Worshipping the Anser: The Edel Golf Umpqua

I can always tell a hack putter maker. Of course, he makes an Anser style head but he never pays homage to its creater, Karsten Solheim. Few are old enough to know that when Solheim first came out with the Anser it was nearly universally decried as being ugly. Perhaps it was. Perhaps its beauty lies only in its functionality.

On the other hand, I do think that its shape is elegant, if not beautiful. As the years move on, the Anser head has evolved and not always to a better feeling or better looking putter. Even Ping's modern incarnations of the classic have become a bit spare and square looking.

Some makers really drop the ball by building a single Anser style which attempts to marry an Anser with an Anser2. I always wonder if they don't see the difference or if they just don't care? With the exception of a few oddball designs today's putter makers are largely consigned to merely refine the work of a departed master. It's rather sad, hardly the font of innovation that most ascribe to the golf industry.

But, take heart: God is in the details. I just received an Anser variant from Edel Golf and it is a marvelous refinement of an Anser head. Take a look at the pictures while you read my descriptions and I think you'll see what I mean.

First, though, let's talk about just how innovative the original Anser was when Karsten Solheim brought it to market. He had already designed the Model 1a (based upon his design mock-up which employed two sugar cubes sandwiched between two popsickle sticks to create heel and toe weighting. The Anser did at least two things better than the 1a. First, it put more mass into the putter's sole and second it kept the heel and toe mass lower in the putter.

In some respects, the 1a would have been seen as a better looking, or at least more conventional, putter than the Anser, especially at the time. But, the Anser was also much easier to make than the 1a and Solheim was an engineer who could appreciate ease of manufacture. Believe me when I tell you that most do not.

All of this said, the Anser could not have been a tougher sell. It came during an era when only white men could play on the PGA Tour. It came when the very best way to sell clubs was to sell them under the name of a famous pro. And, it came during a time when most putters looked like a Wilson 8802 or a funny looking Scottish mallet called a Hammerhead.

The Anser showed that most golfers didn't truly care about performance but rather about conformity. Are things all that different today? Even tour players tend to use the putters they see others using, sometimes for good reasons but sometimes not. Still, a better mousetrap cannot be denied forever and the Ping Anser was the very best single putter design ever, and surely the most imitated.

But, how well has it been imitated? Sometimes an Anser variant will pretty much copy the original, radius for radius and dimension for dimension. I am thinking, here, of the early replicas made by Bobby Grace. Others get the basic shape right but make the curves more simple and fewer to lessen casting or milling issues. Remember that every casting has to be based upon an exact positive and negative model and every milled putter is first a very complicated series of instructions. Rarely does a putter maker improve on what Solheim accomplished from either a functional or aesthetic perspective, let alone both.

David Edel is a very sophisticated putter maker. When I saw the small picture of his Anser variant, the Umpqua, on the Edel Golf site I was prepared to be underwhelmed. I assumed that it was probably just a generic Anser with very little justification for its existence. I could not have been more mistaken. Little more than a week after I provided Edel with my Specs, a black Edel putter box arrived at my post office box.

When I got the box home I took it out of the box and pulled the cover off. My habit is to feel a milled putter before I look at it searching for its feel and also feeling for the level of finish. The Edel was very well milled, very likely the best that I have seen. The only other putter than might have been its rival were putters from Kevin Burns back in his hey-day.

The Umpqua feels like a well made instrument and looks very business like. I especially like what Edel did with the putter's cavity. Rather than do a Scotty Cameronesque redo of the original, Edel made the cavity look cleaner yet still curvy enough to be easy on the eyes.

The top line is quite thick giving the Umpqua a substantial feel while the length of the blade keeps its overall look crisp and compact. The face is smooth, devoid of any meaningless mill marks. I often wonder if the Cameron devotees realize that the mill marks they lust after so heartily are merely evidence of a milling head that has moved across a surface too rapidly. A good machinist would be embarrassed by their presence.

The face on the Umpqua is smooth, but not glassy. It has an almost satiny quality. The sole is polished to a high gloss. Per my instructions the putter has a single black site line in the cavity.

Interestingly, the Umpqua eschews a traditional hosel in favor of a shaft-over design that retains a full-shaft offset while making the shaft's intersection with the putter head almost seemless.

Best of all, the Umpqua strokes very smoothly with a meaningful sense of heft. Well struck balls come off the face with a nice, tight roll and the putter has a muted sound at impact. This, gentle readers, is a player's putter.

Unless you truly care about the game, don't waste your time even thinking about an Edel. The same goes if you're the kind of player who seeks to impress his playing partners with what you have in your bag instead of the kind of game you possess. The Edel Umpqua is a putter for those who have tried some of the best and now want to play the best because their games demand it. It does my heart good to know that there are guys like David Edel out there who are devoted to making the very best products they can to improve people's game. He honors the past by building upon it.

Frank Did It!

Well, we can all breathe easier knowing that Frank Lickliter has secured his place on the PGA Tour for 2008. We can rest easy knowing that his well known and beloved scowl will be delighting galleries for yet another season. Now, I've never met the guy and there's no reason to believe that he is not, in fact, a wonderful human being.

That said, he is a golfer who makes it all too easy to dislike the game. He always seems either emotionless or irritable. Lickliter is the kind of player who seems to revel in his ability to be either anonymous or unpleasant all while making a heck of a lot of money not winning (or even contending in) significant tournaments.

But, there could be something positive that might come of all this. The tour can initiate a move toward reducing the number of exempt players from the now ridiculous 125 to 100 or, better yet, 75.

An exempt field of 75 would either weed out guys like Frank or motivate them to elevate their games during the season when it is supposed to count. Now, I have no expectations of this really happening, at least while the Tiger Gravy Train rolls on. Until then, we can look forward to have Frank's glaring face beaming down on us.