Hey everyone, Jake here from Made for the Range. Welcome back to the Made for the Range YouTube channel. We are in our second month of small batch releases here with Sean Toulon, who is sitting in the offices in Vista right now. This is small batch Palo Alto, correct?
I've got mine here in the box. I haven't taken it out yet because I wanted to organically do that with you here. So you have a sample there as well. Real quick, give us just another brief recap of the small batch project as a whole, just for people that don't know about it or haven't seen the other videos, and then we can dive right into the story behind Palo Alto and I'll get mine out and ask you a few questions.
Yeah, great. By the way, good morning to you. It's a really cool way, I think, for us to sort of exercise our creativity, the whole small batch platform. We make these putters using really interesting, new, different materials, different finishes. We get to explore different designs, different mill patterns, different graphic treatments, finishes, all kinds of different things. The world is your oyster as you would look at designing something here. What's also cool, Jake, is we make very few of them, hence the name small batch. We typically make about 75 of them worldwide. Half or so get sold in the United States and the other half or so gets sold outside the US. They're super rare. We think, you know, every one of them when we get the first prototypes back and then we work and tweak and change and get the finished product, I always say to the team, this is the most beautiful putter I've ever seen. But at some point, well, let's hope that never ends, but this next one, Palo Alto, I would say it's the most beautiful putter I think I've ever seen. So anyways, it's just a really cool way for us to keep our design shops sharp, getting them hopefully make them even sharper, and just bring things out to the golfer that will really resonate in a new and a different way.
Yeah, absolutely. I love the small batch project. I think it's just a fun thing for the design team to really exercise the creativity. Some of the stuff that's come out of small batch has been like the stories behind some of them, I think, have been even better than the putters themselves, which is cool. People don't understand the history and the research and the story development that goes into why each one of these is designed, which leads us into Palo Alto. So Preston was talking to me about the story last night and I felt like a bad golf nerd for not knowing who the guy was that the putter was named after and the story there. So I guess let's start off with that. The putter is based off of a Rossy design, and I didn't know until last night that the Rossy design is named after a person. So walk us through who that is and then kind of what his history with the shape and with golf actually is.
Yeah, so I would say anybody like 50 years old and older would know the name Bob Rosberg well, and probably most as a golf broadcaster for ABC. Rossy was really sort of one of the first roving reporters that would follow a group of golfers along during a tour event and commentate on situations that the players would get into. Rossy was just a wonderful player, six-time winner on the PGA Tour, including the 1959 PGA Championship at Minneapolis Golf Club. Born and raised in San Francisco, went to school at Stanford, hence the name Palo Alto. Was a two-sports star, both baseball and golf, inducted into the Stanford Sports Hall of Fame, which is pretty incredible. But I think even more important than all of that, just a magnificent guy, a wonderful competitor but friendly to all. He was an innovator. As a professional growing up in the 40s and 50s, you didn't really have the access to equipment like you do now. So a lot of the players sort of had to kind of do their own thing. Rossy loved equipment and loved tinkering and came up with a bunch of different ideas that later became design projects with companies like MacGregor, Top-Flite, a lot of different golf club manufacturers that he helped design clubs for. But he was really passionate about putters and was one of the fathers of the modern mallet. He was a really good putter, but he chose to putt with mallets probably more so than almost anybody at the time. Stockton would have been a mallet guy and Billy Casper would have been primarily a mallet guy as well. But Rossy was really the one that I would say kind of gave birth to the modern mallet that later became the Rossy at Odyssey.
Yeah, that's absolutely crazy. There was also, I do want to point out the specific story that he beat Ty Cobb in his club championship or something like that at age 12. So Ty Cobb, this is at Olympic Club, right? So that's where Rossy played as a young kid and he beat Ty Cobb seven and six. And Ty Cobb was a wonderful player. And as the story goes, the members teased Ty Cobb relentlessly about losing to a 12-year-old to the point that Ty Cobb got so sick and tired of it that he resigned from the club and went and played somewhere else.
Oh, holy cow. But he did say, Rosberg, because Ty Cobb was also known as being sort of an ordinary, you know, highly competitive obviously, baseball player, a golfer as well. But Rosberg said Ty Cobb couldn't have been more gentlemanly during the whole match. So, dang, yeah, Rossy put an end to his reign at Olympic Club.
Wow. Okay, so first things I'm noticing here is I love the text that's been chosen. So I always look at the cavities first. I think that text font, this is not one you guys have used before, it looks new. And then the Palo Alto matches that on the bottom. The trees on the bottom are significant for the area, correct?
California redwoods, right. So obviously the tree that's used in the Stanford University logo. But there's four of them and it's really cool, I think, the way we did those, Jake. Those are really deep laser engraved into this material that we're using on the sole, which is 7075 aircraft quality aluminum, a really strong aluminum. Just a magnificent material. But to do the really deep laser engraving, we felt like we needed to move away from 6061 aluminum into this material. So we do that and then we hard anodize after that and that gives that really cool kind of treatment to the trees. And I couldn't be more tickled with the way it turned out.
Yeah, it's great because there's a little bit of a texture to it too. Like it's not a flat, it's not like an, like there's a little bit of an actual texture when you run your fingers over it. It's not sharp, but you can definitely tell that it's different where the trees are, basically as if you're kind of running over foliage, basically. And then there's a BR 1959. I'm assuming that's Bob Rosberg. What is the 1959?
That's the year that he won the PGA Championship.
