Hot List Extra: The best-looking mallet putters on the 2025 Hot List
Although the mallet putter has been around almost since the birth of the game, its presence has almost always been met with the same type of reaction from golfers. “Sure, they’re probably easier to putt with, but the look … “
The voices trailing off need to go no further. The large backsides of mallets can make them look like an Army destroyer at best and a science-fair project gone wrong at worst—even if they can be a thing of beauty to those using them.
That’s starting to change because today's mallets are far from giant hunks of metal on the end of a stick. These putters are a well thought out marriage of materials, mechanical engineering and biophysics brought together in an effort to keep off-center hits near the hole on approach putts and the missed three-footer a shocking event instead of a common occurrence. A large part of the reason is that most mallets today push weight behind the face to the back of the putter, thus increasing the inertia (or stability) along that line. Manufacturers, however, have finally found a way to do so in shapes that don’t leave the golfer recoiling in horror when setting down the clubhead behind the ball.
A large part of making that happen has been the ability to make mallets more compact without sacrificing performance. The original TaylorMade Spider and Scotty Cameron Phantom models were positively massive but are now considerably sleeker, upping their appeal. Add in the alignment benefit (mallets scored nearly a full point higher in our alignment vector ratings than did blades) and the increasing appeal of mallets becomes evident.
Some, in fact, are downright attractive. Shane Popham, a veteran Hot List tester, found the Odyssey Ai One Milled 7T CH to be “Regal, elegant. I like how the fang lines angled toward the ground minimize the profile so it's not flat and chunky. It centers my eyeline.”
How cool have mallets become? Consider all 10 of the top 10 players on the World Ranking use a mallet. That doesn’t happen if they can’t stomach the appearance.
Still, some look better than others. The Ai One Milled series was one of five mallet series to achieve a look score of 3.9 out of five or higher in our criteria of Look among our 32 testers. Below is the entire group in alphabetical order.
