T.P. Mills Has Been Shaping Golf History for Half a Century

by Darin Bunch

The story goes something like this:

Some 50 years ago, T.P. Mills built one of his handmade putters for an up-and-coming ball-striker who many believed would go on to make an impact on the game of golf. As was his custom, Mr. Mills placed the finished product in the young man’s locker at an event — along with the bill, which was about 35 bucks in those days.

When the kid found the invoice, he tracked down T.P. and told him he couldn’t pay for the flatstick — not because he didn’t like it or didn’t have the money but because his father, who doubled as his agent, believed his son shouldn’t pay for golf equipment.

In turn, Mr. Mills said he understood — and he took back the putter. After all, in those days, as golf was somewhat at the beginning of the popularity curve it has enjoyed ever since, and more importantly before television embraced the game, there was no advantage to having a professional play his clubs for free. No brand names adorned golf bags, and advertising took a back seat to tradition and integrity in T.P.’s mind.

You see, Mr. Mills put a lot of effort into each of his custom creations. Five decades later, his son, David, explains it this way: “Dad worked awfully hard to build these golf clubs. And not being too far removed from the Great Depression, he was cautious. Even when he was making a lot of clubs, he was never quite sure how the golf business was gonna pan out.”

And because of that, everybody who wanted a T.P. Mills putter paid for it. Simple as that. Over the years, the list was impressive — from guys named Palmer and Player and Chi Chi to players like Pate and Irwin and Langer. And as the era of sponsorship began to grow, even a few big names blacked out the “T.P. Mills” stamp on the face (and his trademarked crossed-dots logo that marked the sweet spot) to keep from drawing the ire of much larger club manufacturers who held them under contract. Beyond the professional ranks, T.P. Mills was the putter of choice for five U.S. presidents (there’s even a picture of Ronald Reagan putting down the aisle of Air Force One).

But everybody paid — from the days when they were $30 (Cary Middlecoff paid for his in three $10 installments) to the days when a custom T.P. Mills putter fetched $500 or more in the ’80s. And rumors of “flipped” putters had them reselling for several thousands of dollars.

But that young kid — named Jack, by the way — never wrote a check, a moment in the company’s history that in hindsight elicits a sly chuckle from David. “I told Dad one time, if you were ever gonna give away a club, couldn’t you have just given one to Nicklaus? We’d have quite a few more major championships.”

Not that T.P. Mills doesn’t make a mark on Tour.

The company’s putters have been employed by winners of pretty much every big event golf has to offer — including The Masters and the U.S. Open.

Still, he never catered exclusively to golf’s elite. Rather, T.P. was willing to build a putter for anyone who was willing to do two things: save the money and wait for the finished product. Of course, the second qualification was sometimes more difficult than the first because order fulfillment could take up to 12 months.

But true believers knew it was worth the wait.

“I remember a story about a wealthy older gentleman in his 70s,” David recalls, “who waited for a year to get his new putter, then got his car stolen with his golf clubs in the car.”

When the man called T.P. to inquire about getting a replacement, he was told it would be another year. And while respectful, the man’s response was a practical one.

“He said, ‘Mr. Mills, I don’t know if I’ve got another year to live or not,’” David says. “‘I can buy a new Mercedes tomorrow, but I have to wait a year to get a new putter, and I may not even be here when it’s ready.’ And I’m still not sure to this day whether Dad moved him up on the list.”

These days, the wait isn’t quite as long (about six to eight weeks), but the quality of a T.P. Mills putter is every bit the same with the family business in the hands of David, who learned the ropes from his father in T.P.’s first shop, a little 12-by-9-foot workroom in their 1,500-square-foot home.

“When I was a young boy, I think I liked to play golf more than work in the shop,” David says, remembering the days of sweeping and cleanup before he hit his teen years. “Then, as I got older and more interested in the game of golf, I began asking questions and learning.”

But it wasn’t until after college that David’s career path really began to take shape. “I was still what you’d call a greenhorn, in that I probably thought I knew more than I did. But I started to do more and more, and eventually Dad taught me more and more, like how to heat the club, where to heat it, how to bend it.”

Later, corporate culture came calling, just as it had for his father, who worked with Spalding for 25-plus years. In David’s case, it was Mizuno where he gained his knowledge of large-scale manufacturing, handling putter design from 1998 to 2002. And then, with his father retired, David realized it was time for the T.P. Mills legacy to live on as a boutique clubmaker.

“I said, What the heck? I knew how many clubs Mizuno was selling, and I knew they were making some pretty good money. I knew how to build the clubs, and I now I understood the manufacturing side of things, so we gave it a try.”

Along the way, David has expanded what T.P. Mills — now commonly accepted, along with Karsten Solheim, to be a grandfather of modern putting — had to offer the average consumer, but he’s never strayed from the core commitment to making the best forged putters anywhere.

“Karsten was famous for his castings,” he says, “and T.P. was famous for his forgings, the carbon steel, the black putter. My dad was known for his great balance of the putter, and when he finished a golf club, you could put the head on the point of a tee and it would balance perfectly under the sweet spot. We still do that to this day.

“I think that’s a testament to the time and effort and thought that goes into building a golf club that is well-balanced. And certainly not all golf clubs can say that.”

David Mills’ putter lines now include a crucial component for golf’s golden age of retail — he offers a limited production line for pro shops and other outlets that want to be part of the T.P. Mills lineage. Ranging from $249 to $299, these putters have standardized machined heads that can be mass produced before David goes to work on the finishing and shaping by hand at his Tuscaloosa shop in Alabama.

“I’m very picky about quality,” he says. “So even with the limited production line, I feel like if somebody’s gonna pay money for one of my golf clubs, I need to put my hands on it. And it needs to be done right the first time, or at least as well as I can do it. My hands are gonna go on it, and hopefully with what I know and what I can do, it’s gonna turn out pretty good.”

But that doesn’t mean he’s backed away from making custom putters with an emphasis on individual fit for a player, an aspect of clubmaking his visionary father predicted would grow in importance in the industry, just as it has done dramatically in recent years.

“Handmade is what we’ve always done,” David says. “We custom fit. I look at specs on a piece of paper and use my experience to build the club that is right for that player. Dad used to say, years ago, that a good golf club is like a suit of clothes — it’s gotta be made to fit you. And that’s what I do today with the handmade and custom pieces.”

That custom work will run you somewhere in the neighborhood of $600 (and the aforementioned six to eight weeks), but Mills says his customers rarely mind the wait, just as was the case when T.P. crafted putters back in his ’60s, ’70s and ’80s heydays.

During those days, T.P. Mills, a former aviation instructor who started building putters in the first place because he wanted a better weapon for his own game, was often a man ahead of his time. Not only did he design the famous flanged BullsEye putter for Acushnet, but he also pitched an idea in the 1960s that nobody would even consider for many years to come.

“He thought the future of the wooden golf club was to get rid of the big neck on it and put more weight into the head,” David says. “So he built a no-hosel wood. And the folks at Spalding looked at it and told him nobody would ever play with a golf club that did not have a hosel on it, that he was crazy and should take that club back to Tuscaloosa. And to this day, we still have that club, and the people who see it marvel at how it looks just like some of the modern metalwoods.”

Meanwhile, the tradition of tinkering, always striving to make better clubs, lives on in David, who has a simple answer when asked why T.P. Mills stands above the scores of new putters that hit the market every year.

“My father’s designs have won virtually every event on tour,” he says, “and his putters have been imitated throughout the industry. But I think a simple way to test is longevity. The golf club industry is an easy-in or easy-exit business, and over the past 40 years or so, there have been more putter companies come and go than you can shake a stick at, so to speak. They’ve come and gone. But there have only been a handful that have stood the test of time. And our business is busier now than it’s ever been.” FG

Published in FG Magazine, July 2009

THE POSTMAN
That’s right, The Postman always sinks nice. Sorry to mix movie metaphors, but forget the Jack Nicholson-Jessica Lange potboiler from the early ‘80s. Heck, after swinging this elegant old-school stick, even Jack himself — who’s been known to wield a golf club now and then, on windshields and otherwise — would have cause to go off-script and join me in waxing poetic about its hole-seeking power.

With T.P. Mills’ limited-edition Postman putter (son David made only 20 of this remake of one of his dad’s original designs) I’m talking about a short-stuff tool that, in movie terms, could certainly fetch five stars from every major critic and be a proverbial “shoo-in for Oscar consideration.”

It took me a few rounds on the Oregon trail to let its classic story sink in, but once it did … oh, boy. Not only does this have the weight of Mills’ handmade workmanship behind it (and I mean forged weight — this ain’t no feathery cast aluminum pretender), it’s effortlessly balanced at address, releases nicely through the hitting zone and sets up square even though it’s not outfitted with flying buttresses, wings or other such geometric googaws.

It’s simply perfect, and perfectly simple. Suddenly I’m draining both 3-foot downhillers and 40-foot double-breakers a lot more often than I used to, with an electric buzz of confidence I haven’t felt in…well, ever.

Why the name? T.P. Mills remained a mail carrier until he retired, all the while building America’s best rollers. And this baby delivers. ­—Vic Williams

THE HERITAGE
A customer named this putter. And now I feel like I’m part of the T.P. Mills heritage by putting with it better than I have in years (it even weaned me off the dreaded long putter).

Back when David Mills decided to build this version of his Klassic model — made of carbon and stainless steel, perimeter-weighted with a sweet spot pocket in the back — he didn’t know what the call it, so he asked a customer to come up with the proper moniker for the clean, smooth design.

“He said, ‘You should call it the Heritage,” Mills recalls, “‘because your heritage is in that soft, hand-shaped look.’ And I said, ‘You just named the putter.’”

It’s the sweet spot that makes it my new “Klassic.” Rather than the geometric marking of the “center of

the clubface” as so many clubs have, Mills finds and marks the actual sweet spot — in this case just inside of center. And when I put the golf ball opposite the pocket with a good stroke on it, there’s no doubt where it’s headed.

I’m playing the rounded neck model, but after much demand, Mills now offers a plumber’s neck as well.

“For years, I had people say, ‘If you made your putters with a plumber’s neck, you wouldn’t be able to keep them in stock,’ and I said, ‘That’s just not what we do.’ But eventually I realized that it’s another component we need to make available to our customers.”

So now there’s no reason for any player to resist becoming part of the Heritage. If it can make my putting stroke an instant classic, it can help anyone putt better. ­—Darin Bunch