Honoring a true innovator.

In the creation of our latest Small Batch design our mission was to pay tribute to an excellent player and one of the game's quietest innovators: Bob Rosburg.

Rosburg became a force in golf at a very young age. Born in San Francisco, he honed his skills at the famed Olympic Club. It was there that a 12-year-old Rosburg once beat the legendary – and often ornery – Ty Cobb in a championship match at the club 7&6. Rosburg maintained that Cobb could not have been more of a gentleman the entire day.

Rosburg would go on to have an accomplished college career at Stanford – where he starred in both golf and baseball – and later was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame. From there he embarked on a celebrated professional career that included 6 PGA Tour wins
headlined by the 1959 PGA Championship.

His acclaim in the game of golf arguably reached its highest in his post playing career when he joined ABC as a broadcaster. Affably known as ‘Rossie,’ he spent more than three decades on air where he pioneered the role as a roving broadcaster walking the golf course with the competitors.

Today on tour, the world’s best players have access to state-of-the-art facilities on a weekly basis to work on their equipment and test combinations. In Rossie’s playing days most players had limited – if any – access to new equipment. Like many of his contemporaries, Rossie began tinkering with his own clubs, but at a level beyond most of his peers. Rosburg’s own study in equipment would lead to him eventually designing clubs for companies including MacGregor, Ram, Top Flite and others.

But it was with the putter that Rosburg would really make his mark. Credited with being one of the first players on tour to consistently use a mallet style putter, he effectively normalized mallet designs and usage by the game’s best players – a trend that has reached its fever pitch in the modern game. Today, more players use mallet putters than traditional blades, a trend once considered unfathomable in Rossie’s era.