Gear: Scotty Cameron Champions Choice putters
Price: $700 each
Specs: Milled 303 stainless steel head with Teryllium insert, aluminum sole plate and adjustable sole weights.
Available: July 28
Who It’s For: Golfers with deep pockets who want to maximize feel and touch on the greens.
The Skinny: Adding a Teryllium insert to classically milled putters enhances feel and sound to help golfers get a better sense of touch on putts.
The Deep Dive: Tiger Woods won his first major championship, the 1997 Masters, using a Scotty Cameron Teryllium TeI3 Newport putter, and Brooks Koepka has won his five major championships using a Teryllium-inserted Scotty Cameron T10 Select Newport 2 prototype, but Titleist’s master craftsman for putters had never made a retail putter with a Teryllium insert until the Teryllium T22 putters were released in 2019. Two years later, the Champions Choice family of putters dropped, marking the second time the exotic material was made available to the public. Scotty Cameron has just updated those putters and released the Champions Choice Limited Release putters for 2023.
There are four putters in the family – Newport Plus, Newport 1.5 Plus, Newport 2 Plus, Newport 2.5 Plus – and each is a slightly larger version of the standard putter that bares its name. The addition of Plus versions of putters debuted in January’s Super Select family.
All the Champions Choice Limited Release putters are milled from 303 stainless steel and have a weight in the heel and toe areas of the sole to allow fitters to adjust the swing weight of the putter based on its length or the golfer’s preferences. They also have a 6061 aluminum sole plate that takes weight from the middle of the head and shifts more of the overall weight to the perimeter for enhanced stability. Finally, they also have a single alignment line to help golfers aim the face.
The significant difference between the Champions Choice and Super Select putters is the Champions Choice has been made with the Teryllium insert. Don’t look for that material on the Periodic Table because it’s a name Cameron made up for an alloy.
“Tellurium copper is made from 12 different alloys to create this super-soft copper. No one [when Cameron was developing the material] had heard of tellurium, but everyone was into beryllium nickel and beryllium copper, so I took the name Teryllium and called and got a trademark on it,” Cameron told Golfweek in 2018 in a discussion about Brooks Koepka’s putter.
The Teryllium insert is designed over a layer of vibration-dampening tape and held in position by three screws that you can see on the back of the putter. Those screws for the Button Back pattern take the place of the trademark Cherry Bombs found on many Scotty Cameron putters. In the Champions Choice putters, the Button Back area has been paint-filled using red, white and blue, but you can not see the colors when you look down in the address position and get ready to putt.