Equipment: Old Odyssey putter pays off big for Crane

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Each week in the Equipment Insider, Adam Barr -- PGATOUR.COM's equipment columnist -- will provide breaking news, notes and analysis focused on PGA TOUR players. Adam will also appear in video segments for PGATOUR.COM.

When you need to make a birdie putt on the 72nd hole, you better like how your putter looks and sounds. Ben Crane had already won once this year, at Torrey Pines in the Farmers Insurance Open. That didn't diminish the excitement -- good and bad -- at having a chance to sew up another win at the CIMB Asia Pacific Classic in Malaysia.

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"I had a great opportunity with that putt, which I'll always remember," Crane said once it was over. "I was so nervous and I was just praying. I just wanted to hit a good putt and to see it go into the hole. It felt so good."

As is often the case with TOUR players, Crane had a putter in the bag that he had relied on for a long time. His wand was an Odyssey White Hot No. 5, a conservative mallet that one Callaway tour rep says Crane has had in the bag "for years," simply because no one can remember when he didn't carry it.

The model Crane used, although not hard to find (for instance, check it out at Callaway Golf's preowned club site), is no longer part of Odyssey's front-line product mix. (Odyssey is a Callaway company.) However, some of the design principles in the No. 5 inspired the current White Hot line, known as the White Hot XG series. The chief attribute is the firmness of the face, which of course affects sound.

The buttery quiet of some putter faces and inserts is far from out of style. Indeed, it was Odyssey, in its pre-Callaway days, that helped popularize such inserts with its Stronomic material. It was black, rubbery, and firm, but ultra-soft-sounding.

But many TOUR players prefer a clickier response, and always have. It's the combination of sound with the feel in the fingers that confirms a good stroke, not unlike the positive response from a well-struck partial wedge. (Short-game slang for that happy sonic event, "click and feel," is still current among avid players.)

In My Bag: Ben Crane

Driver: Titleist 910D2, 9.5 degrees Fairway woods: TaylorMade V Steel (15, 18 degrees) Hybrid: Titleist 909H, 21 degrees Irons: Titleist AP2, 5-PW Wedges: Titleist Vokey Design (51, 56, 60 degrees) Putter: Odyssey White Hot No. 5 Ball: Titleist Pro V1x

Ben Crane used this conservative mallet to win in Malaysia.

The White Hot XG line achieves this by combining a little soft with a little hard, say Callaway engineers. The core of the putter is an elastomer, a pliable but firm synthetic rubber. Polybutadiene, the main type of rubber used in golf ball cores, is an elastomer. And we know golf ball cores can be made from many different recipes to react in various degrees of energy release when struck, so it makes sense that you can make a putter core recipe to tune the sound and feel for the specialized job of putting.

Added to this in the White Hot XGs is a firm outer covering of the insert, which provides the clicky-sounding part of the equation, Callaway designers say. Likely it was one of the sweetest sounds Ben Crane has heard lately.

On the other end of Crane's bag, his driver was a Titleist 910D2, which has an adjustment ring in the hosel that allows the head to be set in 16 different positions. Crane's was position C-2, which changes the shaft lie angle to be three-quarters of a degree more upright. It also knocks three-quarters of a degree off the loft, which is why Crane's driver loft was reported at 9.5 instead of 10.5, which is what the bottom of the driver says. If you're parsing degrees, it was probably closer to 9.75.

MOVING THE NEEDLE: Ping is the beneficiary of the long-expected shakeup in the Official World Golf Ranking. Lee Westwood, who has been a Ping staff player for all of his 32 wins and seven Ryder Cup appearances, became the world's top golfer when the OWGR was recalculated after this week's worldwide play. Westwood, 37, proudly noted during the celebrations that he got his first set of Pings when he was 13.

Westwood will travel to China this week to defend his ranking against Tiger Woods (No. 2), PGA Championship winner Martin Kaymer (No.3) and Masters champion Phil Mickelson (No. 4) at the World Golf Championships-HSBC Champions.