By Ellena Savage, 2014
Last week a troubling story broke on the high-profile ESPN subsidiary Grantland. ‘Dr V’s Magical Putter’ began as a quirky sports story, an investigation into a potentially game-changing piece of golf equipment. The putter’s inventor, Dr Essay Anne Vanderbilt, was challenging the old-hat wisdom of golfing technologies with hard physics. An attractive, eccentric inventor with a higher degree from MIT and a decade in secret dealings with the US Department of Defense, Vanderbilt, or Dr V. as she was known, cut an irresistible story for any journalist.