“You Can’t Out-Guess Your Miss!”

A Men’s College Golf Team Captain won a tournament last year, then shortly after saw me at LPGA International fitting a Senior Tour player. He asked if he could putt with the Black Swan… “Sure” … and I fit him for a putter… a 21* Swan.

He putted great… basically made everything. “I’ve got to get my whole team to try this!”

The next day, we have 11 men, 7 women, and two coaches on the green at Orange County National. The players (unfortunately it was tough to have enough putters with all the needed lie angles to fit them all) hit 30/30’s… thirty balls each with their putter, and ours. Then repeat.

The Captain, being the best putter on the team, was being watched carefully by the coach. He was better with the Black Swan than his Cameron, but in the first test, the edge wasn’t massive, like the day before at LPGA. “It’s better, but not as good as yesterday!” he exclaimed.

That’s OK, I told him… just one small test, not much data yet. Do your next test…

“Can I pick a tougher putt?” he asks… sure… pick any putt between 12 and 36 feet.

He picks a tough downhill 20 footer that slides left to right about 5 feet. Shoot… looks like a wasted test… we’re just counting makes… he’s not likely to make any here… lucky to make 2 or 3.

He picks his Cameron… hits practice putts to get his line and then starts…

Miss… Miss… Miss…

He misses 30 in a row. Goose Egg. Ofer. Nada. Zip. Zero for Thirty.

The coach just keeps watching. Then he picks up the Black Swan…

Make… Make… Miss… Make… Make… Make… Miss… Make… Make.  He’s now 7 for 9, and laughing.

“Please just finish the test” I tell him. He ends up making 14 of 30.

Long pause…

He looks at me and says… “Fourteen instead of Zero. How is that possible?”

Easy, I tell him. You can’t make breaking putts with conventional putters.

“Why?” he asks.

Because You Can’t Out-Guess Your Miss! Your small mistrikes roll differently, at different speeds, and on different lines. But the Black Swan putter has a sweet spot that enables your “would-be” miss-strikes to roll just like your perfectly struck putts.

You can’t hit the sweet spot with a traditional putter. You can’t miss with ours.

By the way… using the Binomial Probability formulas, and assuming we give the Cameron one make instead of zero, the probability of 14 or higher makes is 1.6 x E-13 if the putters were “comparable”. In other words, the chance of this being just due to a ‘fluke’ occurrance is less than 0.00000000000016, or just One in Six Trillion.

No kidding.