BGT Paradox putters: What you need to know

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: BGT (Breakthrough Golf Technology), the company that has made inroads with its Stability putter shafts designed to improve consistency, now steps into the full putter business with the new Paradox. Again, the theme is consistency. The company touts the putter’s high-toe/low-heel weighting as being a fundamental improvement in the zero-torque idea by keeping the face square to the stroke path “dynamically.” The key is how the head’s weighting lines up with what its engineers call “the point of rotation in the putting stroke.”

PRICE: $700 (Paradox Blade, Paradox Mallet). 33, 34, 35 inches.

3 Cool Things

1. Axis praxis. The weighting and structure on the Paradox focuses on squaring the face to the putter path with a significant reduction in hand manipulation to achieve solid contact. In other words, the Paradox is designed to make it difficult to move the face off square to the path of your stroke. Like many increasingly popular “zero-torque” putter designs from L.A.B. Golf, Odyssey, Evnroll and Bettinardi, the Paradox aims to make the putting stroke simpler and more efficient biomechanically, letting the player more consistently contact face center.

Paradox’s designers believe the key isn’t simply lining up the shaft axis with the putter head’s center of gravity. Rather, the idea here is to focus on how the putter swings, or more precisely what BGT’s team and principal designer Scott Burnett calls the “point of rotation.” That point isn’t somewhere in the shaft or even the grip, but rather exists in the air above the grip and rests between a player’s shoulders during the stroke. Specifically, Burnett said the point lies on an axis that’s angled 10 degrees from a vertical line extending upward from the center of the putter head at address.

The design of the Paradox seeks to line up that point with another wonky physics term, the “principal axis of inertia.” Basically, a rigid body like a putter rotates in three primary axes: backward-forward, open-closed and up-down. In this case, the principal axis of inertia is basically the backward-forward axis. Although the theory is more typically applied to free bodies (like flipping a tennis racket in the air), Burnett believes by aligning that axis and that point, it should require less effort to control the putter face during the stroke.

“This is the first putter where the principal axis of inertia is aligned with the point of rotation in the putting stroke,” Burnett explained. “What that means is it’s going to rotate ‘stable-y’ throughout the stroke. Other putters are not like that. What everybody is calling ‘zero torque,’ that just means the center of gravity itself is lined up with the shaft axis. But none of those [types of putters] are aligning the principal axis of inertia with the point of rotation during the stroke.”

2. The form of function. The Paradox features an asymmetrical head shape where the heel side is narrow and low and the toe side is wider and taller. In essence, the face looks almost like a triangle lying on its side as if the putter were set up with the toe off the ground and the space under the toe filled in. The CNC milled aluminum body features steel weights in the low toe and high heel portions of the face. About two-thirds of the putter head’s overall weight is in the heel and toe weights. The center of gravity is aligned with the center shaft position, Burnett said.

3. Stability squared. The Paradox putters come standard with BGT’s Stability putter shaft, which also looks to improve the repeatability of a square face angle. The multimaterial shaft combines layers of carbonfiber and an aluminum insert. In addition, the putters feature a midsize, non-taper grip to further control hand action during the stroke.