Sure Cures

Bad path meant our putting stroke was off-line. This would be cake. Above all else, inventors are brain-bent about putting. We found putters with level bubbles in them, putters with guitar-string faces, putters with rollers on the bottoms, putters with only golf balls at the end of them, putters with rubber-band faces (they work), and even mirror putters, wherein you look at your putter and see not only the ball but also the hole, which is reflected in the mirror. In this way you can check to see not only if you are perfectly aligned, but also if there are any Cheetos in your teeth from the snack shack at 10.

We found putters that look like Romulen space cruisers, with two giant winged appendages, putters with convex faces, putters you adjust for lie. There was a putter not more than four inches tall, which you hit by getting down on your knees. It's amazingly accurate, but illegal, as is much of this stuff. We even found one putter that looked like a tail pipe from a '53 Nash Rambler. In fact, it was the tail pipe of a '53 Nash Rambler. "As you can see, these people need to get new hobbies," Forbes said with a sigh.

There is one putter, the ACCULINE PT-1000, that stands up by itself, allowing you to walk around behind it to see if you're lined up correctly. Gardner Dickinson won a Super Seniors competition with the putter before the USGA nixed it. Now Acculine has come out with another, legal version. There is the pinball putter, in which a piston hidden inside the blade fires when you pull a trigger ring in the shaft, knocking the ball nearly dead straight every time. Free Game.

Everybody knows about the long putter, popularized by Charles Owens of the Senior tour. We tried one and gave it a par. We found it to be wonderful on short putts, but impossible on long putts.

Why not carry two putters? The long putter is great for unplayable-lie drops. When you're allowed two club lengths, it's perfectly legal to stretch this big sucker out and give yourself another foot and a half or two feet.

The worst putter in the world today is the BINGO TOPROLLER, the face of which is set at a 45-degree angle downward. The idea is that all you have to do is hit the ball and you get immediate topspin, which makes for a truer roll.

"Makes your present putter an instant antique," says the brochure. But mostly what the 45-degree blade does is maul the ball into the green. This is the worst-feeling thing we've had in our hands, up to and including the frog we dissected in seventh grade. If someone tries to hand you this thing, run. Quadruple bogey.

Don't let the CONTROLLER putter near your golf balls either. This thing has scoring lines that are supposed to keep your putt from going off-line. If you push the ball, the Controller's scoring lines will "apply a counter-clockwise spin that brings the ball back toward the cup," and vice versa. Right. We three-putted four straight greens with this hunk of scrap metal and put a counterclockwise spin on it into a nearby lake.

Coors, the beer people, sent us the COORS TZ putter, made of "one of the strongest and toughest materials available today"—ceramic. Coors says you want the hardest material possible so the putter face is extremely flat and the ball rockets off the club face.

The next day in the mail came the DOUGLASS DISTANCE ONE putter, with a faceplate made of the softest material legal—Surlyn. See, you want soft so you can take a bigger stroke.