Chasing Scotty Cameron

By Max Adler
Photos by Thomas Broening March 2, 2009

The name might sound thought up by a corporation, the Betty Crocker of putters, but Scotty Cameron is in fact a real breathing human. Every morning, the boyish 46-year-old wakes to put on expensive wireframe specs and chooses one of his vintage cars to make the short commute to his hi-tech studio in San Marcos, Calif. There he fires up a milling machine and proceeds to sculpt the objects drooled over by golfers around the world. Tiger Woods has sworn by the same Cameron model for all his 14 majors.

"I don't know a single serious player who hasn't putted with a Cameron at some point in his life," says David Eger, a two-time winner on the Champions Tour. There are other men who make putters, but their existences pale by comparison so much it's as if they're in a different line of work. Original millings by the Cameron hand (not the stock models purchased by you and me for $300) have fetched prices as high as $30,000 at auction. He has become to putters what Les Paul is to electric guitars. There is even a museum dedicated to him in Japan, complete with the paint-splattered worktable and tools the boy genius used in his formative years.

Vincent Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime and died 83 years before he, or anyone for that matter, could visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Online auctions run by the Scotty museum regularly return bids of more than $1,300—for a headcover.

"Most of the tour guys in the late-'70s and early-'80s used factory stock Ping putters," says Clay Long, designer of the oversize MacGregor Response putter Jack Nicklaus used in his victory at the 1986 Masters. "As obvious as it might seem today, the notion of fine-tuning the specifications to the player, massaging the look to fit his eye, wasn't until later. Scotty was essentially the first to go out on tour successfully and say to pros, 'Let me make a putter just for you.' "

At least first in the era of modern milling machines. Puttermaker David Mills, who carries on the legacy of his father, T.P., recalls, "Back in the 1960s players would come over to my dad's shop, which was in our home, and he'd look at their stroke and build them a putter by hand. They'd pay cash or by check. My dad never gave putters away. It wasn't ego. He needed the money."

With the exception of the odd-looking mallet, say a Futura or a Detour, a cynic would contend most Cameron shapes are unoriginal, merely elegant versions of T.P. Mills blades or the first Ping Ansers by Karsten Solheim.

"Scotty Camera" is the derisive nickname sometimes whispered by rival designers.

But almost every designer makes a putter that mimics the Anser. Will any of them ever be big enough to truly classify as a rival?

One man who was big enough, at least once, is Bobby Grace. Nick Price used Grace's high-MOI "The Fat Lady Swings" mallet to capture the 1994 PGA Championship. Annika Sorenstam used Grace's "Pip-Squeak" to win her first seven pro events. As TV cameras zoomed in on the final rolls of those victories, the puttermaker from Florida who never graduated from high school shared in the glory. For puttermakers, purchase orders always spike the day after someone wins using one of their designs.

"The small guy is only going to get known through use on the tour," Grace says of aspiring designers. "But it's not like it was when I got started. Now the PGA Tour has stonewalled this guy by making the guideline for credentials a catch-22. It's impossible to get a credential to hang out by the putting green to get tour players to try your putter. You can only get a credential if a player is already using your product."

Because dreamers are thwarted from loitering on golf's grandest stage—in part to protect player privacy —the pros who have played David Whitlam putters have names such as Dae-Sub Kim, Sung-Hyun An and Bae-Kyu Tae. "As much as I'd like to get out on the PGA Tour again," says Whitlam, "I'm happy right now with my Korean Tour players. They're young, and they're a lot of fun." If instigated, Whitlam is full of crazy stories of nights out until sunrise in faraway Asian cities.

Set down a David Whitlam Signature Series next to a Scotty Cameron Studio Style and you see two shiny Anser-styles milled from high-grade stainless steel that sit dead square. Save the aficionado, it is similar to trying to tell the difference between twins. Yet Whitlam could be described as the anti-Cameron. The Canadian turned Californian plays golf in sunglasses, an untucked shirt, cargo shorts and prefers carts to caddies. He makes no pretensions about being an artist. He's more of a jeweler.