L.A.B. Golf - Part 1: "The Revealer" - The Fire Pit w/ Matt Ginella

him in his life, life and career. Unreal And what what? What has that meant for the lab business?

Same could be said and has been said by a lot of people to a lot of people about a wide variety of things heading into every PGA merchandise show, which is why, while working for Golf Channel at the time and spending days and hours popping in and out of one booth after the next, I was skeptical. And I should also say I'm not much of an equipment geek at the time, I had used the same putter for almost a decade, the Gambler by Never Compromise, gifted to me by a sales rep at a PGA tour event.

I like the name, the look, feel, and the results. But Burkhart is a good friend, and he's not the type to overstate anything, and he's never one to talk in superlatives. So I went by the booth and asked for Sam Han. That's him, the guy holding the crazy contraption talking people through how and why hanging a putter between two long metal rods can reveal both the good and bad in putter technology. Han, who you hear in the opening SoundBite, had the look of a man on

a mission. Before I go any further, I just want to say thank you to Dormy Workshop for their support of this podcast. I also met the Bishop Brothers at the PGA Merchandise Show, and as I reported several times on Morning Drive, I was blown away by their head covers and their line of handmade leather goods. The Canadian based company only makes great stuff and we're lucky to have them putting our logo on a variety of things,

all available at Firepitcollective dot com. For their complete collection of originals, headcovers and classics, go to Dormy Workshop dot com and use promo code fire Pit fifteen for fifteen percent off your next purchase. Dormy obviously makes putter covers, but it would take most of the cow to conceal and protect lab Garoff's original directed force what some might refer to as a spatula or a toaster oven to look down at the directed force wasn't easy on any

golfer's eyes. But going back to twenty nineteen and because of Mike Burkhart, I had time for Sam Han that day, and within twenty minutes I saw how this contraption Han referred to as a revealer did just that. It revealed to me that every other putter I used, as it hung from the top of the contraption, and as I held the two posts on either side of the putter grip, that when I made my putting stroke, the putter head would spin and at the point of impact, the putter

face was anything but square to the target. To try the same thing with the directed force putter. Sure enough, this revealer in fact revealed that the putter stayed in balance throughout the putting stroke and the face was square at the point of end impact. Cool, I remember thinking, but I had no real sense of what I just used or witnessed. And although Han came across as knowledgeable, articulate, and certainly passionate about his product, I still walked away

a skeptic. Again, I'm not an equipment geek. The terms moment of inertia, center of gravity, and the idea of lab Lie angle balance was gibberish to me. I'm more a look and feel guy. If I like the way it looks, the way it feels, and if I have some relative success using it, it stays.

have been well documented. To be direct, he had the yips going back to twenty nineteen, the year I met Han, Glover was one hundred and sixty third in strokes gained putting.

In twenty twenty he was one hundred and thirty seventh, twenty twenty one one hundred and eighty ninth, twenty twenty two one hundred and sixty ninth, and in twenty twenty three he was one hundred and sixty eighth, and yet because he's an incredible ball striker with an insane amount of grit and grind, he kept his PGA Tour card

and has for twenty years. His career earnings in spite of his putter woes thirty four million, five hundred and forty three thousand, nine hundred and fifty one dollars and counting. Much more on and from Lucas Glover later in this podcast series, but after he won twenty twenty three Wyndham Championship and the FedEx Saint Jude, all the chatter was about his putting, and specifically his lab broom putter lab. I thought, is that the thing that Sam Han was

selling at the PGA merchandise show. I called Mike Burkhart. Sure enough, there was truth in the technology, and in fact, certainly for Lucas Glover, it was a game changer, a career saver, and the story seemed worth a few more phone calls. This podcast series is about more than just the gritten grind of Lucas Glover, and it goes much deeper than Sam Han. This is an American dream, rags to riches. You're going to hear from the inventor Bill Pressey.

Sometimes the best story is your own story. And I got to feel like, I'm not sure you're ever going to stumble upon a better story than your own story.

I put together a really cool band. I had a eight to twelve piece band with a bunch of horns and singers and stuff, and we went around the country a few different times, and I actually ended up meeting a girl here in eugen while I was out on tour and then ended up just kind of coming back here to be with her, and then still kept playing music, but also kind of expanded in booking a big ass band around the country. You know. I got good at

booking and promoting and all that stuff. So I started a talent agency here, very very small, booked for a few venues here in town, and have basically been in the bar and music business for since two thousand and one. So being in the bar of music business leaves you a lot of time during the day. I was always working at night, and so during the day I was I've always been a golf psychopath. I loved playing when

I was young. Never did anything to really get good, but I just loved going around and around and around. And so when I moved out here, I met a dude like minded fella, you know, kind of a weird hippie stone or golfer like me, and we hit it off pretty well. And that's what I really started to get into the game, you know, in a serious way, really started practicing. I was an eighteen handicap when I was like around twenty years old, and I was a scratch player about two years later, and in you know,

all that golf stuff. I got super into equipment and always tinkering, always screwing around with stuff. And then fast forward to twenty seventeen. Summer of twenty seventeen, I was out here taking a lesson from my guy here, guy named Bob Duncan who's now now in ben really good instructor, great guy, and he had this crazy ass putter. And at the time I was like, I've always been a pretty good ball striker and just a lunatic with the putting.

And at that time I had been my whole stick for the like six months prior was I was grabbing a new putter before every round of golf, no matter what, so that I could just ride a honeymoon for every round. Even if I putted well the day before, it didn't matter. I was always grabbing a new putter and screwing around with it. And I was, you know, it was my thing, and it was made fun of plenty, and you know, each new putter was the answer. There was fifty plus

in my basement. And so then at the time I was screwing around mostly with like eighty eight h two style putters. I think, as I look back on it now. I was like, if I'm gonna suck at putting, I might as well at least have a cool looking putter. And so I had a NAPA that day. I remember I was putting with this really cool oil can Scottie Cameron napa and Bob comes up and you know, shows me the RENO two point one by a company called

Directed Force at the time. Was how it was kind of branded, and I was like, what the am I allowed to swear? Yeah? Of course you are, Yeah yeah. I was like, what the fuck is that? Like? Barf likes full on barf. I mean, it was just the most ridiculous looking thing I'd ever seen. I was like, there's no chance I'm putting with that.

was fifteen hundred dollars. It was about four to seventy five or something at the time, and I said that and he said, well, let's try it.

called the revealer again. The revealer is that contraption invented by Bill Pressey in his garage that does just that. It reveals what a putter does when a golfer makes a putting stroke. It's what I saw Han using at the Merchandise Show in twenty nineteen two metal rods with a suspension bar connecting them at the top, in which you can hook and hang any putter from You hold the metal rods on the side as you make a putt, and every putter other than the directed force. Eventually the

Lab putters will spin wildly throughout the putting stroke. The directed force doesn't move, essentially staying square so that when you hit the putt, the ball rolls online. It's the tool that pressy and anyone who has sold the directed force, and eventually Lab Putters uses to help demonstrate the technology and ultimately sell the putters back to Sam Hunt. As he and Bob Duncan are at Emerald Valley in Oregon.

So he's like, just give me nine holes, grab a cart, went out on the golf course and I one putted the first seven greens for a total of about one hundred and fifty feet worth of putts. And I was like what the fuck and could not I mean, my mind was blown. I ran into a group and I feel like wait, and I drove back into the bar shop and I was like sold, done, bought it on the spot, and I got real excited. I started telling friends I was excited. I was, and you know, and

everybody's like, okay, so you had another putter. That's the answer. For Sam, it just worked.

this is the greatest thing since slice bread. Because had I not done that, the two weeks that followed very likely would have would have resulted in me throwing the putter in the river. It was. I went through what I now called the torque hangover period, which is which is a thing. It's a a very real process and sort of getting used to to our technology. And I couldn't roll it into a swimming pool from two feet

like I was losing my mind. But because I was so stubborn about, you know, not letting my friends be right about you know, how absurd it was that I bought this putter, I grounded out. And that was the beginning of me developing you know, you know, the technology was there, but we had to figure out how to use it. And I had my own process in figuring out how to use it, which was the start of me kind of developing the curriculum, if you will, as

to how to use these things. And I quickly arrived at the reality that like, look, I've seen it with my own eyes, I have in my hand a self squaring putter. The putter is actually seeking square to staying square by itself. So if I'm missing lines, we know it ain't the putter. And that sort of you know, baseline understanding of what I had in my hand changed everything for me.

my groove with it. I was a one handicap at the time, I was a plus three and a half six weeks later.

That was the thing that was incredible to me because and that actually had slightly less to do with the technology I was using, and more to do with the size the MOI the forgiveness of the putter, where you know, there was no fight on the takeaway and the through stroke, and so I was squaring up the face pretty well. But from outside thirty feet, nobody hits the center of the face every time, and with the DF it didn't matter. So all of a sudden these thirty footers started going in.

Then in close range I was worthless the culprit for me, as with the vast, vast majority of our customers who reach out talking about issues with short putting is alignment with a conventional putter, with a conventional torque putter. I don't want to say alignment is irrelevant, but it's way less important than you would think, because no matter what, with the torquing putter, you are making a manipulation through impact anyway. So you know, and and and there's data

to support this. Dave David, David Orr and David Adell did some very in depth studies in the early in the early the early odds and found out that even the best players in the world, none of them aimed their putters. Well, the vast majority of them were outside aimers.

And at the time, nobody more egregious than Tiger and Mike Weir were both you know, that was when Mike was playing his best golf and was one of the best putters in the world, and Tiger, obviously exceptional at putting, didn't name their putters, So I wasn't a particularly good aimer at the time. Uh. And that was what got exposed with the with the the reno, because that putter's going where you point, and if you're not pointed good, You're going to struggle period.

what the industry said it should be. So, but I never really like allowed myself to fully accept that. I was still thinking, you know, when I was feeling archy and gaety, that I should be using the toe hang and vice versa, and so there was always just this conflict.

against reality. So the narrative to date when you go to wherever you're gonna go get fit is that if your stroke has less arc and less face rotation in relation to that arc, you should be using a face balance putter or in other words, a putter that when you lay the shaft on your finger parallel to the ground,

the face points to the sky. If you're somebody that you know the path that the shaft travels on has more depth to the arc, and that the face rotates in excess of that arc, that you should have a toe hangputter at it. And for the kind of medium golf nerd. We've all heard the word toeflow. So when you know people are advertising answer style putters or you know Scottie Cameron Newporter like kind of that Odyssey number nine shape like Phil uses a lot. You know they

talk about toe flow. The toe doesn't flow. There's nothing flowy about the toe, and there's like it does the exact opposite from a torquing perspective, The second you pull back a toe hang putter, it's trying to shut. It's not opening up allowing your gate to happen or anything like that. And then the exact opposite on the way through, if you're able to keep it square in the backstroke and you go forward, that putter is trying to open.

It is not trying to close. And then a face balance putter, like I I don't, I don't even understand, Like who made this shit up? Because like a face balance putter just opens in both directions. As to why that suits somebody with less gator, I have no idea. It's it's it's a total load of crap. What I will accept absolutely is that different people have different reactions

to these torque profiles. So if I put, if I put a new port in your hand, and then I put a two ball in your hand, a face balance two ball in your hand, You're very likely going to have different results with each of those putters. So people do react differently to torque. The brilliance of lyingle balancing is we just eliminated that variable. We're not chasing some

kind of thing. Because here's what I found and what I noticed, you know, after I got into lyingle balancing and after I started to understand how putters actually work, was that everybody reacts to the instrument that's in their hand. So if you have access rotator ex exportation one way or another whatever with the putter that you show up to your fitting with, and then they put a fitter in your hand, or different putter in your hand, and you have a different reaction to it that, at least

on paper is better. That's all fine and good until you get used to it. And then you get used to it, and now you've got a whole new set of problems, and likely you go back and they want to throw a tow hanging putter back in your hands. And this is why we all have fifteen fucking putters in our basement. And so you know, we're always we're

always chasing. Now at a high level, of course, these guys know how to manage torque, you know, out on tour and the high level amateurs, and they have a better understanding of what does what they can calibrate, they can mitigate, they can do all kinds of things to accommodate torque. The rest of us we don't have a quintic at home. We don't have a coach watching us, we don't have any of that, and so we're chasing.

The most incredible thing to watch over the last six years with our customers is they just stop chasing finally, you know, they and I have it in my head like a lot of a lot of golfers, I think already think that their putters stay square by themselves, you know, Like I remember I had rounds I'd miss a couple

four footers. I'm so pissed, and I go to the putting green after the round, I'm like, okay, if I just keep my hands really neutral and I just rocked my shoulders, then this putter should return back to square all on its own. And like it didn't, and you know, and here we are, so now I.

I didn't say it like this at the time. But this is my stick now, is that when you know people are kind of learning to accommodate the tech, every other putter that you've ever used in your entire life, you have to keep it square, and with a lab putter you have to let it stay square. So just

that mentality shift alone changed everything. So if the task is now to let the putter face stay square versus keep it square, the first changes started to happen in my hands and in the way that I held the club. So you know, a good portion of us, you know, use the kind of stand uply reverse overlap grip, and

we do that for stability. And he I think he even calls out that word in his book, The art of putting is that this this this, you know, the lead hand index finger, you know, going over the knuckles there stabilizes the face. Well, with a lying the balance putter, you're not looking for stability. The stability is already bilt into the head. So what's that to like get out

of the way kind of exactly. So, so I had to get into a mode where, you know, kind of the words I used that I was making my hands feel stupid, and so I used to have like a pretty strong tilted down here. I had a pretty strong left hand grip like that, or the left hand was over this way, similar to kind of how I grip a seven iron, pretty neutral right hand kind of on

top of it. And then I couldn't tell you or remember specifically how I arrived there, but I eventually started working my hands underneath the putter and so really weak left hand underneath it, strong right hand, and this sort of neutralized my hands to where the putter was just kind of doing its thing. I felt so uncomfortable gripping it that way that I had no choice but to just trust that the putter was going to come back square.

So those two things so kind of the way I held the putter, and it was more than like the physical holding it was it was a perspective. I mean, this was a philosophical perspective shift on what I was trying to do in the movement of a putting stroke. Between the way I held it and then the way I kind of moved it, sort of getting smoother and more gravity oriented rather than acceleratetion oriented. That was when

things really came alive. And and that's another one of the things so that you know, usually the first thing when they if they email us if they're struggling, go check your alignment. The second thing they call us, and they'll say, I'm having speed troubles. And one hundred percent of the time I can be like leaving the long one short and hitting the short ones by, and they're like, yep. And the reason being on the long ones is that

that disappearing effect. Most people don't take the putter back any further from forty feet than they do from twenty. And if you've got a forty footer and you take the twenty foot backstroke and just try to accelerate it, the putter completely disappears on you. It feels vague and weird, you get uncomfortable, you leave it ten feet short, you'll overcompensate and jam the ten footer five feet by. And so I got I got really lucky just working through

all of that on my own. And then you know, like I said that the vast improvement in my scores was just it was nuts. It was time. I wasn't even actually hitting the ball particularly well, but it didn't matter. I was I could just didn't matter at all. I could hit any as long as I got it somewhere within you know, thirty yards of the green. I then knew I could hit it somewhere within ten feet of the hole, and I knew I was going to make

the ten footer. It just didn't matter. And my bad rounds I was, you know, my scoring average, and this is a very very strong golf course that I play. My scoring average was seventy two. That's the lowest it's ever been. So just a regular old ho hum day for me was even par, And within that stretch I had some of the finest rounds of golf I've ever played.

And I didn't want to touch it, you know, I didn't want to do anything. So now I spend the next like month and a half like just not even breathing on the putter. Like I was putting it in the cart next to me. I wasn't putting it in my bag. I just like just so desperate to keep this thing together because I could feel the head was loose. And then finally I think balls off. And so at that time talked to Bob. Bob said, you gotta you know, here's here's Bill's number. Bill Pressy was the inventor of

the putter Litill Pressy the fourth. He's from Reno, and he gave me Bill's number. I sent back the putter. Bill reached out, you know, to you just apologize for the head fallen off and tell me how it was going to go, and gave me a shipping label and everything. We sent it back and then we just got to

talking and we just hit it off. I mean, he just absolute kindred golf spirits and he is to this day the highest golf iq of any human being I have ever met, and certainly within within the realms of putting, for sure, just an absolute genius. And then all the way through the bag and it's everything. He's a golf historian, certainly an equipment historian, a wonderful instructor. And he'd been you know, up and down the every facet of the

golf business. He'd been in sales, he'd been an instruction he tried, you know, a couple of different times to get out on tour. I mean, just a just an everything golf guy.

realized that he had the vision and excuse. He had the vision and the skill set, the people skills that that I desperately wanted as a partner.

lying a balance to the world. And then it kind of a month or two of doing that. I don't have the timing quite right, but I think I think it was probably two or three months. Uh, the company was in real trouble and they you know, builded an incredible job with the technology and the patents and all the stuff. And to kind of get it going, he partnered with some folks that just I just didn't know

what they're doing. They just they you know, they tried their hand at marketing and manufacturing and whatever, and it just it just wasn't working. And uh so, uh they were about to close the doors, and I'd ask Bill to put me in touch with the guys that he was partnered with, worked out a deal with them. Me, my dad, and my brother all put everything together and bought out Bill's existing partners. And that's how the whole thing,

that's how LAB started. So then at that point, so that was late twenty seventeen, I think we were officially, you know, business married in early twenty eighteen, and we were off to the races and or so I thought back to Bob Duncan.

It's kind of funny, but you don't, you know, some questions not to ask when you're talking about money, And so I just mentioned to him that THO was looking for some new uh investors, and Sam kind of took the took the reins and he and he started talking to Bill and they got together kind of without my knowledge, but sooner, no, sooner was there meeting than they started to come up with some kind of an agreement. And Sam's I think Sam's family may have gotten involved. I don't know.

and so Uh I took. I didn't get I mean I did get bought out, but my my equity and shares and everything that I have just transferred into LAB. And then we bought out the original investors and partners. And and then Sam and UH and myself and his family. You know that the Hans took lion, you know, the lion share of the company, and which was which was nothing new to me that I was never in the controlling seat. So it worked out great.

I absolutely remember running into you. And you told me what you were doing, and you were just wide eyed and freaked out and this and you know, I mean, this was such a as I look back on it, like, I have no idea how I convinced myself that this was something I could do.

of the cool kids, you know. So then I see him at the bank and he is completely freaked out, which is not the Sam Hon that I know, And I'm like, what's going on?

and buying lab Golf. And I'm like, and I think at that time I already had one of the putters too, because he was like trying to sell him and so I'm not sure if I had my putter in the din or not or just after he bought it, but uh, but I saw I saw technology, and it's like, you know, I've been playing golf since I was like three, I'm sixty two now or something, so and I just saw

someith He's just completely somewhere else. You know, you'll be able to, you know, sign your first mortgage, how freaked out you are. And that's that's kind of look he had. And he goes, yeah, I'm buying the company, and I'm like, that'll be awesome, you know, and it's just like and then a couple of months later, he's they moved the company here, and I see has a little Facebook ad about I'm going to I guess I can work you know, two jobs and go work for lab Golf for a

little while, so you know, it starts taking off. So that was kind of the short version of how it all happen.

everything about what we were doing. I would say now, in retrospect, one of the absolute best things we had going for us was the fact that I didn't have any idea how the golf industry worked.