mallet

The Arthur Knight line traces to a single point of origin: 1902, when the center-shafted mallet putter attributed to Arthur Knight entered the record. There is no series of successors here, no line of yearly updates to chart. The story of this name in our files is the story of one putter.

According to convexgolf.com, the 1902 model was a center-shafted mallet with a crosshatched face, built with a face of wood and lead. That same publication credits the design to Arthur Knight himself, tying the putter's construction and its maker together in a single attribution. None of this is verified fact in our own testing or maker-published material, and it should be read as one outlet's reporting on a very early putter rather than an established figure.

What stands out, even from a single entry, is the specificity of that crosshatched face treatment at such an early date. A mallet head, center-shafted, with a worked face pattern in 1902 places this putter at an interesting point in the broader evolution toward milled and textured faces that would come to define later decades of putter design. Readers weighing this one against the rest of the record should keep in mind the tier of the reporting behind it, and draw their own conclusions about how much weight a single-source account from over a century ago ought to carry.