Well-Heeled

There’s always a fear…an expectation, almost…that when a completely new technology or niche product appears and creates genuine excitement among a small section of society, the manufacturer will eventually begin watering down the initial message and quietly join the mainstream.

Depending on the lens through which you look at stuff, that can either work out or leave you feeling disappointed, even a little let down. Spotify began as an edgy, piracy-fighting platform that allowed obscure indie acts to be heard. Now it’s huge and all but ignores the sort of acts it was built on, paying them very little and emphasizing far more commercial music.

Starbucks was a quirky, little Seattle coffee shop, but is now reported to have over 41,000 outlets around the world – outlets where a ‘seasoned’ individual might go in looking for a humble cup of coffee and have a hard time finding it on the menu between the Matcha Crème Frappuccino and Iced Apple Crisp Oatmilk Espresso.

It’s happened in the golf industry too, perhaps the best-known case being GolfSmith, which started life as a catalog-based maker of club components and a club repair shop and became a mass-market, big-box store. Like we say, to many, that’s growth, progress, and the natural order of things. Others, though, are upset and miss the good old days.

Some golfers will, no doubt, have assumed something similar was happening at LAB Golf, which recently launched its first heel-shafted putter – the OZ.1iHS. LAB Golf’s zero-torque, Lie Angle Balance technology appeared to depend on a center-shafted design – having the tip of the shaft point at the Center of Gravity, which prevented the face from wanting to open or close at any point during the stroke, but kept the face square to your arc.

Great putters – Ben Crenshaw, Brad Faxon, Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Billy Casper, Denny McCarthy, etc., kept/keep the face square to their arc (for the most part) and square at impact…but it took/takes a degree of manipulation and those players manipulated/manipulate the putter the best. Zero-Torque putters eliminate torque almost entirely, which reduces, or more or less eliminates, the need for manipulation, allowing you to focus more on the target and less on your stroke.

LAB Golf’s center-shafted putters look unconventional, however. Well, that might be a nice way of saying they look…odd. Many were happy to overlook the eccentricities of their appearance, however, firmly believing in the science. Others weren’t, however, rejecting center-shafted putters no matter what the scientists wanted to tell them.

The OZ.1iHS places the shaft in the heel-end of the putter, like the vast majority of the world’s other putters. But LAB Golf hasn’t forsaken the Lie Angle Balance technology. The putter’s neck/hosel, weighting, length, etc., just needed altering to ensure the putter was balanced.

Actually, LAB Golf doesn’t use the term neck or hosel – the part that joins the shaft to the putterhead is a ‘riser’ and the varying lengths of the aluminum riser accommodate varying lie angles, meaning there’s an OZ.1iHS for golfers who prefer to stand tall with their eyes above the ball and those who prefer to keep their eyes inside the target line (with the sole of the putter flush to the ground, of course).

The R&D Dept at LAB Golf – Kevin Martin and Brian Parks – are obviously highly-qualified engineers who spent a long time developing the OZ.1iHS and we won’t pretend to understand what exactly is going on in their new design like they do. Spend a day reading up on the science and hitting the putter, though, and you do get at least a modicum of a morsel of a hint of a shred of an idea of what it’s all about.

At the end of that day, though, you realize it’s okay that you know there’s stuff you won’t know and satisfy yourself with the knowledge this putter works…for me at least.

The heel-shafted design will appeal to a much wider range of golfers than LAB’s center-shafted models do, so the LAB tech should now be experienced by a larger number of golfers. And knowing that each of LAB Golf’s products starts from scratch and are hand-built entirely to order is a good thing to know.

If you shunned LAB Golf’s putters because the center shaft looked odd, maybe the design of the OZ.1iHS will allow you to see for yourself if Lie Angle Balance works for you.

$600 (custom), $500 (stock)
Go to labgolf.com for a remote fitting or to find any of the 25 fitting locations in and around Denver (plenty more in Colorado), and to see all the various custom options.