With a L.A.B. Golf Putter, Lucas Glover Resurrected His Game on the Greens
It’s too bad the PGA Tour quit using its old “Anything’s possible” marketing slogan.
Lucas Glover is living proof that anything is, indeed, possible. The way the 2009 U.S. Open champion resurrected his game suddenly this summer verges on being a miracle.
Look, Glover ranked 194th of 198 players on Tour in strokes-gained putting earlier this year. Then he switched to a L.A.B. Golf long-shafted putter and worked hard to learn how to use it.
Now Glover, along with his L.A.B. Mezz.1 putter, are golf’s hottest tickets. Glover has five top-6 finishes in his last six starts. He won the Wyndham Championship and the FedEx St. Jude Championship in consecutive weeks. He went from losing a battle with the dreaded putting yips to maybe earning a spot on the U.S. Ryder Cup Team. He is the rags-to-riches stuff of Horatio Alger novels.
Lucas Glover and his L.A.B. Mezz.1 are on a two-week win streak on Tour.
Chris Day/USA TODAY Network
Meanwhile, L.A.B. Golf has vaulted from slightly-known putter-maker to, pardon the hype, king-maker.
“The last two weeks have been nutty,” said Sam Hahn, CEO of Oregon-based L.A.B. Golf. “I’m just happy it’s nutty for all the right reasons. Lucas's story is inspiring.”
Glover’s dramatic improvement is miraculous. And it led to a second miracle. Suddenly, average golfers impressed by Glover’s revival are trying out long-shafted L.A.B. putters and seeking their own putting cures.
“Sales have been crazy,” Hahn said. “I would almost guarantee we set an all-time global record for broomstick-length putter sales in two weeks. We’ve sold more broomsticks in two weeks than we did in the previous two years. In one fell swoop, Lucas just normalized broomstick putters. It has put us on a much bigger stage.”
Serious golf equipment gearheads already knew about L.A.B. putters. L.A.B. stands for Lie Angle Balance. The Miracle of Lucas blew up the company’s brand awareness. Glover isn’t paid by L.A.B. Golf, by the way. He uses the putter because it works for him.
“We’ve been pretty clear that because of our manufacturing costs, we just can’t pay players,” Hahn said. “The best we can offer is ‘we’ll do anything you want and support you the best we can.’ Lucas Glover or Adam Scott? We can’t afford them. Any offer we could give them would be insulting.”
Scott is also a L.A.B. Golf user. Glover ordered a L.A.B. Golf long putter with Scott’s specs, then watched videos of Scott and others to get the hang of how to use it. Others who are using or have used its putters include former PGA champion Jimmy Walker, Kyle Stanley; LIV Golf’s Charles Howell III and Charl Schwartzel; and professional surfer Kelly Slater.
The secret of L.A.B. Golf’s success isn’t even a secret. It’s right there in the name: Lie Angle Balance. The putters are designed to provide a zero-torque experience for the user. In other words, the L.A.B. putter is designed to stay square to the target at impact throughout the stroke. Most regular putters have torque and try to turn in a player’s hands during the stroke.
“Our whole gig is, you’re a better putter than you think,” Hahn said. “From a physics standpoint, we believe existing putters prevent athletes from being athletes. Rather than focusing on a target, they have to focus on managing an instrument. With our technology, you don’t have to manage an instrument, you just focus on a target.
“Look at the way Lucas hits the ball. He doesn’t think about it. He takes a couple of waggles and smashes it down the middle. He’s a next-level, different-planet-level athlete. He ended up with some fouled-up neural pathways after a few short missed putts.”
Hahn believes that torque in a putter head contributes to the yips or maybe even causes them.
“Yips develop from traumatic emotional experiences,” he said. “Those missed short putts create anxiety and that anxiety gets triggered by a bad experience. Most people associate that bad experience with pressure. My theory is, the day they missed that three-footer to win the club championship, they took the putter back and they were nervous, their grip pressure was different and their putter torqued on them in a different way than they were used to. As soon as they felt the putter torque that way, they thought, “Oh (bleep)! Bad experience!” And they flinched. Remove torque from the equation and it changes everything.”
Maybe that sounds like marketing talk but it is backed up by physics. There’s a video from L.A.B. Golf about "The Revealer," a device like a set of handlebars with a putter head attached at the bottom. It shows how most putters don’t hang square to the target line because they’re toe-heavy or heel-weighted. When The Revealer is used like a putting stroke, the attached putter head fights returning to square before impact because of its weighting. The L.A.B. Golf heads, however, hold the line and stay square. It is a convincing video.
“We’ve had greater success because our putters are balanced throughout the stroke, not just at address,” Hahn said. “You can’t explain the merits of this in words because nobody has the attention span to listen to physics. You watch a 30-second Revealer video, though, and people go ‘holy (bleep)! I just saw a self-squaring putter!’ That has enabled us to take it to a new level. Our technology is just better.”
Hahn’s golf adventure began in 2017, after he originally tried to pursue the music business, then put in some 20 years in the bar business in Oregon, all while also being obsessed with golf. His friends hassled him over his poor putting and he admits to switching putters before almost every round in an attempt to score “a honeymoon round” with a new putter.
That’s when he discovered Directed Force, an obscure putter-maker. Its putter looked like a gigantic branding iron. Some called it the Starship Enterprise on a stick. Hahn eventually tried it, liked it and knocked four shots off his handicap, all of it due to his improved putting. Months later, Directed Force was going out of business and he was able to raise enough money to buy it. Most important, he landed Bill Presse, who designed the Directed Force (DF for short) putter.
The Directed Force putter from L.A.B. Golf.
Courtesy L.A.B. Golf
They changed the name to L.A.B. in 2018, gave the putters a better look and relied heavily on social media to spread the word. The result has been exponential growth in five years.
The company factory is actually at a golf course—Emerald Valley, set on the west bank of the Willamette River in Creswell, Ore. It is the home course for the University of Oregon golf teams. The course was originally supposed to be a full-service resort but that never panned out. So one building sat there for years getting little use.
“Our company started in Reno with 2,500 square feet, and then we had a small shop in Eugene that was 4,000 square feet,” Hahn said. “We moved in here at Emerald Valley, we started with 12,000 square feet. I just met with the landlord about taking over all 45,000 feet. Anyone who walks in can’t believe what they see. We do everything here—R&D, assembly, customer service, shipping, all of it. We are labor intensive because there is no way around hand-balancing the putters. We have just the coolest factory.”
Not many factories have a golf course on the grounds. Emerald Valley is a strong track at 7,300 yards with plenty of 150-foot Douglas firs lining the fairways. There are lots of doglegs and elevated greens. It is a “players course,” said Hahn, whose handicap is 1.
L.A.B. Golf doesn’t have traditional sales representatives like other companies. “Our cost of assembly and manufacturing is so high, if we do it the way everyone else does, our basic putter model would have to cost $1,500,” Hahn said. “So we have to do things differently.”
The Directed Force is still Hahn’s personal putter of choice. “It is just a lot of putter,” he said. “We had saturated the market with its function-over-form. It was time to come out with something easier on the eyes.”
That led to the Mezz.1, Glover’s putter. Its head resembles a letter "C" on its back. It has four weights on the bottom of each wing. The newest addition and also the company’s best-seller—or was before Glover made the Mezz.1 into golf’s Flavor of the Month—is the Link.1, designed in the style of the classic Ping Anser. On L.A.B.’s website, the list price for the clubs is $399 for the DF 2.1; $449 for the Mezz.1; and $479 for Link.1. All are available in customized versions that can add a few hundred dollars to the final price.
The company has a cool online remote fitting program so buyers can fit themselves. “When you do in-person fitting, a pro is there with all of his gear and you’re so far out of your element and how you normally putt, you end up with funny specs,” Hahn said. “Nobody is watching your or judging you with remote fitting because you’re at home, so you’re far more likely to make your normal stroke.”
Things have all come together for L.A.B. in large part due to Glover. Hahn texted Glover after his win at Wyndham and Glover’s simple reply was “Thank you!”
After the FedEx win in Memphis, Hahn told Glover how at the L.A.B. factory when one of the technicians sent a text message of LFG it meant “Let’s F----g Go!” Now, they’ve changed it to mean “Lucas F------ Glover!”
“He quite enjoyed that,” Hahn said with a chuckle.
Imagining a scenario like that four months ago would have been preposterous.
But Glover and L.A.B. are reminders that anything’s possible.