King of the Flat Blade

When he came home from a tournament last year, Billy Casper found his eight-year-old son tapping balls across the living-room rug with a mallet-head putter he had found lying around the house. Casper tried a few strokes, liked the feel of the club and decided to try it out in the Bob Hope Desert Classic. He won, and the putter has been in his bag ever since. Last week it won him the coveted Masters championship. His longest putts popped in as if the undulating greens were as level as his living-room rug.

Casper's chance discovery befits the mystique surrounding putting, the most delicate and distressingly difficult aspect of golf. In quest of an elusive "feel," professional golfers will try anything short of witchcraft to find the right putter. They experiment constantly, switching from wood shafts to glass, straight shafts to curved, aluminum heads to lead. In his heyday, Ben Hogan roamed the greens with a brass, center-shaft club the head of which was fashioned from an old doorknob. For a while Sam Snead tried putting between his legs, croquet style, with something that looked like an undernourished sledgehammer. Arnold Palmer prepares for a tournament by endlessly changing the grip and reweighting the head of his favorite putter. Gene Littler has been known to use a club he bought at a miniature golf course for $1.

"Putting affects the nerves more than anything," explains Old Pro Byron Nelson. "I would actually get nauseated over three-footers, and there were tournaments when I couldn't keep a meal down for four days." The pressure causes golfers to study a green as though it were a minefield, surveying each blade of grass along the intended route. Their stances vary from the pigeon-toed crouch of Palmer to the cross-handed contortions of Orville Moody. And once the ball is on its way, they try to coax it along into the hole with some of the most astounding body English this side of a Martha Graham troupe. The stakes are worth it. As some laureate of the links once observed: "You drive for show, you putt for dough."

Mental Refreshment. No one proves that adage better than Billy Casper. Known as the King of the Flat Blade, he is perhaps the best putter among all the great players in the game today. Though he likes to say that he attaches more importance to his driving, he will lecture for hours on the virtues of the "reverse overlap" putting grip, or the different consistencies of Bermuda and bent-grass greens. "If you don't putt well, it affects your whole game. It is the most delicate and precise thing you do," he says. "It takes more touch, more feel. You have to be mentally refreshed to do it well."

In preparation for the Masters, Casper refreshed himself with a five-week layoff and just one tune-up tournament to put a high gloss on his game. It paid off as he out-putted Bert Yancey and Gary Player in the final round and went into a play-off with his old boyhood friend Gene Littler. Relying again on his trusty mallet-head, Casper one-putted seven of the first eleven greens, holing snaking shots from 15 and 30 feet. He went on to win by five strokes. Throughout the 90 holes of play, Casper needed only 145 putts while Littler needed 166, a crucial difference of 21 putts. Casper, in fact, did not waste more than two putts on a single green.

After picking up the top prize of $25,000 and his first Masters victory, Casper said with a straight face: "I think most golfers overemphasize putting." Neither Gene Littler nor anyone else believed him.

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