A Look at a Tour Issue T.P. Mills

Anyone who's read any of my putter articles knows of my admiration for Ping's late founder, Karsten Solheim. Pretty much the entire contemporary golf club business owes a significant debt to Solheim for his lasting contributions. Both the cavity back iron and the heel and toe weighted putter came from his mind and no other and both are as relevant today as they were when he first conceived of them.

The Anser style head is always the design I turn to when I want the best chance of making putts. To my eye, the most pleasing Anser design was Ping's own Scottsdale version. It is sad to report that Ping has seemingly abandoned that shape and done so for reasons that elude me. Ping has even begun to forsake their long tradition of casting their own putter and iron heads. When you consider Solheim's reason for choosing his factory's location in Phoenix was the presence of the abandoned foundry that stood there, it is ironic Ping is now turning their back on their long tradition of design and manufacture.

So, as uninspiring as the Made in China sticker is on current Ping putters, what really turns me off about them is their shape. Things started to go to hell with Ping's Anser design with the machined JAS series. Those marvels of machining looked like nothing so much as a vaccuum cleaner attachments, with squared lines where smooth curves should have been.

That kind of squarish look is a common problem with Anser wannabes. What is sometimes forgotten is the fact that the Anser's softish shape came from the simple casting molds Solheim created when he and his wife Louise were casting putters in their garage. Round and smooth is easy with a casting. Sharp and square a bit more tricky.

So it is that many of today's CNC milled Anser-style heads are possessed of a look that is too mechanical, for lack of a better word. Scotty Cameron gets this classic shape more right than anyone else these days though in the past he accomplished this the old fashioned way...he copied the original.

Nowadays Scotty's Anser style heads blend the original shape with some of Scotty's own contours which finally have a truly original appearance to them. I like the look so well that an off the rack Cameron is in my bag right now.

All of this brings me to the subject of T.P. Mills. Like most players, I owned a couple Spalding / Mills putter back in the day, but they never did much for me. Later, I owned a forged Mizuno / Mills (TPM 2). This was a fantastically soft putter, let down only by its relative light weight at my preferred 34" playing length.

Even so, the Mill's name always stayed in my mind. Mills was a contemporary of Solheim and created some fine designs that still have a great look today. His work with Spalding made him a household name in the golf world. His longstanding tradition of requiring tour pros to actually pay for their Mills putters set him apart from pretty much everyone else. The quality of his putters made him able to march to the beat of his own drummer. After a nearly 40 year run making putters, T.P. Mills died in 2006 at the age of 85.

Happily, T.P. Mills putters live on through the work of the elder Mills' son, David. David worked alongside his father for many years and continues to eschew the use of CNC milling. All work on T.P. Mills putters is done by hand.

I've owned dozens of off the rack Camerons and two Cameron tour putters. The Cameron Circle T putters are the holy grail to some aficiannados but they can leave me a bit cold. In far too many cases a Circle T putter is nothing more than an off the rack putter with some hand stamping.

By making all of their putters by hand, T.P. Mills brings genuine uniqueness to what has become the expected shape of putters. I am showing the Tour Issue Mills next to my Cameron Studio Select Newport to give those of you who haven't seen a Mills up close and personal a convenient point of reference.

For me, its look at address is make or break for a putter. If the putter looks too square, or if its dimensions are disproportional or in any way awkward, it's not going to work for me. The Mills Tour Issue is right on the line of being too squared off at the heel and toe to be a great Anser head. That said, the smooth hand-crowning of the top line makes up for this and helps give the putter an understated and purposeful look. The Newport's top line looks a bit flattish in comparison, The snow on the Mills doesn't hurt or help the putter, to my eye. However, I like how it looks in pictures and when I'm just admiring it. I never notice it when I'm rolling the ball, which is a good thing.

It's surprising (and a little disappointing to me that the Mills' two sets of heel and toe bumpers were quite sharp. The Cameron is significantly softer in this area and more in touch with the classic Anser head shape. The Mills does square up a little better (optically) than the Cameron thanks to the shape of the bumpers.

One significant area of superiority for the Mills over the Cameron is the way the Mills soles when it's placed at address. Cameron putters, even with their sole angles, tend to toe in a bit. It's not severe like with some putters and it's easy to correct but the Mills sits perfectly at address making it very easy to align. This is really interesting since the sole is seemingly plain. It speaks to how well the Mills is balanced in ways both visible and invisible.

From the cavity, you can see both putters make use of alternating rounded and squared surfaces. The Mills putter looks and feels like the more green hugging of the two with its trimmer and less rounded heel and toe bumpers. The Studio Select is one of Cameron's cleaner designs but even with the hand stampings the Mills keeps most of its all business look.

I'm not much for colored grips so the red and white Mills grip is a bit much for me. Those of you with an eye for details will notice that the Studio Select Newport is wearing the standard grip for Cameron's California series. Why? Because the standard grip on the Studio Select is, you guessed it, red.

The faces of both putters are very nicely milled. The Cameron has plenty of mill chatter and it's shaped like all Cameron face milling back to the time of the late 1990s Oil Cans. The mill chatter on the face of the Mills is softer looking in comparison and I especially like the classic T.P. Mills aim point. What's a T.P. Mills putter without 'em?

How do they roll the ball?

Quite surprisingly, the Cameron is the softer of the two putters. The Mills is very solid with a slightly more poppy sound and feel. This is in contrast to the very soft feel of the previous Mills design I've used, the Mizuno TPM 2. Though difficult to confirm, I would say the Mills rolls the ball a little more tightly than the Cameron which is good if you want your putts to hold their line (assuming you've rolled the ball on the right line).

Though both these putters owe much of their design and functionality to the legendary Ping Anser, each is very different in look, feel and use. The Mills has the organic quality of a creation we might make for ourselves, if we had the time and ability, while the Cameron exudes the presence of a highly executed product.

I can make putts with either but am very glad I own both.

The Heel: Who Ended The Lift?

During last week's coverage of the WGC at Firestone, Peter Kostis asked Nick Faldo about the issue of heel lift. Kostis wanted to know why a common practice of nearly a century went away. For some reason, Sir Nick either didn't know the answer, or didn't find the question compelling, because even though Kostis asked him twice Faldo didn't answer him.

Now I am quite certain Johnny Miller would have talked about the subject for the next 30 minutes, but that's another story.

The question and Faldo's non-answer got me to thinking:

When did the heel lift leave the building and who made it go away?

By the mid-50s Ben Hogan still lifted his heel, if only a little.

Like many, I see the Hogan of the 50s as a harbinger of the modern swing, even down to the heel lift. He still had one, but it was almost an anachronism. It wasn't as if he needed it to get a full turn or that he lacked flexibility. It seemed more like an old habit than anything else.

Jack Nicklaus lifted plenty, as did Johnny Miller. It would seem both took more influence from Jones than from Hogan at least in that way. Tom Weiskopf still lifts, but as with Hogan's over a half century, it appears more habitual than functional.

I believe that it was Fred Couples more than anyone who made keeping the left heel on the ground at first fashionable and later fundamental. Couples really bridged the end of the Johnny Miller (A notorious heel lifter and arm rotator) Era to our contemporary game.

Watching Couples swing today it's all too easy to forget that he's over 50. Back in the early 80's Boom-Boom days he was like hot spaghetti. He swing was unimaginably wide and upright...all the while his heel stayed bolted to the turf.

Remember, too, that the television era really got going in the 80s and Fred Couples was the man. Of course, there are plenty of other reasons the heel lift faded away. Golf went from being a game that relied on a gradual gathering of centrifugal energy (the old school small muscle swing) to one that augmented centrifugal energy with leverage (the big muscle, one piece takeaway swing).

I wonder if the heel lift is gone for reasons that truly benefit the average golfer? I'm not sure. So much of golf's progress seems to benefit the very people who don't need help. High COR drivers, multi-piece balls make the game easier, in the main, for better players. The heel lift may have gone the way of the dinosaur because better players didn't need it but I'm not at all sure it's vanished from our local munys for the same good reason.