Tiger Woods’ Putter Choice Has Created an Asset Class

Few pieces of sports equipment are more personal than a putter. It’s meant for one of the more delicate tasks in sports: slowly rolling a ball 3 feet, or 10, maybe 20. It is, unless something very strange happens, the only club a golfer will use on every hole. And the subtlety of the putter’s task belies the emotional connection someone can feel with the club. It’s not a shoe, meant to be worn and ripped and replaced after just weeks or months. It’s not a driver or a baseball bat, objects meant to batter and bludgeon. It’s not even a tennis racket, carried onto the court alongside a dozen clones to be swapped out when its strings loosen too much. A putter doesn’t take enough abuse in the regular run of play to break beyond repair. It can stay with you for a lifetime. And so the sum of its makes and misses, successes and failures, becomes part of its weight.

The importance of what golfers call the flatstick can bend their minds in strange ways. And it will make the pursuit of the right putter worth almost any price. On the one hand, you can get a new, well-made putter from any modern golf manufacturing company for a couple hundred dollars. A bit past that are the mass-produced models designed by the brand Scotty Cameron and sold by Titleist, which retail for $400 to $500. But this is just the beginning. The true prizes are what Cameron calls tour putters, a bit of marketing that suggests they’re pro-quality gear, and are better known as Circle T’s, a reference to the distinctive branding-iron-inspired logo that adorns the clubhead. Circle T’s are made in much smaller batches, sport somewhat more bespoke designs and sell for many times what the off-the-rack models do. They’ve spawned Instagram accounts, forum communities and bidding wars that span continents.