Putting Flashcards
When you guide your putter selection by how the club feels in your hand, how it looks when you put it down in front of you, how it fits you physically, and how the ball feels when you roll it, you’re going to end up with something that inspires more confidence. I believe that “match” has more to do with how pleasing the head shape is to your eye, the loft on the face and the kind of grip on the club than any specific “style” the club has. In that sense, the particular kind of putter you have in your hand matters less, as long as it feels good to you and helps you.
Now, do I believe that the average player can benefit from new putter technology? Absolutely. The new putters dramatically reduce the penalty for missing the sweet spot on the face, and the material and groove technology improve the quality of the roll for anybody, regardless of their skill level.
We’ve talked about how important the forward press is in the stroke—and starting out with 4 degrees of loft on the face of the putter lets you forward press and keep loft on the face through impact for a good roll.
When a putter has little or no loft, it causes you to subconsciously shift the grip back, away from the hole, to see more of the face. It’s hard to roll the ball well from there. You want to make sure you have enough loft on the putterface so that there’s some loft of the face at impact.
As far as balance goes, I think it’s important for a putter to feel “light” in yourhands. I don’t want to pick it up and immediately feel the weight of the clubhead.
Some players go with a heavier head because they think it helps keep them steadier, or because they feel that they don’t have to make as big a swing. I think that’s robbing yourself of a lot of the sensitivity in your fingers. I want a balanced putter, not a heavy head or a heavy grip.
If you struggle with your stroke, you’d probably be better off with a putter that’s face-balanced. Face-balanced weighting means the putter wants to stay square through impact. That gives you a larger sweet spot across the face, for when you don’t catch the ball right in the center.
To check if a putter is face-balanced, balance the shaft on your finger, up near the head. If the face is horizontal and parallel to the ground, the putter is face-balanced.
The style and size of grip you use should absolutely feel good to you, but you have to be careful not to use a grip that is too small. If the grip is small in your fingers, your tendency is to hold on tighter with your fingers to stabilize it. That tension is not good for feel.
As long as the size doesn’t get out of control, and doesn’t change the overall balance of the putter, I think it’s an option to consider.
And really, the only way to narrow it down and find the putter for you is to try a bunch.
You can get some insight into what putters are popular bychecking a tour player’s bag, especially if he or she is using a different brand of putter than the rest of the clubs in the bag. Tour players don’t mess around with putters.
The new materials they’re using in the face inserts and the quality of the groove and weighting technology mean that you can miss the “sweet spot” slightly and still get a good roll.
The grooves are as important on a putter as a wedge. You wouldn’t want to try to control a shot with a wedge that had no grooves—but that’s a discussion for another book. I feel like I don’t have to be perfect in terms of hitting the sweet spot, and I’m still going to have control over the speed and roll. I’m more concerned about stroking it through impact with a square face and starting the ball on my line.
The last piece of advice I have for you on equipment might sound unimportant, but it’s an importantstep to becoming a real player. As I said at the beginning of the chapter, you can’t be a good putter unless you treat your equipment with respect. Put your putter in the top end of the bag, with your driver and other woods, and keep the headcover on it. Don’t stick it in the bottom divider of your bag along with your wedges, where it can get beat to all hell. If it bangs around with the other short clubs, it can get nicks and dings on the face and leading edge. Those bumps and bruises are distracting, and they can cause the face to shine, which makes it hard to see.
The best putters are players who spend almost all of their energy and focus on the line and speed of the putt, and almost none of it on mechanics.
But the two main problems I have with this emphasis on mechanics are that it leaves out the most important part of putting—the mental side—and it encourages you to trace somebody else’s signature instead of signing your own. When you’re concentrating so hard on what your hands are doing, how far to take back the putter, whether it’s going back in a straight line or on a slight arc—or any other bit of mechanical information—you’re diverting your attention from where it should be: on line and speed.
It doesn’t really matter to me if you have a short, quick stroke or a long, flowing one. You don’t have to have a stance that’s perfectly square to the target line, or a ball position that stays absolutely locked in day in and day out.
What you do need to have is a setup and a stroke that suits you—your temperament, your body type, and what makes you comfortable.
On top of all that, a person just doesn’t feel the same from day to day. People aren’t machines. Some days, it might feel better to have a little wider stance and a ball position a little farther forward. I encourage every player I teach to be receptive to those feelings, and to go with them. I get asked all the time about my ball position, or exactly how wide or open my stance is when I putt. The answer—“It depends…”—
The best putters are players who spend almost all of their energy and focus on the line and speed of the putt, and almost none of it on mechanics. They connect with the “feel,” not with a mechanical checklist of body parts and movements.
Mechanics do play a role, especially if you’re a beginner or a player who can’t make the most basic repeatable contact with the middle of the putterface.
Developing some solid basics is like going to driver’s training class as a fifteenyear-old. You learn how to start the car, put it in gear, hold the steering wheel, accelerate, turn, and stop. Once you know those things, then you learn how to drive. Real driving is diagnosing the situations that unfold in front of you and responding to them with physical movements that are virtually subconscious.
Watch a NASCAR driver make a pass at 200 miles per hour and try to tell me that he’s thinking about how far to move his hand on the gear-shift lever, or how many inches he should adjust the wheel to the left. He isn’t. Those movements have been shifted to the background.
The same has always been true for me when I’m standing over a putt on the first green (or the 72nd) at a PGA Tour or Champions Tour event. When I’m going through my routine, I’m determining my line and the speed I want toroll the ball, and narrowing my mental focus—which we’ll talk about more in Chapter Three. I don’t think about the mechanical process of rolling the ball any more than I’d think about the mechanics of dropping an ice cube into a glass of water.
The whole point of reading a green is to give yourself a mental picture of what the ball will do on the path from where it sits to the hole. You’re trying to analyze the conditions—distance, slope, grain—and choose the right line for the situation. You’re picking the right combination of pace and direction.
The first time I watched Phil Mickelson go through his routine on the 12-footer I described at the beginning of the chapter, I was astonished at his ritual. He basically made a 420-degree circuit around the putt—looking at it from the high side, behind the hole, the low side, behind the ball and back to the apex of the putt’s break—all to feel comfortable about the line he was seeing. If all of that helps you see your line, and doesn’t get in the way of making a comfortable stroke at a pace that suits you, I’m all for it. But if you have a two-minute reading and pre-putt routine that doesn’t help you see the line better or feel more comfortable, all you’re doing is giving yourself more time to get nervous and think about the reasons you’re going to miss. That’s just not productive.
When you approach a green from the front, you can feel the changes in contour and relative firmness of the grass with your feet, and you can seethe predominant slopes on the putting surface. You can see which way the green drains—which is also the primary direction putts will break on that hole.
