prototype. One month prior, Justin Thomas, currently the number-two player worldwide, won the Players Championship aided by Cameron’s Phantom TX 5.5 mallet. On the secondary market, bidding wars over Cameron’s archival pieces can become as competitive as a PGA Tour event. Last September, a Newport 2 customized for Tiger Woods (who won all of his fifteen majors with a Scotty) was sold at auction for a stupefying $154,928.
These days, Cameron does his work at a compound in San Marcos, California. But as a kid, he learned principles of club design and craftsmanship in the workshop of his golf-obsessed father, a two-handicapper who died when Cameron was thirteen. In the late eighties, the younger Cameron launched his own business in his garage, crafting putters for major manufacturers like Maxfli and Cleveland. His breakthrough came in 1993, when Bernhard Langer used Cameron’s Classic I to win the Masters. The next year, Cameron inked a deal with the company that owns Titleist to make its putters exclusively.
Still, sometimes he’s nostalgic for those early days, when golfers would casually drop into his workshop. Or before that, when his dad was teaching him the spiritual side of design. “I loved putters, but he instilled into me design and feel,” he says. “I’ll buy a hammer and it feels so good in my hand. I think, How can I re-create the feel from this hammer in a putter grip?” Cameron remembers his dad constantly asking him, “What does it make you feel?”
A few years back, he wrote down a reminder. “Make me feel."
This article appears in the Summer 2021 issue of Esquire. Join Esquire Select today and get unlimited access to Esquire.com + a magazine subscription.
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