already got the one, use your own instincts on how it looks and feels, get the lie and loft adjusted to fit
your stroke and use it a long time.
One extra thing I’ve noticed over the years, both from maintaining my own putters and
experimenting with other ones, is that the appearance of the face angle on a putter is way, way more
important than the actual face angle. If you set yourself up in a nice, neutral stance and your putter
looks closed—that is, the face appears to be aimed to the left of the target—you’re bound to do some
bad things with your stroke. I’ve seen some interesting testing done with lasers attached to the faces
of putters, and they show what I had figured to be true just based on my experience. If you think your
putter is open or closed—or if it really is open or closed—at address, you will compensate for that
with your stroke, because you’ll subconsciously believe that the ball isn’t going to go in the right
direction the way you’ve got it set up. I like my equipment to be neutral so I don’t have to deal with
those compensations.
I’ve had a remarkably consistent career when it comes to the actual putters I’ve used in
competition. I have changed putters only about four times in the last twenty years—mostly due to lost
luggage. The Cameron model I use now has a head shape similar to the Ping Anser that Mr. Lanning
gave me back before I turned pro, and the swingweight of all of them since 1980 has been the same, to
maintain a consistent feel. When I’ve experimented with different head shapes, I haven’t felt
comfortable. The results have been good, so why mess with it?
The wild card in all this discussion is “feel.” What does “feel” mean? That’s one of those things
that’s really hard to describe, but you know it when you “feel” it. To me, sound has a lot to do with
feel. The sound of a solid putt is very distinctive, and I am listening for that sound every time I hit a
putt. To me, that’s where my idea of feel starts—from the sound the ball makes when I hit it with my
putter. That’s why I don’t use putters with soft inserts in the face. I really want the audio feedback. In
fact, I have Scotty Cameron cut a channel in the sole and hollow out some of the material behind the
face of the Newport putters he makes for me so that I can really hear the impact. In terms of
engineering, it doesn’t change the performance of the putter in any way, but I like it because I can tell
right away if I didn’t hit a putt on the sweet spot of the putter, and that’s important information to
know. Listen for “solid.” It will help you understand feel. If you do decide to pick a putter with an
insert, pick one that not only allows you to feel solid impact but hear solid impact.
(LEFT) The Scotty Cameron putter I use now has material hollowed out from behind the face to give me more sound at impact. It also makes my putter lighter—a swingweight of D-2 instead of D-6, which is also closer to what my irons swing at.
(RIGHT) My putters also have a groove carved in the sole to add to that sound at impact. I know what
a solid hit sounds like, and I want to be able to hear when I don’t achieve it.
In the end, the mixture of mechanical specs, the way a putter looks and the feel you have for the
club itself is something of an art. I’ve seen guys putt great with beat-up old things you’d be
embarrassed to put in a garage sale. I’ve also seen guys who have great strokes and could get the ball
rolling well with a crowbar. What I would say is that a putter with the characteristics I have
described here is the most likely to feel good for you, both right now, for the first few putts you take
on the practice green, and down the line next summer. You’ll be far less likely to turn it into an
expensive decoration in the corner of your spare bedroom or closet.
CHAPTER 4
THE ART OF PUTTING
What is a putting stroke, anyway?
Sure, the idea is to get the ball in the hole. You can do that a lot of different ways. To use some
current examples, take Brad Faxon and Billy Mayfair. Brad has a gorgeous putting stroke. I could
watch him hit putts all day. Billy’s stroke is different, with the heel of the putter up in the air and an
outside-to-outside loop. I’m not criticizing it, because Billy has won a lot of money with that stroke.
stroke the ball great. Like I said, you can stroke the ball a lot of different ways, but I believe that it’s
easier to consistently be good when you have a fundamentally sound stroke.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to the fundamentals of the putting stroke. One
way to putt is to try to keep the face of the putter square to the target line through the entire stroke.
Face-balanced putters are designed to work with this type of stroke, and Dave Pelz has done very
well teaching that style. Loren Roberts has made miles of putts using that technique, too. But I believe
the square-to-the-target-line method works counter to what your body wants to do, and counter to
what you do with the rest of your clubs on full shots. It also takes a lot of practice to maintain. That’s
fine for tour players, who spend hours every week on the practice green, but a challenge for the
recreational player.
In my opinion, the putting stroke shouldn’t be fundamentally different than a full shot, just a
smaller version of it. I love to use the phrase “golf is a side-on game,” which I learned from
instructor Jim Hardy. You stand to the side of the ball when you hit it, and the shafts in your clubs,
putter included, don’t run straight up and down from the clubheads. Because you’re to the side of the
ball when you hit it, the swing has to happen in a round or circular motion. The tilt of that circle is
dictated mostly by the shaft angle at setup. This swinging in a circle at a tilt is what causes the swing
plane you’ve seen in so many golf instruction diagrams.
Here’s a better way to illustrate what I’m saying. If I swung really, really fast with my putter—
say ninety miles per hour—but I hit the ball with my method, it would still go straight. If I did that
with the straight-back-straight-through method, that ball would slice, and I’ll explain why in a second.
I believe that the straight-back-straight-through method is based on the premise of swinging on an axis
that is fairly vertical. The eyes are over the ball, and the shoulders rock up and down the target line in order to make the swing work. To me, that doesn’t make sense when you’re standing to the side of the
ball with a club that doesn’t swing on an axis that is straight up and down.
Without going into too much physics mumbo jumbo, the clubface on a full swing moves in a way
that’s square to the arc, not square to the target line. Since I believe the putting stroke is simply a
smaller version of a full swing, that means the putter should follow the arc back and through, and stay
square to the arc the same way. It will swing slightly inside the target line on the way back, and
slightly inside on the way through. It will look like the face of the putter is opening and closing, but
that’s happening because of the natural rotation of your body, the arms and shaft around the swing
plane, not by any conscious twisting or flipping of your hands.
But wait. You’re probably thinking that swinging the putter inside the target line can’t possibly
&
nbsp; be as precise as bringing it straight back and straight through on the target line, right? If the putter is
doing all this “opening” and “closing,” that can’t be as good as keeping it square to the target line,
right?
Actually, I believe that’s wrong.
If you’re standing to the side of the ball to hit a putt, to make the putter go straight back and
straight through along the target line, you have to use the small muscles in your hands to close the
putter face on the backswing, and then open it again on the forward swing, in relation to your body.
That’s the opposite of what you do for anything else in this game, from a driver swing to a short pitch,
and it’s also not the best way to do something consistently, time after time, without a lot of practice.
Letting the putterface move in a path square to the arc is what will make the ball go where
you’re aiming, with a bigger margin for error and less need for practice. That’s why Brad Faxon can
walk onto a practice green, drop a ball and immediately start rolling it great. He’s working with
physics and the mechanics of his body, not against them. When I give a putting lesson to somebody,
the rest of my game.” It all comes from the same fundamentals. As I said earlier, I don’t believe the
putting stroke should work any differently than the swing you’d use for your other clubs. It’s just
smaller.
To get the putter following that nice path, you need to feel the way the shoulders and arms work
in the putting stroke. You’re trying to get away from rocking the shoulders up and down and toward
turning them around your spine, like they do in a full swing. In other words, if you’re a right-hander, it
should feel like your left shoulder is moving around toward your chin on the backswing, not down
toward your left foot.
The stroke itself is simple: You always want to start the putterhead back first, because the toe of
the putter has the farthest to swing on the arc. To make your stroke with a relaxed arm swing, you
want to feel your left arm push the putterhead away while allowing the right elbow to soften and fold
close to your side. The through swing is generated mostly by lengthening your right arm through
impact, in order to have your shaft end up even with or slightly leaning ahead at impact. Your left
elbow must respond to this by softening and folding along your left side. If your tendency has always
been to work the face square to square, you will need to feel your forearms rotate during the stroke so
the toe end of your putter leads the heel in the backswing and then releases through on the arc and
leads the toe again past impact. Remember when we talked about keeping the arms and shoulders soft
and tension-free? This is where that softness comes into play.
Most players have too much tension in the shoulder and elbow joints when they putt—sometimes
to the point of total lockdown. Even if you know what you’re supposed to do with the putting stroke,
it’s impossible to actually do it when you’ve got that kind of tension. In a lot of the lessons I give, the
first thing I start with is tapping the player on the shoulders with the grip of my putter to get him or her
to “let the air out” and relax. You’ll see a person’s shoulders drop three or four inches after that.
When you have that kind of tension in your shoulders and arms, the only way to hit the ball is to
use a lot of body movement and release the putter in a flip move with the hands. That causes a
tremendous amount of inconsistency—basically, you’re making a different stroke every time you hit a
putt. It’s probably not a surprise to hear that inconsistency like that translates into poor speed control
and missed putts. You can guess what happens next: The missed putts build anxiety, which creates
more tension in the shoulders and arms. It’s a vicious cycle. From there, it doesn’t take long to get
completely locked up over putts, especially those important five-footers. You’re standing over them
all tense, with no real idea of what you’re supposed to do. There’s no feel in that stroke, and no flow.
Other players might have that tension in their putting stroke because of their personality. If
you’re a precise, detail-oriented person, you might think that locking down the muscles in your chest,
shoulders and arms gives you more precision and control in the stroke. Actually, the opposite is true.
You need the softness to make it happen. Loose, relaxed muscles in the chest, shoulders and arms will
let you respond to the weight of the putterhead moving, and you’ll quickly notice how naturally this
folding and unfolding takes place. This relaxed, flowing stroke is the best way to hit consistent,
accurate putts.
If you have trouble visualizing what I mean by soft, responsive arms, think about tossing a ball
underhanded toward a target on the floor five feet in front of you. If you stiffened your arm and tried
to toss the ball just using your shoulder, you wouldn’t get much power on the toss and you certainly
wouldn’t have much accuracy. I really like the underhanded toss analogy, because it works for the
grip as well as for the feeling of softness in the stroke. If you were going to toss that ball, you would
hold it in your fingertips, because that’s where your feel is. You wouldn’t hold it in your open palm,
or grab it in a tight, hand-dominated grip like you would something you were trying not to drop. Your
putting grip is the same way. With the underhanded toss, your fingertips are helping your brain
automatically judge how much energy to put into the job of getting the ball to move, without too much
conscious interference from you. If you have a good grip and keep that softness in your arms and
shoulders, you’re doing the same thing—letting your brain’s powerful natural instincts take over.
Once you relax and make the stroke I’ve been describing, you’ll definitely notice that the
putterhead looks like it’s opening and closing—not staying square to the target line back and through.
That’s great, because I believe that’s the best path for a putter to travel if you’re looking for
consistency and a feel for distance. Check out the sequence pictures of my putting stroke in the color
insert section and see for yourself. Again, that comes from turning around your spine tilt, on plane,
and from the blending of forearm rotation in the backswing and follow-through, not from your hands
flipping or turning the grip end like a doorknob.
Explaining how the forearms work may give you more of an idea of what I’m talking about. At
address the two bones in your forearms are stacked on top of each other. The top bone is the called
the humerus, and the bottom one is called the ulna. In the backswing, make sure you’ve got the top
bones in your forearms—the humeruses, for all you orthopedic surgeons out there—leading the way
both back and through. If you rock the shoulders instead of turning them, or close the putterface going
back, you’ll immediately see the bottom bones in the forearms, the ulnas, leading. Again, the stroke is
a combination of shoulders turning, arms swinging and forearms rotating—not wrist action—so
maintain the angle you had in your right wrist at address and don’t let the left wrist break down
toward the target through impact. If you haven’t picked up a putt
er and tried the stroke I teach yet, that
might sound like a difficult thing to do. Your impulse might be to get the hands and wrists involved in
the stroke—especially at impact—to help generate enough power to get the ball to the hole. It doesn’t
work that way. Trust me. Forearm rotation and a little arm swing will give you all the power you
need. In fact, when you try my method, you’ll probably smack the first few putts quite a bit past your
target. That’s okay. It just means that you can now take a smaller, smoother and more controlled stroke
on every putt. You’ll quickly get the feel and be able to recalibrate your distance.
To get the ball to roll nicely, you need to move the putterhead end of the club the most in your
stroke, not the grip end. The energy in your stroke needs to be primarily in the putterhead through
impact—for consistency and efficiency. To start the stroke, the shoulders turn slightly, the arms have a
little swing to them, the grip end stays relatively quiet, and the putterhead swings away long enough to
create the energy to roll the putt the proper distance. Problems start to creep into the stroke when you
turn the shoulders too much, or jerk the grip end of the putter back. You’re taking away energy from
the end of the club that will be doing all the work, and this will destroy your consistency. If you do
move the grip end too much and too early, you have to speed up the clubhead end of the putter down
through impact to compensate. The only way to generate that speed at that point in the stroke is to do it
with your wrists and hands. The left wrist breaks down, the hands flip toward the target and it gets
really hard to make a solid, consistent strike on the ball. You’ve probably felt those kinds of misses in
your hands—a thin, clacking kind of impact toward the bottom of the putterface, which often leads to
putts ending up short of the cup.
By far the hardest habit to break is that of tilting the shoulders up and down during the stroke
instead of letting them turn around the spine slightly, like they’re supposed to. It’s one of the
fundamental differences between making a stroke that’s square to the target line (the stroke that
teachers like Dave Pelz endorse) and one that’s square to the arc, as I prefer. Don’t get frustrated if