Welcome Back to Putter Talk

Just about 20 years ago I wrote the first post on Putter Talk titled "Why a Site About Putters?" The gist was simple. I was never going to be a scratch golfer... but no matter what you hit off the tee, no matter what you do from the fairway, you almost always have to putt. Drivers go obsolete in a couple of years. A putter can last a lifetime. There's a relationship a person builds with the flat-stick that they build with nothing else in the bag. That was the whole idea. It's still the whole idea.

What I didn't know in 2006 was how big the rest of it would get. The reviews. The putter stories. The classifieds. 13 years of members teaching members...80,000+ threads, more than a million posts, an encyclopedia of putter knowledge that didn't exist anywhere else because we built it, one reply at a time. The forums were always the lifeblood of this place. I said that in the very first post, and it turned out truer than I knew.

And then it was gone.

We had just finished re-launching the site and it was getting more traffic than ever. I’d worked it out so that Putter Talk was going to be my primary job. I was going all-in on it after years of being an absentee landlord.

Then, my partner in it (my dad) got a phishing email. One of the good ones. The kind that looks exactly like the real thing and fools smart, careful people every single day. By the time anyone understood what had happened, the domain was gone. And when the domain went, everything attached to it went with it. 13 years of posts. The whole archive. A million conversations. Gone.

I'll be straight with you, because if you're reading this you've earned straight...I chased it for a long time. I ran down every path there was to run down. I got the domain back, eventually. But the content was never coming home. I had the keys to a house that had burned to the foundation. I grieved it. It took a while. And then I did the only thing you can do, which is stop mourning what's gone and take a hard look at what isn't.

Here's what wasn't gone.

The name still meant something. That surprised me. Years dark, not a dollar of marketing, and people still came looking. People posting across the internet still to this day about the good times they had on Putter Talk. Not long ago somebody tracked down one of our old moderators...hunted him down…just to ask how a person might bring Putter Talk back. That's not a brand. That's a pull. The people were still out there. The reason putters matter was still out there. I just had to rebuild the platform.

For a hot minute, I thought about bringing Putter Talk back as just a podcast. We shot 4-5 episodes, but it wasn’t the same. Great content, and interesting conversations but not the same as what this place was at its peak.

But I also didn’t want to just build another blank forum and hope it filled up again. People moved away from forums several years ago. I wanted to build something that was closer to the facebook groups and instagram feeds that people have become accustomed to.

So we're back. And I'm not going to pretend I resurrected the old site, because I didn't, and I couldn't. The archive is gone and I've made my peace with it. What's here is new, built from the ground up for how people actually live online now, not a forum from 2006 with a fresh coat of paint. It's the thing Putter Talk always wanted to be, finally built the way I always wanted it.

Some of what's new is going to surprise you. Parts of it haven't existed anywhere before. We'll get into all of that soon enough. For today, the only thing you need to know is that the door's open again, the lights are on, and the same thing that was true in 2006 is true right now: this place is only ever as good as the people standing in it.

Welcome back.

-MrDoug