Can You Buy a Decent Putter for $20?

Oh, my $20 putter, how do I love thee?

Let me count the ways …

I love that when I hold you in my hands I rarely have to count to three.

I love that when you miss that first putt, you almost always leave me an easy second putt, no matter where that first putt comes from.

And I really love the fact that when that second putt is a bit of a tester (and I blame myself for that, dear friend, not you), I can almost always knock it in.

Yes, my darling $20 putter, you have stolen my heart. Our souls are intertwined. We are inseparable. I am your Romeo. You are my Juliet.

For now, at least.

My $20 putter

While I’m not remotely close to our putter pundit Dave Wolfe when it comes to a putter collection, I have a few.

Well, seven.

My $20 putter is an old Rife 2-Bar Hybrid Mallet, circa 2008. It joined the team this past April, courtesy of the used section at Golfer’s Warehouse in Danvers, Mass. After some bench time, it finally found its way into the starting lineup a month ago.

When it comes to putters, I ride the hot hand. For most of the season, that was a Scotty Cameron Phantom X 11s, also courtesy of the used section at Golfer’s Warehouse. A L.A.B. DF2.1 is also part of the rotation. When the L.A.B. is hot, it’s thermo-nuclear for me but the Scotty was more consistent for much of the season.

Until it wasn’t.

About a month ago, I figured I’d send both putters a strong message and give the Rife a start. Since then, it’s been full-on Linsanity for the Rife while Scotty and the L.A.B. sit in my office, Wally Pipped by a 16-year-old relic.

(Look ‘em up.)

It’s not like the Rife is sinking everything in sight. It will sink the occasional bomb but the difference is in distance control. What doesn’t go in is close enough to the cup to be either a tap-in, a gimme or makeable.

Golf is a lot more fun that way.

The Rife 2-Bar backstory

You probably know Guerin Rife as the man behind Evnroll but his story is a fascinating one. Rife started in advertising. He was an art director for a Chicago ad firm with no connection to golf. He moved to Florida in the ‘90s and started his own firm. One of his early clients was David Leadbetter, who asked Rife to help him design a training aid.

That led to a lifelong fascination with putters.

Rife’s first creation was a patented cavity-back mallet called True Blue. He admits he didn’t do a very good job writing the patent but he would learn that lesson very well later on.

His second patent, for face grooves, was built on True Blue’s low mass and heel-toe weighting. According to Rife, removing all that mass in the cavity created lift at impact. By adding grooves and reducing loft, Rife’s putters would reduce skidding and get the ball rolling forward quicker. Skidding, whether you’re putting or driving a car, slows you down due to friction. Rife’s grooves promoted a forward roll sooner, which made for a smoother roll that would be less likely to come up a revolution or two short of the cup.

Rife at first licensed the technology to Spalding/Top-Flite but would eventually go out on his own. The original 2-Bar putter came out in the wake of the Odyssey Two-Ball in the mid-2000s and became a mini-blockbuster. At its peak, upwards of 40 players on the PGA Champions Tour were using Rife’s creation and it was gaining momentum on the PGA Tour. The company quickly grew, prompting Rife to sell off pieces of his company to investors to keep up with that growth.

That would soon become a problem.

The 2-Bar goes tropo

The original 2-Bar had a kind of gumdrop-looking mallet head with two bars to promote balance and stability and to help with aim. The technology was called Twin In-Line Moment of Inertia with the weighting designed to resist twisting on off-center strikes. Rife sold a boatload of them at $199 a pop, which translates to nearly $300 in today’s dollars. In the two months from December of 2005 through January of 2006, Rife estimates he sold $1.5 million worth of 2-Bars.

A year later, Rife expanded the line with his “Island” series with putters named after islands in the Caribbean. The Barbados, Antigua and Martinique models debuted at the 2007 PGA Show and each featured Rife’s patented RollGroove technology. The Martinique and Antigua were blades while the Barbados was a rounded mallet with openings on either side of the center piece along with some beefiness on the perimeter. The 2-Bar Hybrid Mallet, introduced in 2008, was simply Rife putting the Barbados and 2-Bar together to see what would happen.

“It was a cast body with weight plugs in the bars with 70 grams of discretionary weight,” Rife tells MyGolfSpy. “It also had a face insert with a polymer backing.”

The 2-Bar Hybrid Mallet (there was also a 2-Bar Hybrid Blade) came with a special bending tool and an instructional DVD so you could adjust the lie angle on your own, as well as a magnetic headcover with a zippered pouch to store the extra weights.

The October crash

2008 was the high-water mark for Rife. Sales hit the $10 million mark, making the company one of the largest independent putter brands going.

Then came The Crash.

The global financial crisis of 2008 did in a lot of companies, large and small. Rife, by giving up shares to investors to help fund his rapid growth, had effectively lost control of his own company. Additionally, the company had a ton of inventory for its now global business at the time of the crash. It was left holding the proverbial bag and ownership was looking for a way out. Talks with COBRA-PUMA in 2009 stalled before the company was sold to the Seattle-based company Innovex in 2011.

Rife was on his own and couldn’t use his own last name to make putters anymore, but he did start a new putter company called Guerin. That eventually led to Evnroll and its more aggressively patented elongated parabolic grooves that turned MyGolfSpy putter testing on its ass in 2016.

Which brings us back to my $20 putter.

My $20 putter: Best money I’ve ever spent

Rife wasn’t terribly impressed with my $20 treasure.

“I think you overpaid.”

Not according to eBay. You can find a beat-to-hell Rife 2-Bar Hybrid Mallet as low as $40 while a nicer one with a weight kit might run as high as $150. Mine needed a new grip but, otherwise, it’s in pretty good shape for a putter that came out during the Hannah Montana years.

What makes the Rife 2-Bar Hybrid Mallet work for me is the combination of length, lie and weight, all of which are pure luck. I tend to prefer a shorter putter with a relatively flat lie and a head weight of around 360 grams. Whoever owned this before set it up just right as I could tell it fit when I first picked it up at Golfer’s Warehouse.

The anodized aluminum face insert has a polymer backing for a wonderfully non-intrusive feel. It’s soft enough to not be clicky and firm enough to not be squishy. I also like the blue tone of the face, which nicely matches the new Lamkin pistol grip.

Golfers love to dismiss putter fitting by simply relying on “looks and feel.” However, having gone through several putter fittings, I firmly believe a properly fit putter will look and feel just right.

“People are finally understanding the value of putter fitting,” says Rife. “If we get the right look, the right lie angle, the right length, the right launch angle, along with the right feel and the right comfort in your hands, then you have this little piece of magic that just feels perfect.”

We golfers can spend an awful lot of time and money trying to find that little piece of magic.

But sometimes, it just might find you.

For now, anyway.

Scotty and the L.A.B. are still there. Waiting.