The Eureka Series of putters manufactured by Incred Golf is gaining popularity claiming to be first of its kind with a weight forward, face down putter that gets you in the correct setup, aiding the putter takeaway allowing square point of impact.
Incred Putter – Taking a Share of the Putter Market Place – And the Reason Why!
By: Gary Van Sickle
ORLANDO, Fla.—Arnold Palmer owned something like 2,500 putters at the time of his death.
That says two things. Arnie never stopped searching in his quest to make more putts. And Arnie never found his Holy Grail.
So when a guy from India who majored in film study at New York University showed up at the Bay Hill Golf Club on the eve of the Arnold Palmer Invitational, it made counter-intuitive sense. Nakul Sood, the aforementioned gent from India, has a unique line of new putters from his company, Incred Golf (short for Incredible).
India? Film study? So what? Arnie never saw a putter he wouldn’t try. If he was still with us, you can bet the Great Man would have grilled Sood about his clubs and worn a path on the practice green trying them out. Arnie’s only question about the putters would have been, Do they hole putts? That is the only question that matters.
My answer to that question, after I took a brief test drive Wednesday afternoon using the SK-1 model is, Yes. But I’m no expert, obviously, since my fleet of putters is approximately 2,477 fewer than Mr. Palmer’s.
Sood took a break from chatting with assorted tour players and caddies to explain Incred Golf to a writer. The idea for his putters came from a strange place—video of several players famously hitting putts with the toe of their putters from awkward lies around greens, including Vijay Singh remarkably holing a “putt” from the rough dangerously near the bulkhead at Sawgrass’ famed 17th green. (You can see the video on YouTube.com by searching for Eureka Putters.)
Swinging a regular blade putter with the toe forward as the hitting surface feels oddly easy to keep on plane (on target) and has a pendulum-like feel, Sood deduced. So why not make a putter designed to do that? It was two hours of inspiration to design, about 12 hours of machine-work to produce a prototype.
That’s the short version, anyway. The longer version is that Sood, after NYU, returned home to India, made a few documentaries as a budding filmmaker (because he didn’t want to do Bollywood-like movie musicals) and suddenly noticed a niche. Cameras and stabilizers routinely cost tens of thousands of dollars for film productions. He was able to develop better versions of Steadi-Ca that cost only $1,000 when models on the market went for $50,000-plus. He also created the first Ambisonic (surround sound) microphones for VR (Virtual Reality), used by several Oscar winners. He also ,captured the improved camera dollies (and reduced their cost) by using roller-blade wheels. Sood originally knew nothing about engineering but started working with technicians small shop in New Delhi, India, across the Yamuna River, a Ganges River tributary.
Sood had always been attracted to golf. His father had access to a course and Sood received ten lessons as a youngster, just enough to get hooked on the game. After his film equipment success, Sood returned to golf.
A few years ago, he developed his Face-Down Putters. The most popular model is the RFB-SK1. The RFB means Reverse Face Balanced while SK1 is so named because Shiv Kapur, an Indian player who was a successful tour player, helped inspire it. The SK stands for the Sood-Kapur affiliation. The putter’s shaft angles into a tube-shaped piece that connects with the back center of the putter blade. Picture that short tube structure as the toe of a putter and you get the idea. After that, it comes down to weight and balances and different materials for feel.
I didn’t have to stay at a Holiday Inn recently to recognize the putter’s pendulum feel. I started to tell Sood that the “putter practically swings itself” but he finished that sentence for me before I could get it out. He said that is a common comment about the model.
His second model is the Legacy Blade A close second is the Blade, which looks fairly similar to standard blades but with a low back-side line. It is machined out of steel and copper billets with a standard 3-degree face angle that some tour players flatten to 2 degrees when they play on fast greens.
The third member of Incred Golf’s big three is the RFB Black Mallet, a large rectangular-shaped mallet for players who like bigger putter heads. It has the same pendulum feel as the other, just with a little more mass.
Incred Golf is still in the early stages of becoming a golf business. Step one is to get it in the hands of tour players, whose use helps with validation and advertising. Imagine, for instance, if Rory McIlroy were to win a Masters with one of these putters. Any putter model he used would lead to thousands of instant sales, ala the 1986 Masters when Jack Nicklaus used the oversize MacGregor Response putter.
Sood showed his putters to McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood in Dubai earlier this year.
“They were both very cool about it,” Sood said. “I went up to Rory and said, Whenever you have five minutes, I’d like to show this to you. Rory said, I won’t have five minutes today but I’ll come by tomorrow. Tommy did the same. And both of them came back. I wasn’t even at my putter bag when Tommy came. I was eating an ice cream cone. I rushed over to talk to him, I was holding the ice cream behind my back and he laughed. He said, ‘You’re having a lolly!’ or something.”
Several PGA Tour Champions players asked Sood to build putters for them. Another player whose interested was piqued was Bryson DeChambeau. One of his techs did some robotic testing with it and said Sood’s putter got the balling rolling (versus spinning) two to three times quicker off the face than a standard putter.
While on the Bay Hill practice green early this week, a sales rep for another golf product told Sood, “You’ve got the best four putters on this green right now.”
Compliments are nice but the real validation will be seeing players use his putters and have success. Sood got his first win on the PGTI Tour (Professional Golf Tour of India) in November.
Golf is ultimately about making putts. Golfers chase that ideal today, just like Arnie did once upon a time.
Gary Van Sickle has covered golf since 1980, following the tours to 125 men’s major championships, 14 Ryder Cups and one sweet roundtrip flight on the late Concorde. His work appeared, in order, in The Milwaukee Journal, Golf World magazine, Sports Illustrated and Golf.com. He is a former president of the Golf Writers Association of America. His email gvansick at aol dot com.
