Any golfer who’s ever played more than a handful of rounds knows the shaft is the most important part of the golf club. It’s the engine that provides the power for the strike. Why else would countless players routinely spend several hundred dollars on an upgraded or after-market shaft for a driver?
But is the shaft in your putter that important? After all, you don’t swing your putter at 100-plus miles per hour. You don’t really “swing” your putter at all; you stroke a putt, and at a speed that hardly seems to stress the shaft.
Or does it?
Recently – that is, over the last couple of decades – putters have evolved to the point where simple blades, like the classic Bullseye and 8802 designs, have disappeared from golf bags and have taken their place in collectors’ cases. In the chase for ever-increasing moment-of-inertia (MOI) numbers, heads have gotten bigger, heavier and more technologically advanced, with adjustable weighting and the like.
Yet, over those same decades – and even long before – the putter shaft has remained basically the same: a mass- (and often cheaply) produced steel tube with an attractive chrome finish on the outside and who-knows-what on the inside. Little attention was paid to wall thickness – which directly impacts factors like flex and torque – because, frankly, who took time to measure such dynamics when it came to putters?
But as putters continued to change, a couple of golf’s leading innovators and technical geniuses saw a need for more advanced putter shafts. That’s why Barney Adams – the founder of Adams Golf and the brains behind such ground-breaking club designs as the “upside-down” Tight Lies fairway woods and the Proto Gold hybrids – started Breakthrough Golf Technology, a Texas-based company dedicated to the sole task of making the most advanced putter shafts in golf.
To help him accomplish just that, Adams hired Blair Philip, a former Tour professional with 25 years’ experience with some of golf’s leading OEMs, including Ping, Yes Putters, Adams Golf and TaylorMade, as vice president of research and development.
Together, Adams and Philip designed the original Stability Putter Shaft, a multi-material design engineered to deliver the putter face, especially with the larger, high MOI designs, more squarely and with more consistent loft than traditional putter shafts. The Stability Shaft quickly gained popularity with Tour players and serious amateurs alike.
Now, Breakthrough Golf Technology, or BGT in short, has developed the Stability Tour Shaft, with a slimmer design and lighter weight but even stiffer flex profile. Made of high-modulus carbon fiber, the Stability Tour is all black – different from the original Stability shaft that featured a chromed-steel tip section – adding to its hi-tech persona.
But going back to our original question, does the shaft in your putter really make that much difference?
To answer that, we tested the Stability Tour Shaft for ourselves. Mind you, ours was not a scientific “clinical trial” done in some putting lab with perfect, billiard-like surfaces and high-speed cameras to record face angle, skid factor, true roll and the like. Our testing was done on a real golf course, with real (meaning not perfect) greens, because that’s where you use your putter. So don’t expect this review to provide a lot of numbers and statistics.
What we can give you is an opinion – an honest, candid opinion, and not just ours but also that of playing partners we asked to try the putter shaft. For the record, the putter head shafted with the Stability Tour was an Odyssey Metal X9, a heel-shafted, flanged blade. Admittedly, the classic style of the X9 head might not impart the physical demands on a shaft that many of the big, square shoebox-on-a-stick heads impart. But to test the shaft, we wanted to do it with a head we were comfortable looking at. Plus we wanted to test the Stability Tour Shaft with a head that didn’t provide the foot-wide sweet spot promised by the oversized, high-MOI heads, thinking it would be a better test of the shaft itself.
Comparing the Odyssey to its former self – that is to how it felt with the stock steel shaft – right away, the feel was noticeably different. More solid, more stable. That was particularly true with putts intentionally struck just off-center, whether a bit toward the heel or the toe. The only negative was getting the ball to the hole on longer putts, but here’s the theory on that. Because the putter felt markedly more solid, it felt like a less forceful stroke was needed – if that makes sense. Once the subconscious realized you could make your normal stroke, distance control no longer seemed a problem.
Asking playing partners to try the shaft brought similar results, but in varying degrees. One friend, a low single-digit handicapper, liked the feel but only moderately so, adding that it was a bit subdued for his personal taste. Another friend, again a good player, good athlete and former tennis pro, loved the putter right away, holing a sharp breaking left-to-right 30-footer with his second stroke.
Bottom line, like the putting stroke itself, finding the perfect putter shaft is a matter of personal preference. So it follows that the BGT Stability Tour shaft is going to be “perfect” for some golfers, not so perfect for others. But then, can’t the same be said for the oversized putter grips that have captured a significant market share in recent years?
Regardless, the BGT Stability Tour shaft makes good on its marketing claims. The Odyssey putter used in our testing felt more solid and certainly “stiffer” with the after-market shaft. And though we didn’t have access to a SAM Putting Lab, putts appeared to roll consistently end-over-end, with little or no side-spin, indicating a square face at impact … all of which logs points on the positive side of the ledger for the Stability Tour shaft.
In fairness, on the negative side, there was an initial decrease in “feel” when going from the traditional steel shaft to the composite Stability Tour shaft. But this is a nit-picking difference pointed out solely in the interest of impartial reporting. It takes only a few holes with the BGT shaft to develop a new “feel” for the more technologically advanced shaft.
Is the shaft worth the $250 it commands at retail? Again, that’s a question that can only be answered by the individual. But when high-end putters from boutique designers are routinely going for $350 and up, doesn’t it make sense to give the Stability Tour shaft a try before investing in yet another putter that’s likely to end up in the bullpen after a few rounds? Especially when you consider the shaft can be fit to just about any putter head ever made.
Before answering, consider this: it wasn’t that long ago that graphite shafts were a novelty in drivers and fairway woods and now … well, you know what’s happened there. With the introduction of BGT’s Stability and Stability Tour shafts, who can say that the same isn’t about to happen to putters?