AUGUSTA, Ga. — Before J.J. Spaun won 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 may have sent off the biggest frenzy for a golf club from one tournament when he won the 1986 Masters with a MacGregor Response ZT.
“Up until that point it was a novelty, a goofy putter,” Clay Long, former head of research and development for MacGregor Golf and the designer of the oversized aluminum putter once told Golfweek, “but it got serious real quick(ly).”
Jack Nicklaus and caddie line up putt at the Augusta National Golf Course during the 1986 Masters.
MacGregor had forecasted selling 6,000 putters for the year. By the Masters, 20,000 had sold. “It was already a success for us,” he says.
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But the company never expected demand to skyrocket the way 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 red Pontiac Fiero at that year’s July sales meeting. The sales award was supposed to go to the salesman that sold the most sets of commemorative irons celebrating the 25th anniversary of Nicklaus’s first year as a professional, but the irons didn’t do nearly the business of the Response ZT.
Long, who still 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 1990s and 2000s, he and Toulon overlapped at Cobra and TaylorMade and formed a friendship that has endured to this day. Speaking from his home in Carlsbad, California, Long said Toulon asked him to do a collaboration about a year ago and they agreed that they didn’t want to do an exact replica.
“It’s a more modernized version of the putter but it looks a lot like the original one,” Long said of the part stainless steel, part aluminum putter named the Small Batch Columbus that officially 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 believe it’s been 40 years since he designed one of golf’s most famous putters. It turns out the club was a mistake. It was supposed to be a corrective putter face aimed differently than the site line with an overhang, but the USGA ruled it was non-conforming. Long liked the putter’s performance and made up a few models without the overhang. “It became a high inertia putter instead,” he recalled.
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Nicklaus happened upon it in Long’s office one day. To say the rest is history would skip some of the memorable details.
“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 said.
Nicklaus experimented with it at Loxahatchee Club in Jupiter, Florida, and shot the course record with it. He put the club in his bag at the beginning of the 1986 season in Hawaii.
“He played pitifully before the Masters,” Long said. “We were worried he would stop using it.”
On Sunday’s final round, Long was by himself at home in Albany, Georgia, working on his taxes with the tournament on the TV set in the background. “And then I wasn’t doing my taxes anymore,” he recalled.
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Long was too busy fielding calls from his former golf teammates from Ole Miss, who were wondering if that was his putter responsible for all the heroics they were watching. When Nicklaus made the putt on 17 and lifted the putter in the air, Long broke into celebration.
“I was running around, screaming, I was so hoarse the next day,” he said. “And I was praying, ‘Please don’t 3-putt on the last hole.’”
Long says MacGregor sold approximately 350,000 Response ZT’s at a wholesale price of $39 before the company stopped manufacturing the club. The original name of the putter, in fact, was “The Solution,” but MacGregor found out just before its release that Titleist already had copyrighted the name. The Response was a shaft MacGregor had trademarked. The first 800 putters, including the one Nicklaus used in the Masters, included Long’s signature, which was later replaced by the patent pending. Nicklaus used the putter through 1988 and an oversized model for the next 10 years.
Long remained connected to Nicklaus, providing design work for Nicklaus Golf for several years when that company was in the equipment business. They previously released a 20th anniversary ZT Response putter. Now 75 golfers can enjoy the magic of the ’86 Masters all over again.
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“Forget golf, that’s the greatest sporting event I’ve ever seen,” he said of the 1986 Masters, “and to have played a part in it is the highlight of my career.”
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Putter Jack Nicklaus used to win 1986 Masters gets re-released
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