Black Carbon Series

The Black Carbon Series arrived out of the Mizuno partnership, the maker's page listing Bettinardi as having partnered with Mizuno for a run that spanned 2005 to 2008, with the Black Carbon putters as the opening act. Our own visits to Studio B caught that opening act while it was still coming together, heads scattered across Bob Bettinardi's office, necks getting shorter, bumpers reshaped, until three finished heads landed on his desk: the BC1, BC2, and BC3. Bob's line at the time was direct enough to quote: "I want this to just scream quality. That is what my market expects."

What made the release distinct within Bettinardi's own catalog, by our account, was the face. The Black Carbon putters were, per our review, the first time a retail putter carried the patented Feel Impact Technology face, and the maker's own page confirms the milling as Feel-Impact Technology (F.I.T.) face milling, elsewhere described on that same page as a milling technique. Our review described the process as a Honey-Comb pattern milled into the face followed by a second pass adding railroad tracks across the sweet spot, an "insert-less insert" meant to change the auditory feedback off the strike, and we found the result was, in our words, a very soft feel that gets the ball rolling real fast.

Against the rest of the Black Carbon line, the finish was the other marked departure: a black plating over the carbon steel body that, per our testing, didn't glare in the sun and resisted rust, and which we found helped concentration on tricky reads by cutting the visual clutter between putter and ball. That combination, the F.I.T. face and the black finish, sat this release apart from what Bettinardi had put out before it, and it did so under the Mizuno banner that the maker's own history now attaches to these years.