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Who among us has never missed a 2 foot putt? I’ve certainly misfired on more than a few in my career, as has every player I’ve ever known. That distance, 2 feet, is microscopic when compared to the distance traveled to get to that point, and yet it is one of the strange attributes of the game of golf that the traversing of that final 2 feet is valued exactly the same as the 280 yard drive that opened the journey to the cup. And while there would always seem to be some excuse for mishandling a shot of greater distance, say a drive or an approach shot, or even a pitch around the green, there can be no quarter given for the failure to negotiate something as seemingly easy as knocking in a putt less than an arm’s length away.
When we talk of golf technique we usually focus on 3 distinct areas: ball striking, which can be broken down into many sub-categories (driving, irons, etc.), short game (chipping, pitching, bunker play), and putting. The first two of these involve swinging the club and hitting the ball into the air for some distance. The skill involved is highly athletic, and involves the application of force to the ball by delivering the clubface to the golf ball at tremendous speed with a relatively small margin of allowable error. The movement requires strength, mobility, and exquisite timing, as well as deliberate and thorough preparation for each swing. The short game is played with less than full swings, but all the shots are swings nonetheless, and the techniques can be mastered in the same fashion as the long game, albeit requiring more precise touch and feel for smaller increments of distance and trajectory control.
Putting, on the other hand, is an entirely different animal. Because the movement is so small and incorporates no pivot movement (the legs and hips remain still), it requires no particular athletic skill concerning strength, speed, or balance. Thus, anyone can be an excellent putter, including those who can barely hit any kind of full or short shot. The stories recounting matches and tournaments won by superior putting skill wind through the history of the game, and certainly account for many of the tales told over beers at the local 19th hole. Usually, the wielder of the magic wand is the David to the ball striking Goliath, and the victory is applauded as though the underdog has triumphed against tall odds. The truth be known, nothing is more galling than outplaying your opponent everywhere but on the greens, where his one-putt to your two or three-putt guarantees your inevitable bitter defeat.
While hitting the ball certainly has its aesthetic value, and certainly makes the game easier to manage, it remains that slice, pull, chunk, 40-footer from the fringe equals bomb down the middle, wedge to 4 feet, lip-out. Not only that, who do you think walks away from the green in the better frame of mind? In almost every case, the canny putter has the better attitude, and grinds out every round much more effectively than the “I hit 15 greens and made nothing” player. Hitting the ball poorly is annoying, but there is always the possibility that the hole, or the round, can be saved by a stellar performance around and on the greens. Poor putting, however, wastes whatever good your good shots have done you, and ends each hole with a lost shot, never to be regained.
All this is pointing to what should be obvious to all golfers, that it would be a good idea to spend a significant amount of time learning to be a good putter. The problem is that there seems to be countless ideas as to what a good putter does, and very little information regarding how to go about becoming one. I thought it might be helpful to do as I usually do and recount my own experience with putting over the course of my 33 years of competitive golf, and end with some bits of knowledge that I have come up with to help me become a better putter. Remember that my quest is to become the best player I can possibly be, as well as to help my students to the best of my ability, so you can rest assured that everything I will say about putting has been tried and tested not only on the practice green but under the most intense pressure, which doesn’t mean any of it is truth, only that it has some credibility behind it.
I started playing when I was 10, and my first tournament was at age 12. I used my mother’s old clubs, a set of Ben Hogan Lady Apex, a Sandy Andy sand wedge, and a heavy, squared off Bullseye putter with a leather paddle grip. I had no concept of putting technique except that the idea was to knock the ball into the hole. I seem to remember running my right index finger down the shaft and setting up with an open stance. Beyond that, it was all probably luck and talent that made me a good putter, for it certainly wasn’t anything I thought up or specifically worked on. But I was a very good putter, and it was a good thing because I weighed in at about 100 pounds and couldn’t hit it very far.
I was a decent junior golfer, especially when I was at the older end of my age group, at ages 13, 15, and 17. I got my butt kicked by the older kids when I was 12, 14, and 16, and my tendency to play well every other year would continue somewhat for the rest of my career. I won my share of tournaments, and often would out-putt my opponent, who would become frustrated at my ability to save par from anywhere. I stuck with Bullseye putters all the way through college, and can’t recall ever taking a lesson or worrying about technique. If I went off, I would simply change my stance or choke down on the putter or some other minor adjustment that would hopefully jar me out of my slump. I eventually made First Team All-American at LSU, and can recall playing the first two rounds of the NCAA Championship in 1979 with Fred Couples, who remarked to a friend after the second round (I had posted 72-72 and stood tied with Fred for 4th place) that he thought I would win since I “hit it 260 down the middle and made everything I looked at”. I found playing with Couples fairly amazing, since he flew his 3-wood well past my best drive with the funkiest home-made swing I had ever seen from a player of his caliber. I would eventually finish 3rd (Fred faded badly) and was on top of the world with a summer of amateur golf and my senior year ahead of me.
At that point everything came undone, as I decided after the last round of the NCAA that I needed to change my swing in order to get to the next level. I proceeded to ruin myself, and never sought out qualified help (why I don’t know) and my putting deteriorated along with the rest of my game. I wasn’t able to go back to what I used to do, mainly because I never knew what I was doing to begin with. I had opened the Pandora’s Box when I started to try to figure out what I was trying to do with my game, and the disease affected everything. I knew, however, that my course was set and that if I wanted to continue on with the game and eventually play for a living I would have to figure it out as I went, which meant that I would have to become versed in swing mechanics as well as putting mechanics.
I turned pro in 1980, and moved to Orlando to play J.C. Goosie’s Space Coast Tour, the premiere mini-tour of the era. My idol was Tom Watson, and I switched away from the Bullseye Flange I had used forever and went to a Ping Pal, Watson’s putter of choice. I decided that the stroke of choice was straight back and straight through, and I thought up as many ways to practice as I could. I tried blocks of wood, tees, divot repair tools, anything to force the stroke to follow the correct path. My problem became taking the putter outside, from which point I would cut across the putt and miss both left and right. At times I would get on a hot streak, but my overall performance was poor at best, and over the course of 5 years I cost my father and other assorted sponsors a fair sized pile of cash.
After ending my mini-tour career and becoming a club professional my battles with the putter continued. Around 1993 I decided that taking the putter straight back was not in my best interests, so I began taking it a bit inside on the backswing while still following straight through down the target line. With this change my putting improved dramatically, although it still tended to be streaky. I began using a chalk-line to practice with, as I found it difficult to assess the subtle difference between the two paths and needed a visual reference to give me some feedback. I also experimented with a cross-hand grip, and used that, along with a Zebra mallet putter, for almost a year. The following year I changed putters, this time to an Odyssey mallet, the large sized Rossie 1, and added some wrinkles to my practice routine.
I had seen a student of mine putting under some sort of wire tied to a pair of pencils, and immediately saw this as an improvement over the chalk line, which was a pain to apply to the ground and inevitably caused damage to the green due to the fact that everyone who wandered over to the putting green would stand in the same spot and use the line after I had gone, causing major wear in the form of permanent footprints. The string, however, was entirely mobile, and I could adjust it to the perfect line and take it with me when I was done. I used my very limited home improvement skills to make a more usable version of the whipping wire and pencils version, and thus had a way to monitor my stroke pattern every time I practiced. In addition, I incorporated a metronome to help me practice with a consistent rhythm. I knew that some days my stroke was faster than others, and that at times I accelerated through the ball while at others I didn’t. The constant clicking of the metronome tied in with the article I read on putting which indicated that the Tour players they tested used the same amount of time to hit every length putt. In other words, the putter took the same amount of time from takeaway to impact on a three-footer as it did on a thirty-footer. This meant that every stroke functioned within a consistent time frame, and that for each individual player all their strokes took the same amount of time. Thus, a 3 foot putt, because it did not need to hit the ball far, fit into the rhythm by shortening and slowing down. For a longer putt the stroke lengthened out and sped up and still fit into the beat. This was a great discovery for me, for it told me that if I focused on the rhythm the length and pace of the stroke would automatically fit itself into the time in which the beat allowed the stroke to occur.
So now I had the string and the metronome, and I practiced diligently, taking the putter back slightly inside and following through down the line with the putter face remaining square. My best putting occurred at the 1995 PGA Championship at Riviera, where the greens were chopped up and generally hideous. Miraculously I made the cut, and I finished 6th in the entire event in total putts, never once 3 putting. I continued to practice the same way until 2000, when my short putting began to go haywire. I started studying the best putters on Tour, and noticed that many of their strokes were quite a bit quicker than mine. I had been setting my metronome on 65 beats per minute for years, but when I tested Tiger’s stroke, among others, I found that their beat was somewhere between 80 and 90. I decided to reset mine to 85, and I got immediate results, especially with the short putts. Instead of the putter going back longer with the slower beat and wobbling in transition, the faster pace made for a much more definitive change of direction and cured my short putt woes. I also began to achieve a better strike on the ball, which resulted in a better, more aggressive roll.