Meet Bill Presse IV: The Inventor of Lie Angle Balance
From Frustration to Innovation
Bill’s quest for Lie Angle Balance began with a relatable moment. He’d hit nearly every green in a Monday qualifier, yet somehow, he failed to break par. His face-balanced putter simply wasn’t cutting it. That day, he made a decision: he was going to build something better.
What followed was a deep dive into putter design. He went as far as experimenting with a “tricep putter,” a unique build that ran along the outside of his lead arm and locked his wrist in place. During this process, he set up to check its length, holding the slick, ungripped shaft. As he held the putter, he realized he couldn’t keep the face square no matter how tightly he gripped. This was his first real experience with torque, sparking the inspiration that would lead him down a new path in putter design.
Bill then started examining the quirks of older, often overlooked putter designs like the Positive Putter, Tommy Armour Zaap, and the PLOP Putter. These low-torque putters planted a seed in his mind—one that big brands had missed.
The Breakthrough: A Broken Crutch
As a master club builder, Bill knew that achieving his vision would take more than creating a new putter head shape. The lesson from his tricep putter experiment was clear: he needed to understand and control torque to keep the face square through the stroke. He spent countless nights drilling holes, adding lead tape, and refining prototypes, all in search of an elusive “perfect balance.” Then came his breakthrough with The Revealer.
Bill invented The Revealer before he made his first Lie Angle Balanced putter. Built from the remains of a broken crutch, The Revealer became the first tool that allowed Bill to observe exactly how a putter behaved during a stroke.
Engineering The Revealer took time and patience, but it was crucial for developing what would become the Directed Force, the first Lie Angle Balanced putter. The Revealer allowed Bill to finally identify the balance needed to keep the putter face square to the arc of the stroke—without any conscious effort.
Seeing Through the Fog
Bill’s journey wasn’t only about understanding physics; it taught him to see through the fog of conventional wisdom. Years spent with big brands had ingrained certain “truths” about putter design and performance, but Bill began to see that these ideas didn’t always match what actually worked on the greens.
He came to realize that the innovators behind unconventional putters weren’t crazy; they were onto something that big brands and big marketing budgets had long overshadowed. Without complex mathematical models, Bill relied on his experience, intuition, and knowledge to design a putter that worked in harmony with physics.