That’s right. It’s a Hot Dog putter. I can tell memories of that Oscar Meyer tune dance in your head. Heck even I know how to whistle that little ditty. It actually does exist. And it happens to be JohnnyGK’s pride and joy – the Oscar Meyer Hot Dog Putter. He’s a pretty good putter to begin with and this delicious little morsel is literally the cherry on top.
Check out our tribute video to the Hot Dog Putter.
It’s had a few mentions on the Friday Foursome. Even Fred Couples was surprised when he saw the “Dog” at a golf course tournament in Arizona recently. And although this video is a year old, I thought it would be nice to show off our fun side.
The debate over club fitting never ceases. Some contend the “Average Joe” golfer gains nothing from a fitting since his swing presumably changes as much as the wind direction on Soldier Field. Others say the quickest way to improvement is to allow a fitting to find the arrow that the flawed Indian can shoot the straightest. Which is it?
The first contingent has a valid argument if “Joe” tops most shots and whiffs the rest. The leading edge of most clubs will scull and top the ball about the same. Otherwise, a quality club fitting is the best first step to chip away at that pesky handicap.
Many a golfer will tell you he’s waiting until he fixes his swing to get a new custom set. Lessons are envisioned, range sessions are theoretically penciled in…but rarely do golfers find that the additional time they need to accomplish the feat. It’s hard enough to strike the ball well with properly-fitted equipment, let alone trying to “pure” a 12-year-old club with a licorice shaft.
What to look for when searching for a club fitter?
Hit off of grass. Golf is played on grass, not mats. Therefore, you should not rely on hitting balls off of a mat when making expensive purchases. This should be a no brainer.
Get fitted outdoors where you can watch the ball fly. Watching the ball fly for 10 feet does not give you any indication of how well you hit a club. A launch monitor attempts to extrapolate where the shot would have gone, but even with vastly improved technology, the data is wrong quite often. Your body subtly adjusts to what your eye sees, and hitting into a net does not let your brain process the visual feedback.
Ensure your club fitter builds your clubs. Wheeling out a fitting cart and ordering a set straight from the manufacturer is not a custom club fitting. Manufacturers have tolerances that allow for variations in each club which can cause a set to have many inconsistencies. You want your club fitter to determine what specs are best for you and then order the club components from the manufacturer so he can build your set. Having the fitter install the shafts correctly, bend the lofts and lies as they should be, and get the proper weight and shaft flex consistent throughout the set is critical.
Flightscope and Trackman both manufacture state-of-the-art launch monitors that actually follow the ball in flight. A good club fitter can do the majority of the fitting without spending much time analyzing the data from the launch monitor. HOWEVER…you, the customer, will benefit from seeing the results of each shot on the screen. Seeing is believing, and you’ll walk away confident if you can see the improvement in the numbers for yourself.
Doppler-radar launch monitors should be used. Flightscope and Trackman both manufacture state-of-the-art launch monitors that actually follow the ball in flight. A good club fitter can do the majority of the fitting without spending much time analyzing the data from the launch monitor. HOWEVER…you, the customer, will benefit from seeing the results of each shot on the screen. Seeing is believing, and you’ll walk away confident if you can see the improvement in the numbers for yourself.
After-market shafts should be available to demo. Shafts that come in stock clubs can range from good to horrible. Most professional golfers use aftermarket shafts and don’t get paid to do so. Why? Because aftermarket shaft options are higher quality and are built to perform better and be consistent from shot to shot. We’ll revisit this topic in more detail at a later date.
Playing with a custom set of clubs adds enjoyment to the game. You will hit the ball better with a custom set. Costs can sometimes be just a tad higher than an “off-the-rack” set. Be careful though…custom club fitting can be like taking your car to the mechanic. Insist on using a fitter with the previous five capabilities or you’ll leave some benefits on the table. You’ll probably encounter warehouse club fitters that will insist they can offer a comparable fitting indoors while hitting into a net, but common sense should tell you otherwise.
Conclusion: Custom club fitting is for you, if you want more birds!
The Fitting Studio is a custom golf club fitting and building business located in Long Beach, CA. Partnered with The Fitting Studio is former professional golfer and UCLA All-American, Travis Matthew Johnson. Travis, who also founded the Travis Mathew Apparel brand, recently sold his interest in TM to pursue more business endeavors within the fashion world as well as the golf industry. For more information about The Fitting Studio, visit www.thefittingstudio.com or email at info@thefittingstudio.com.
Gratitude is what inspires me. It’s the foundation of my life and Greenskeeper.org.
I don’t start a single day without first thanking a member of GK in thought or action. It feels good and puts me in the right mindset. My favorite thing to do is appreciating Greenskeeper.org members that contribute helpful content to the site.
Gratitude is more than just a feel good thing for me, it’s an energy.
I am someone that believes what we appreciate expands and what we depreciate fades. It’s why I am grateful for just about everything in my life and why I rarely complain about things important to me.
When I launched Greenskeeper.org back in 2002, I did not appreciate nearly as much as I do now the value the site brings to golfers and the active members that make it all possible. Over the years as my gratitude grew so did the culture of GK in proportion to it.
The clarity moment for me as far as my mission with Greenskeeper.org, the moment when I realized what I loved most about GK, came when I gave a heartfelt speech at a GK Event at Monarch Dunes Golf Club in 2012. From that point on GK was more about the site community than anything else…a culture with a sense of belonging, connectedness and being of service to each other. Basically a community that sincerely appreciates each other’s love for golf.
It was then I started looking at Greenskeeper.org as a family. A family I want to grow across the United States and eventually across the World. A family I know will ingrain itself into golf forever bringing more fun to the game we love.
John Hakim – JohnnyGK CEO – Founder – Leader Greenskeeper.org GreensKeeper iPhone App (coming 2016)
If you don’t mind I’d like to hear how you do in your first round using this.
I think it will take several rounds and several practice sessions to better understand the implementation. I am going to take the next 2 months and go out to my course in the evenings and study the greens. I will go so far as to make green charts, like yardage books, of each green. The explanation I gave refers to a straight planar green. when you have saddles and crowns it’s more complicated, and I don’t quite understand that yet.
It sounds interesting but i’m having a little difficulty grasping this zero line.
On a planar green, which is a flat tilted green… if you went around the hole and putted a 5 foot putt at each degree (so 360 degrees/putts), 2 of those putts would be 100% straight. That line is the zero line. Every break on every other putt is calculated off of that line.
In reality, for practical purposes, the actual zero line could span maybe 5 degrees, or the length of your foot. then you figure 30/60/90 degrees off of that zero line.
But how do you determine slope in degrees? For me I would think severe, not so severe, and non existent? Any way to pigeon hole these breaks?
They use %slope. flat= less than 1%, avg=2%, steep=3%, severe=4%. They say on tour, with greens running stimp >12, it’s never more than 2.5%… more than that the putt is too hard. Slopes more than 4% will rarely hold… they’ll roll down to a flatter surface. You might have to putt through a >4% slope.. they tell you how to handle that. But the charts they give you go up to 4%.
I bought a 9″ digital level that gives you %slope… so i’m going to calibrate my eyes to learn what these slopes look like.
About GK Member michaelko:
Our resident physical therapist from Northern California and one of the original GK Staffers. He is also one of the individuals responsible for making the GK Casual Golf Events possible. Way back when it was only an idea, michaelko, was one of those individuals that made it possible with our first outing of six members at Rio Hondo Country Club, Downey CA.
This is one of our original articles posted for the GK Blog by one of our members a few years back. I always look back at that series of articles when I need to rethink my putting strategy. I think it deserves to be re-posted in our newly revamped version. What do you think?
It all started with an article I read in Golf Digest magazine. It was about this thing called Aimpoint. It highlighted a different way to approach putting, or more accurately green reading: using science and physics to accurately predict how much and which direction putts will break. Instead of trying to read the green with your eyes and trying to figure out how much and which direction a putt MIGHT break, you use the laws of gravity and physics to accurately determine how much the ball WILL break. Hmmmm… a green READING system to help improve my putting…it made complete sense to me. A brief summary with basic principles was outlined in the article, and I headed out to the putting green to put it into practice. However, it was harder than I thought. A look at the website further intrigued me, but there were no classes close to me. So, I shelved the idea.
Aimpoint — Reading the green
Fast forward a few months later, a forum topic on Greenskeeper.org was started: “Aimpoint Clinic, anyone do this?” This inspired me to check the website again for clinics. I was rewarded with a clinic being offered THAT weekend.. $125 for a 2 1/2 hour class only 30 minutes from home. I quickly signed up and was exposed to the single greatest golf concept I have ever learned. It was eye-opening, and fairly simple to implement. In the end, I just needed guidance.
After a month of reading and rereading forum topics on the subject at the Aimpoint forum, watching and rewatching different videos, and several hours of practice, I am more and more encouraged with the results and the system. What I have learned is that I have alot more to learn, but I am grasping concepts and techniques that have improved my green reading skills immensely. I am excited about how much better I am going to get at it. I guess if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it’s this: “I am no longer guessing what the putt will do; I KNOW what it’s going to do.”
The following is a de facto blog, I guess, of my Aimpoint experience. I plan to update it as I go through the experience over time. You can get more info at www.aimpointgolf.com, as well as clinic dates. There is a forum as well, where people talk about all things Aimpoint. I highly recommend this clinic for everyone.
Wednesday March 2, 2011 — First Impressions and Initial Feedback:
First of all, my general feeling is I am really excited about this. At worst, I’ll be able to tell which way a putt will break 90% of the time, and I’ll come close to knowing how much. At best, I will be a putting fiend!
First a little background:
You know when you watch a tourney on television; they show you the putting line, and how accurate that line is? That’s AIMPOINT technology. The inventor of Aimpoint developed a system based on physics and gravity that can accurately predict the putting line. He turned that into a green reading system and has several touring pros on his system.
The class is a green reading class, not a putting class; however, it is very important that you practice hitting the ball straight and work on speed control.
The basic premise: The ball will give in to gravity. It will break downhill — always. This guy figured out, based on the length of the putt, speed of the green, and severity of the slope, exactly how much that ball will break, as long as you always hit the ball 12 inches past the hole.
Basic Implementation:
You have to find the zero line, which is the point on the green that is a completely straight putt. From there, you plug in the data: length, degrees off of zero, uphill or downhill, right or left of zero, severity of slope, and speed of green. It then tells you how far away from the hole to start your putt.
For example: I have a 10 ft putt. It is uphill 60 degrees from zero line. Slope is steep (as oppossed to flat, average, or severe). The greens are running at a 8 stimp. Once I figure this out, I look at my chart, and it takes a second to see I have to aim say, 4 inches away from the hole. if I start my ball on the right line aimed 4 inches left of the hole (for a L to R putt), and hit it at a speed where the ball will go 12 inches past the hole, the ball will break accordingly.
After 3 hours of clinic, I was thoroughly sold. After reading the Golf Digest article I was sold on the concept, my stumbling block — I couldn’t figure it out in practice. After the clinic though, I see how easy it is All I needed was someone to walk me through it. Plus, with the chart they give you at the clinic, the information is all accurate. They say up until now, you were guessing on how the putt will break. Now, no more guessing.
A few things I learned:
1. There were many putts that I read with a completely different break than what actually happened, and the system was able to get it right every time.
2. I need to really learn what 12 inches is, what 10 feet is.. I need to calibrate my distances. I realize I’m way off. What I think versus what actually is are two completely different animals.
3. My speed control sucks.
4. The hardest part is finding the zero line, but over the 2-3 hours, I was better at it. I know with practice I’ll be able to do it.
5. Long putts (greater than 30ft), are really not that hard to read with this system.
6. You never have to read a green again; just find zero line and pace out your putts.
From my perspective, I highly recommend this clinic. I know I can master this in 2-3 months.
Look for my next article as I analyze both the practicality of the Aimpoint system and how it has helped and/or hindered me.
About GK Member michaelko:
Our resident physical therapist from Northern California and one of the original GK Staffers. He is also one of the individuals responsible for making the GK Casual Golf Events possible. Way back when it was only an idea, michaelko, was one of those individuals that made it possible with our first outing of six members at Rio Hondo Country Club, Downey CA.
About GK Member michaelko:
