Updated April 7, 2026, 12:58 p.m. ET
AUGUSTA, Ga. — Before J.J. Spaun received the 2025 U.S. Open with a LAB putter, Wyndham Clark the 2023 U.S. Open with an Odyssey Jailbird and Payne Stewart the 1999 U.S. Open with a SeeMore FGP bronze putter, Jack Nicklaus could have despatched off the largest frenzy for a golf membership from one match when he received the 1986 Masters with a MacGregor Response ZT.
“Up until that point it was a novelty, a goofy putter,” Clay Long, former head of analysis and growth for MacGregor Golf and the designer of the outsized aluminum putter as soon as instructed Golfweek, “but it got serious real quick(ly).”
MacGregor had forecasted promoting 6,000 putters for the yr. By the Masters, 20,000 had offered. “It was already a success for us,” he says.
But the corporate by no means anticipated demand to skyrocket the way in which it did after the ’86 Masters: “We took 5,000 orders from 8 a.m. until noon on Monday. By the end of the year, we did 150,000,” he remembered. “We couldn’t make them fast enough. The plant was full of putters.”
MacGregor rewarded Nicklaus with a crimson Pontiac Fiero at that yr’s July gross sales assembly. The gross sales award was supposed to go to the salesperson that offered essentially the most units of commemorative irons celebrating the twenty fifth anniversary of Nicklaus’s first yr as an expert, however the irons didn’t do practically the enterprise of the Response ZT.
Long, who nonetheless designs high-end milled putters all these years later, is teaming with Sean Toulon of Toulon Design, a division of Callaway Golf, to make a limited-batch salute to the ’86 Masters. In the Nineties and 2000s, he and Toulon overlapped at Cobra and TaylorMade and fashioned a friendship that has endured to today. Speaking from his dwelling in Carlsbad, California, Long mentioned Toulon requested him to do a collaboration a couple of yr in the past and so they agreed that they did not need to do an actual duplicate.
“It’s a more modernized version of the putter but it looks a lot like the original one,” Long mentioned of the half stainless-steel, half aluminum putter named the Small Batch Columbus that formally launches on Thursday. “I’ve been putting with it and it feels very good.” [Toulon noted on Instagram that Long already has broken his age on four separate occasions using the putter.]
Long can hardly consider it has been 40 years since he designed considered one of golf’s most well-known putters. It seems the membership was a mistake. It was supposed to be a corrective putter face aimed in a different way than the positioning line with an overhang, however the USGA dominated it was non-conforming. Long appreciated the putter’s efficiency and made up just a few fashions with out the overhang. “It became a high inertia putter instead,” he recalled.
Nicklaus occurred upon it in Long’s workplace in the future. To say the remaining is historical past would skip a number of the memorable particulars.
“He said to me, ‘Is this a joke?’ Then he tried it out and he liked the way it rolled and asked me to send him a couple to try out,” Long mentioned.
Nicklaus experimented with it at Loxahatchee Club in Jupiter, Florida, and shot the course document with it. He put the membership in his bag originally of the 1986 season in Hawaii.
“He played pitifully before the Masters,” Long mentioned. “We were worried he would stop using it.”
On Sunday’s closing spherical, Long was by himself at dwelling in Albany, Georgia, engaged on his taxes with the match on the TV set within the background. “And then I wasn’t doing my taxes anymore,” he recalled.
Long was too busy fielding calls from his former golf teammates from Ole Miss, who had been questioning if that was his putter chargeable for all of the heroics they had been watching. When Nicklaus made the putt on 17 and lifted the putter within the air, Long broke into celebration.
“I was running around, screaming, I was so hoarse the next day,” he mentioned. “And I was praying, ‘Please don’t 3-putt on the last hole.’”
Long says MacGregor offered roughly 350,000 Response ZT’s at a wholesale worth of $39 earlier than the corporate stopped manufacturing the membership. The authentic identify of the putter, in reality, was “The Solution,” however MacGregor came upon simply earlier than its launch that Titleist already had copyrighted the identify. The Response was a shaft MacGregor had trademarked. The first 800 putters, together with the one Nicklaus used within the Masters, included Long’s signature, which was later changed by the patent pending. Nicklaus used the putter by 1988 and an outsized mannequin for the subsequent 10 years.
Long remained linked to Nicklaus, offering design work for Nicklaus Golf for a number of years when that firm was within the tools enterprise. They beforehand launched a 20th anniversary ZT Response putter. Now 75 golfers can benefit from the magic of the ’86 Masters once more.
“Forget golf, that’s the greatest sporting event I’ve ever seen,” he mentioned of the 1986 Masters, “and to have played a part in it is the highlight of my career.”
