The colorful arrangement of bars, circles, dots and metal wings on a new putter is not the artistic musing of some Eastern European modernist. It's the science of optics. When we look over a putt, everything we see -- the ball, the cup, the contour of the green -- is only as real as the illusion constructed inside our heads. The brain is constantly disassembling and stitching together the information provided by the eyes. Every day, there are people who get up and research how the brain processes the visual problems inherent to putting. They make subjects putt in labs while wearing $20,000 helmets that track gaze patterns and fixation points. They've come up with theories about eye dominance, eye convergence and other complicated stuff that would paralyze you over a four-footer if we tried to explain it. All you really need to know about the top of your putter is that its function can be threefold: to get you to position your eyes directly over the ball, to aim the face along the target line, and to influence the type of stroke you make.
"Golfers are the most visually sensitive athletes," says Dr. Alan W. Reichow, Nike's director for vision science. Reichow worked to develop the IC Series putters in which color contrast -- white against green -- is the central optic element. "Suppressing all the noncritical information, like a part that reflects more light than the alignment aid, is essential to letting a golfer maintain a comfortable focus," he says.
But there are other tricks besides color. Many believe that longer sightlines can exacerbate a golfer's existing misalignment issues. And designer Travis Fussell, whose company, Fussell Putters, is expanding on the two-ball system popularized by Odyssey, believes staggered discs create an optic flow in a golfer's peripheral vision during the stroke. Other companies use visual cues that appear only when the eyes are out of position. Profound Putters (orange strips) and Cleveland (a sightline with a notch) are two examples, but they work only if the putterhead is flat at address.
"We can create putters to create strokes," says Scotty Cameron, the Titleist designer who regularly invites tour players to his studio in San Marcos, Calif., for putting-analysis sessions. "For example, if a golfer is taking the putter back outside, we can make the heel smaller than the toe," he says. "This gives an illusion that will cause the golfer to take it back more inside."
That golfers see differently is one thing most experts agree on. "Not everyone's eye is drawn to the same part of the putter," says Blair Philip, director of R&D for Yes! Golf. "We're starting a study that will hopefully show a correlation between a person's focus and his or her aiming tendencies."
"There are four types of aimers," says Dr. Craig L. Farnsworth, an optometrist who has worked with more than 60 professional golfers. "Horizontal aimers who aim the leading edge, vertical aimers who aim the sightline like an arrow, golfers who aim a combination of the two, and the clueless who aim no specific part of the putter and who are typically putting all over the place."
Don't know which type of aimer you are? Your teaching pro can use laser putter-analysis tools like the SAMS or TOMI devices, or maybe even just his eye, to help you run a comparison test to see which optic features you (and your brain) naturally aim best.
* NOTE: Putters with Gold or Silver awards were rated in the 2008 Hot List. These awards were based on the product's average score across the five Hot List criteria. Gold products earned an overall grade of 96 or higher on our 100-point scale. Silver products earned an overall grade of 92 to 95 on our 100-point scale. For more on the Hot List click here.
