In addition to loving the game of golf, I love to cook. Undoubtedly, my favorite chef of all time is Jacques Pépin. If you aren’t familiar with Pepin, I highly suggest you become so. To keep things brief, he’s easily one of the greatest chefs of all time (the greatest, in my opinion). Part of his magic and appeal is his approach to cooking. A self-described “miserly” chef, he believes in wasting nothing and that good food doesn’t need to be pretentious or expensive. He’s absolutely right.
I forget where I read it years ago, but when asked about his favorite cookware brands and utensils, he essentially said the brand didn’t matter. Cookware, to him, was just a set of tools, and a good tool was a good tool regardless of price or pedigree. That doesn’t mean premium brands are good or budget brands are automatically bad. It means that across the wide pantheon of stuff, you can find quality tools anywhere if they do the job well.
While it may seem odd to be talking about Jacques Pépin’s philosophy on cooking tools in a golf article, enter Tour Edge. In the golfing world, Tour Edge might be one of the game’s best-kept secrets. For a long time, they’ve been making genuinely great gear at phenomenal prices. With their recent rebrand and the release of their new Exotics line gaining traction, Tour Edge may not remain a secret for much longer.
Toward the end of the season, I found myself doing a fair bit of putter hunting and came across the Tour Edge HP-Series #6. I immediately liked the way it looked. The next thing that caught my eye was the price. At $100, I figured what the heck, I’ll take a flyer on this thing. Long story short, this putter has no business being as good as it is.
It gets the ball rolling end-over-end with ease and the feel and feedback are surprisingly superb. You know when you’ve hit the sweet spot and you know immediately when you haven’t. In the few rounds I played with it— and, yes, this is going to sound apocryphal— I preferred it to my Evnroll Z1 Tour Spec and L.A.B. OZ.1 by a wide margin. What continues to impress me is how stable the face feels through impact. My distance control with the HP-Series #6 is some of the best I’ve had with a putter in a long time.
I mentioned looks earlier and I think the topline looks cool and the alignment lines work especially well in tandem with my ball of choice, the Maxfli Tour X Align. The brushed nickel finish gives it a utilitarian but sleek appearance. The sole, on the other hand, is fairly basic and a bit dated, but it’s the sole. Nobody’s looking at it, anyway. In fact, that’s part of what makes me like this putter even more. It reminds me of classic ’90s golf gear that, much like Jacques Pépin’s cookware, was designed to get the job done first. Looks are secondary at best.
Looks matter. Brands matter. I understand that. But at the end of the day, golf clubs are tools. If a tool works, why complicate things?
The Tour Edge HP-Series #6 is a tool that simply works and, at $100, it’s an absolute bargain. If there’s anything you take away from this article, it should be this: go watch some Jacques Pépin videos on YouTube, maybe even pick up his essential cookbook, and get yourself a Tour Edge HP-Series #6. Your life will be better for it.
Dean D
6 months ago
Brands only matter if you’re trying to impress people with how much money you can afford to waste rather than your golf skill. Knock off clubs quality has always been terrible, but putters don’t experience 100mph impacts so the QC isn’t quite as important. That said putting with my old Rife in a duplicate set at my son’s is excruciating after using a Taylormade Spyder Tour for a couple of years. I’ve owned dozens of putters this is the best I’ve even tried. Better tools & half way decent marketing is the map to success. Clothing brands are temporary leaders at best – see Ashworth.