Putting

A long putt is a better prospect than a tough bunker shot.

Since putting accounts for about 40% of the total shots played in a round, it would be a terrible mistake to neglect this department of the game.

First and foremost, your grip should be neutral, with your palms facing one another in the form of a comfortable and correct grip. Position your eyes directly over the ball.
Make sure your shoulders, arms, hands, and the putter all move away together to produce a smooth and nicely synchronized start to the takeaway. The putter-head should stay very low to the ground. A useful method of keeping the lower half of the body stable is to keep the knees very still.
When you make the transition from the backswing to downswing, there should be a softness in your wrists that causes the putter to lag behind your hands momentarily. This ensures that the putter does not overtake your hands at impact, which would cause the face to close and the ball to go left.
In putting, the impact position should be identical to the setup. Keep your head steady, ensuring that no unwanted upper body movement can upset the perfect path of the putter into and through impact.
Let your putter-head finish higher in the follow through than it ever reached in the backswing, which is a product of smooth acceleration and an upward strike.

Hold the club at least as softly as in the full swing. Putting relies on delicate touch.

Good posture is important for a full swing. But it is critical to the success of your putting stroke, too. Ideally, you should adopt a posture at address that allows your arms to hang down — not totally straight, but tension-free for a smooth action back and forth.

When you watch good putters in action, it is almost as if there is no “hit” as such; instead, the ball simply gets in the way of the swinging putterhead.

Judging breaking putts is not an exact science. There is always more than one line into the hole, and the route you choose depends on the amount of speed you apply to the ball.

Speed is everything.

To give your ball the optimum chance of dropping into the hole, the ball should move fast enough to travel 45-60cm past the hole. This ensures that the ball holds its line as it approaches the hole, when subtle breaks can all to easily knock the putt off line.

The putting stroke is initiated by the shoulders, not the hands. You should feel a rocking motion in the shoulders as you make the putting stroke. Hold the follow-through until the ball either goes in the hole or stops rolling. This will ensure an accelerating stroke.

The most important step now is to commit to the line and trust that you have correctly read and lined up the putt. Most putts are missed by not committing and not trusting your putting stroke.

Make every putt a straight putt.

Golfers may become confused with putts that have some break. After you read the putt and determine how much the slope will affect the line of the putt, think of the putt as a straight putt. If the putt will break 15cm, aim the lines or writing on the ball to that point. Putt the ball directly at that point and let the break take over. You can only start the ball on its course. Gravity does the rest.

To control the distance you need when putting, you have to control the length of the stroke back and the stroke toward the hole. The backswing and forward stroke should be equal in length and rhythm. Think of a pendulum. When the pendulum changes direction, it is unhurried. The ball should be in the middle of that pendulum swing. A smooth stroke will produce a pure roll.

All you have to do to improve your putting is watch how the great players putt. They all have soft grip pressure. None of them move their legs or hips. They each keep their head steady. They don’t use any wrist break. They accelerate through the ball. If anything, their putting strokes are either the same size back as through, or their follow-through is longer than their backswing. They all hold their follow-through. Only the neck rotates after impact.

Another way to make sure your head stays steady when you putt is to close both eyes after you have established your address position. It’s the best cure for the yips that I have found. Just close both eyes, make a putting stroke, and listen.

We all know that to putt well you have to keep your head steady. One of the best ways to do that is to focus on one small spot. Try focusing on one dimple on the ball when you putt. You’ll find that you stay very steady and make every solid contact.

The most accurate way to determine the break is to keep your eyes open. If another player is in your line and has to putt first, carefully watch the ball roll. How it rolls will tell you how much your ball will react. If you putt and the ball goes past the hole, carefully watch which way it breaks as it rolls. (Many players look away as the first putt misses.) Also, keep your eyes open on a chip or pitch shot that runs by the hole.

Putting, that his consistently good putting, is perhaps the most difficult part of the game and calls for the highest degree of skill and the nicest kind of judgment both as regards accuracy and strength.

In respect to accuracy, it is imperative that you should act upon some well-defined principles. Proceed first by taking a glance back of the ball toward the hole, and trace the line over which it must pass, noting for subsequent guidance a particular blade of grass on this imaginary line. Take your stance and square the face of the putter at perfect right angers to the blade of grass you have picked out by resting it immediately in front of the ball.

Pick an immediate target, and square the putter blade to it.
Take the putter straight back, and then straight through the ball.
Don’t look up until the ball is well on its way to the hole.

There are 4 important factors in putting, aside from grip and stance:

Contour of the green.
Texture or grain.
Lining up the putt.
Swinging the clubhead to get over-spin on the ball.

Some people may be born putters, but serious thoughtful practice will go a long way toward improving any golfer’s play on the greens.

Obviously, the more the “bank” or “tilt” of the green, the more the allowance for the alteration in the roll of the ball from a true, normal, straight path. As you play, experience will be your teacher. You will also find that for a long while you will tend to underestimate the amount of effect a banked slope will have on your ball.

Never leave a putt short — to the high, or “pro side,” of the hole.
Most golfers underestimate the break — add 25%.
Hone the skill of reading borrow and break on the practice green.

The world’s best putters (the golfers on the PGA Tour) make only about half of all their putts from 6ft away; however, if they were on perfect and known surfaces, their strokes are so good they would hole approximately 90% of these same putts.

Pelz emphasizes simplicity when it comes to putting. “The simpler and easier the stroke is to execute, the more precisely and repetitively you’ll be able to execute it, especially under pressure.”

For most golfers to improve their scores, it is often easier to reduce their number of 3-putts than it is to increase their number of 1-putts.

This means that you shouldn’t practice only short putts; the long ones are also important. And you must stop 3-putting those long ones if you want to be a good putter.

People who want to know about the mechanical nature of putting are putting the cart before the horse. Putting is primarily about feel and visualization.

Rather than look away in frustration or anger after missing the putt, he studied how the ball broke after passing the hole. That gave him the read, and the confidence, to make the next putt coming back.

3 most important clubs in the bag, in order: the putter, the driver, and the wedge.

Golf should be learned starting at the cup and progressing back toward the tee.

High handicappers should use their putters from off the green whenever it looks feasible. They’ll generally get closer to the hole this way.

The club is only 1 inch wide for a putt that is struck too hard. The club is 4 inches wide for a ball that dies at the hole.

An average golfer misses short putts because of fear or a lack of concentration. Instead of thinking about stroking the putt into the hole, he or she is thinking about any number of things — including the other players who are standing on the green watching for the result.

Negative thoughts and carelessness cause more missed short putts than any other factor.

A great way to improve your feel is to putt with your eyes closed. After each putt, try to guess how far the ball rolled. This is the best drill for distance control I know of.

The putting stroke is not a very complicated action. My hands move only a foot at most in either direction during the stroke. My arms move less than that, my body less still and my head not at all. So the biggest priority in gripping the club is to establish a feeling of sensitivity, comfort and relaxation.

From the time I was a little kid — and I mean about 4 years old — my dad hammered home the idea of swinging the putter back and through at the same speed. When you see a putting stroke that looks smooth, it’s because the putter is taken back at a slow, even pace and then swung forward at the same speed.

Every good putter keeps the head absolutely still from start to finish. Every bad putter I know moves the head to some degree. It’s as simple as that. If I move my head even a fraction, it’s almost impossible to keep my putting path stable and true. It’s hard to hit the ball solidly, too. More than likely I’ll open my shoulders on the forward stroke, causing me to pull the putters across the ball from out to in. I practice keeping my head dead still until well after the ball is gone.

If you’re like me, you can’t wait to see if the ball is tracking toward the hole right after the ball leaves the putterface. But the urge to glance up too soon has some nasty consequences. The tendency to peek too soon causes my head to move and leads to sloppy contact. Not only that, if I’m distracted by thoughts of where the ball is going, I won’t focus on my main job, which is to keep the putter moving directly down the target line.

I study the last 6 feet of the putt closely. Knowing the way the ball behaves when it’s dying at the hole is crucial.

Fast early, slow late. Grass grows quickly — enough that the same putt you hit at 8am can be considerably slower at 5pm.

Learn to read grain. Grass doesn’t grow straight up, it tends to grow toward one side or the other. Grain isn’t as big a factor as it used to be because greens are cut so short nowadays. Still, it’s a factor, especially on Bermuda grass. Another general rule: Grass grows toward the setting sun.

I regulate distance by varying the length of my stroke, not by applying a sudden burst of speed with my hands.

I hit the putt solidly at all cost. If I miss the sweet spot of the putterface by half an inch — which is easy to do when I’m making an extra-long stroke — I can lose 10 feet of roll or more.

If you rolled the ball on the line you chose, at the pace you wanted, with what you felt was a good stroke, then you made the putt. You may not hole every putt, but you can make every putt.

How much a putt breaks depends completely on how fast it’s rolling. The faster the ball is traveling, the less effect gravity will have on it, and therefore the less it will break.

The best way to read a putt is start at the hole. Examine the area around the hole. Then work backward from there to your ball, imagining the path and pace your ball will need to travel to enter the hole at the spot you picked.

Thinking to yourself about how hard to swing the club while putting is a surefire recipe for disaster.

When you putt with imagination, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how many putts pour into the hole exactly the way you imagined.

One of the most common approach to long putts is to lag, meaning to try to roll the ball near the hole without really trying to get it in.

The most common technique is to imagine a circle, 6ft in diameter around the hole. If you’re inside this, you have no more than 3ft remaining for your 2nd putt. The purpose of this approach is to take the pressure off the long putts.

The fundamental mechanics of the putting stroke are the opposite of those of the power swing. The putting stroke has no lower-body turn, no coil of the upper body against the lower, and no cocking of the wrists. The head and trunk remain still while the arms swing with a slight rotation of the shoulders. There should be no forearm rotation, a key element of every other swing: Forearm rotation is a killer of good putting, making it difficult to achieve consistent directional results. But because the forearms rotate in every other swing, most golfers let them rotate through their putting strokes without realizing it, to their great detriment.

3 ingredients are needed to sink a putt:

Green reading, or assessing the contours of the green, its slope and speed.
Distance control, which involves hitting the putt at the right speed for the green you are on.
Directional accuracy, or hitting the put along the right line for the speed you’ve chosen.

One player told me he doesn’t have his caddy help him read the greens because the caddy doesn’t know ho hard he plans to hit the putt. Green reading, speed, and line are inextricably linked.

When an amateur asks his partner or caddie for a read, a typical question is, “How much break do you see?” It is rare that you hear, “How steeply uphill is the slope for this putt?” Yet for most putts, and certainly for putts of any length, the most important judgment to make is the slope of the green, for slope determines both how hard or softly a putt needs to be hit and how much it will break.

Fast greens are so much more difficult to putt than slow greens. Fast greens require a lot more touch than slow greens. Another reason is that putts need to be hit softer on fast greens, bringing nerves more into play. Smooth greens, which also tend to be fast greens, take some of the luck out of putting.

Setting the target at the hole, that is, zero feet beyond the hole, can be called the “die-it-in-the-hole” strategy. You’ll often hear the advice “just lag it close” as another way to express it. For short putts, this strategy is so far too conservative: It will lead to leaving 50% of putts short of the hole, with fewer made putts as a consequence. So let’s start by restating that on short putts, choosing a target beyond the hole is necessary for best performance.

There’s a trade-off between putting with enough aggressiveness to give the ball a chance to go in the hole versus too much aggressiveness, which leads to long comebackers.

Die it or jam it? Neither is correct for short putts. An intermediate strategy makes sense for short putts, one that will have the ball rolling 1-2.5ft by the hole depending on the green slope and putt angle. As the putt distance increases, the die-it strategy makes more sense, especially for uphill putts.

Downhill putts break substantially more than uphill putts, because of the physics of a ball rolling on the green.

Putts break more on steeper greens than on flatter greens. Putts break more on faster greens than on slower greens.

The path of a putt after hitting is visible, but the aim line is not. This makes it hard to learn from your own putts and to go to school on others’ putts. You can, however, get useful feedback on a practice green by putting through a “gate”. It makes it easier to visualize the putt’s true aim line.

Distance is the most important factor in putt difficulty: Except on a very fast steep green, a sidehill putt is easier than a 2-foot-longer uphill putt.

For both pros and amateurs, 3-7ft is the distance range that most separates good putters from average putters.

The reality of the game of putting is that not all well-struck putts go in, and that sometimes poorly struck ones do. Your odds of success will never be anywhere near 100%, even if you are perfect in every stroke you make.

Here is a fact: Straight downhill putts are usually easier to make than straight uphill putts. This may be the opposite of what you think. On downhillers, the force of gravity tends to hold putts on-line, minimizing the error caused by a slightly open or closed clubface at impact. On the same length uphill putt, however, gravity maximizes the result of the same error, actually increasing the possibility of missing the hole.

All that said, it’s easier to 3-putt a downhiller than an uphill putt of the same length. The reason is speed: Downhill putts require a more delicate touch to control rolling speed.

The uphill putts stop closer together, indicating that on uphill putts, balls tend to roll closer to the same distance. This means the roll of an uphill putt is less sensitive to the length of the stroke than putts on a level surface. The lesson is that even if you don’t hit all of your uphill putts the right speed, be sure to get them past the hole. That gives them a chance to go in, and the longest ones will probably stop near enough to the hole to leave no-brainers coming back.

Downhill stroke has to be about 3 times more precise than your uphill stroke to stop a putt at the right distance. When putting downhill, make a stroke of the wrong speed and you’ll have trouble making your next putt.

And that brings us to the simplest, easiest, most repeatable, most reliable, and therefore best way to putt — the pure, no-hit, pendulum stroke. By this I mean a putter swinging in rhythm with the arms and hands, with no power input from the hands and wrists whatsoever. If the pendulum is pure and swings down the line with no face rotation, it is as simple a motion as can be made under the Rules of Golf.

Putterface angle has more effect on the line a pull starts on than does the putter path. But golfer practice putter path because it’s easier for them to see, their friends (from whom they take advice) can see it, and they don’t know what else to practice.

Once your posture is correct, position your eyes somewhere directly over the Aimline. Accomplish this by moving closer to or farther away from the ball — not by changing you back angle or leaning over or hack. Remember, the Aimline extends behind the ball, so it’s okay to set your eyes slightly behind the ball.

There are any number of ways to hold a putter. But I think there is one way to set grip pressure, and that is light and unchanging throughout your stroke. Light pressure is better than tight because squeeze your hands and flexing the hand, wrist, and arm muscles makes them stronger, less pliant, and less sensitive to delicate feelings. And remember, your hands should be dead rather than strong when putting. So the lighter your grip, the less likely you are to “hit” your putts and the more likely you will “stroke” them. This applies to all putting grips.

A pure pendulum stroke is the weakest, least powerful swing in golf. When you first try it, you will probably feel insecure, as if you can’t get the ball to the hole, so you’ll probably leave every putt short. You also will feel as if you don’t have control of the ball.

Trying to control your putts with a hitting action may make you feel good in the short run, but ultimately it degrades your putting. On the other hand, not trying to control your putting — using a dead-hand stroke — is a positive action because it is pressure-proof.

This is why you must learn to hold your follow-through until the ball has stopped moving. As soon as you drop your putter or move your body in a motion unrelated to putting, the feeling of the stroke is replaced by the feeling of that motion.

Given the length of most putters, tall kids grow up learning better setup postures (especially wrist angles) than shorter kids.

Your stroke should always take the same amount of time and should always move at the same rhythm, for all putts, regardless of putt length or the length of your move.

Whenever you have doubts about the true break, fudge toward the higher break. If you are going to make an error judging break, it’s always better to play slightly too much than too little.

The reasons are simple:

A putt is more likely to catch the high edge and lip-down-and-in than it is to catch the low edge and lip-up-and-in.
Balls that hit spike marks or footprints bounce downhill more often than uphill.
When your subconscious thinks you are aiming too low, it tends to hit your breaking putts hard. When this happens on a downhiller, look out for the 3-putt.
While the chance of the ball wandering into the hole from the high side might not be near 100%, the chances from the low side are near zero.

Speed is important enough to be number-one principle in putting. It is the one element that you should think about with intense, full-bore, flat-out focus in the form of ball tracks every time you putt.

So rather than wrapping your lower hand completely around the shaft, giving you the opportunity to make it rotate through the stroke, take a grip that minimizes hand control. I’ve found the claw and fingertip grips the best options for achieving this.

The more a putterhead is “heel-toe” balanced — more of its weight is placed toward the ends of the head — the less it twists when mis-hit. (In scientific terms, such a putter is said to have a higher moment of inertia.) In general, this is good, and explains why heel-toe-balanced putters have sold well over the years: Putts hit away from the sweetspot roll a little closer to their intended speed and line.

Now the bad news. The less a putter twists when mis-hit, the better it feels. Using a putter that feels good even on mis-hits lets golfers get sloppy with their impact patterns, which leads to long-term degradation of putting performance.

For a stable stroke to be consistent (especially under pressure), it must accelerate through impact without the hands providing acceleration.

Which do you think provides the worse perspective for evaluating visible break? Of course, as the perversity of nature demands, the worse view is the golfer’s view, from behind the ball, because it shows the less obvious vision of the visible break (it appears smaller from this view).

While all 3 distances are the same from the balls to the holes, they appear to be different when viewed by a golfer standing vertically over his ball in the address position. The discrepancies occur because in each case the eyes of the player are a different distance from the hole (even though the balls are not). The funny thing is that on uphill putts, which need to be given more energy, the distance always appears shorter than it really is, while on downhill putts, which should be rolled more carefully and with less energy, the distance appears longer.

I didn’t believe it. Especially when it came to big putts, I’d always known Tiger to be thoroughly meticulous with his read and the housekeeping around the hole.

He didn’t want to dwell on the putts that he missed, because that would only make it harder to be certain that the next one was going in. And that was one thing Locke insisted on. Putting was about confidence. “Hitting a putt in doubt is fatal in most cases.” Locke has to be certain that the putt was going in.

The important thing is that you commit yourself completely to the read you make.

No other part of golf induces as much heartache and conversation as putting. Many fine strikers of the ball have literally been driven from the sport because they couldn’t finish holes as well as they started them. Why? Because putting messes with your internal organs. Every putt has only 2 possibilities: You either miss it or hole it. Accept that and you won’t have nightmares about the ones that “should” have gone in.

Putting is the most individual part of the game. You can putt — and putt successfully — in myriad ways. You can break all the rules with a putter in your hands as long as the ball goes in the hole.

All you need to know is that MOI putters resist twisting on off-center hits. That means that your bad putts turn out better than they would otherwise. How much better? MOI putter might make a 4ft difference on a 22ft putt.

The putting grip isn’t like the full swing grip. The full-swing grip is more in the fingers, which encourages your wrists to hinge and unhinge. Your putting grip’s purpose is exactly the opposite. You grip the putter more in the palm of your hands to reduce the amount of movement your hands make.

One of the biggest cases of missed putts is the breakdown of the left wrist through impact. When the left wrist bends through impact, the putter blade twists. The twisting causes the ball to wobble off-line, even if you’ve got an MOI putter. That’s why you should maintain the bend of your left wrist from the address position all the way through the stroke.

One of the best ways to develop a touch for the speed at which a putt should roll is to imagine things happening before they really do.

Three-putting is just about the most frustrating failure for a good golfer. It’s also the quickest route to a poor score. It’s sinful to bogey a GIR.

More than one-half of your putts will be from 30ft or more, so there’s definitely a scoring payoff for finding a way to 2-putt from monster distances.

One of the most common causes of poor lag putting from long distance is a faulty stroke. Many players take a shot backswing and then over-accelerate the club as they come through the ball. They almost punch it. This is because the brain knew the shortened backstroke wasn’t long enough to propel the ball the intended distance on the through stroke.

Another mechanical fault when putting long distance is hitting up on the ball versus through the ball.

A popular tip for very long putts is to try to get the ball inside 3ft circle that surrounds the hole. It sounds good, but when applied, rarely works. The best way to get a long putt close is by focusing on making the putt.

Monster putt:

Mistakes:

Taking too short a backstroke and then surging, or over-accelerating, in the forward stroke.
Allowing the putter to swing to high through impact, thus striking the ball with an ascending and glancing blow.

Setup:

Use a normal setup (no changes from regular stance).

Pre-stroke thoughts:

Get behind the ball and visualize path to the hole.
Focus on making the putt at the right speed to get as close as possible.

Stroke:

Keep the club moving at the same pace through the ball.
When lengthening the backstroke allow the club to swing in a slight arc, staying as close to the ground as possible.

I don’t know anyone who likes putting downhill and left to right. Most bad misses on left-to-right stem from stroking the ball too hard and too straight. Instead, try to leave the putt short. And allow for more break than you think you see. Aiming the ball farther up the slope will help you control its speed and bring it toward the hole more softly.

Left-to-right downhill putt:

Mistakes:

Looking at the hole instead of the apex.
Failing to trust your line.
Underplaying break, overplaying speed.

Setup:

Align the clubface to the apex you’ve chosen.
Normal stance and setup.

Pre-stroke thoughts:

Let the ball fall into the hole — focus on the high side of the cup.
Focus on putting the ball to the apex; once it reaches that point, gravity will complete the job for you.

Stroke:

Stay committed to the line you’ve chosen.

The most common error in making this type of putt is trying to completely take out the break. Players bang the ball into the back of the cup.

I’ve never missed a putt in my mind.

This sounds rather simple, but don’t underestimate the power of imagination. Great putters have great visualization — they see the putts going in the hole.

Short breaking putt:

Mistakes:

Trying to eliminate the break by ramming the putt into the back of the cup.
Focusing on the hole instead of the break point or apex point of the putt.

Setup:

Align putter head to the intermediate target, the break point.

Pre-stroke thoughts:

Visualize ball toppling into hole from top side of hole.
Remind yourself, “Maintain a light grip pressure and make a smooth stroke.”

Stroke:

Breathe deeply, slowly before stroke.
Take final look at break point.
Bring eyes back to ball and stroke the ball.

Smile a little bit before each putt. Frowning is something your body does automatically when you’ve engaged your conscious mind to concentrate on a problem.

They had better love 1-putting more than they hate 3-putting. I want them to envision every putt they try going in the hole, no matter how long or slippery the putt is.