you struggle with that early on in this process, using a mix of your old stroke and the new one we’re
working on. A physical therapist explained to me that our bodies fall into a physical pattern when we
perform a certain movement time after time—like putting the wrong way—and it’s hard to break that
pattern. My job is to help you do that demolition work—to build a set of positive, solid fundamentals
to replace the old habits. Some players I work with can change their pattern in twenty minutes or so. It
might take you a day or a week, but it’ll certainly happen. We can all create the change given the right
information and a little encouragement.
We’ve covered mechanics and stroke pretty thoroughly, but I think the “art” of putting covers
something more than just physical stuff. People ask me all the time, “What do good putters do, and what do they think?” Sure, the technical aspect of putting is part of being great—I can’t think of an
all-time great with terrible mechanics, or a stroke that wasn’t repeatable. But good putters also have
this attitude about what they do. They have confidence that they’re good, and that they’re going to
make the next putt, even if the last one did a 180-degree horseshoe and stayed out. We’re going to talk
more about that in Chapters 6 and 7. Here, I want to talk about some of the great putters I’ve seen,
both from a mechanical and confidence perspective.
If I were making a list of the best putters of all time, the guys on it would all have good
technique, but they certainly wouldn’t have identical strokes. Jack Nicklaus was the absolute best—
nobody made more putts with big tournaments on the line. Did he look relaxed and in the flow like a
Ben Crenshaw or a Brad Faxon? No—he got into that familiar crouch, kept everything still and
basically pistoned his right elbow to make the stroke. He had a very repeatable stroke, even if it had
some unique things about it. More than anything, Jack had an incredible intensity about his putting. He
was tremendously focused, and spent a lot of time analyzing his line. That might not be the best
method for some guys, but it fit with the way he played the game. And he made a lot of putts. There’s
a generation of players from about 1965 to 1980 that would give Jack the nod if it ever came down to
picking a guy to make a putt to save your life. He’d put a good stroke on it, and you know the pressure
wouldn’t get to him.
I heard Jack say recently that he never missed a short putt he needed to win a tournament. It’s
just a given in a long tournament career like his that he missed some here and there. As good as he
was, nobody is perfect. But he really believes that he didn’t miss any big ones, and I think that’s
because he was so strong mentally that he has blocked out those negative memories. It was one more
thing that helped him to be completely focused on the putt he had in front of him—not on something
that happened yesterday or last week.
Guys like Crenshaw and Faxon are at the other end of the spectrum, both in terms of stroke and
intensity level. Both guys are really artists—lots of graceful flow and pure athletic ability in the
stroke. They have such good strokes that it looks like the ball can’t help but go in, and they also have
the confidence to trust their strokes and let it go. I really learned a lot by watching both of those guys
—not so much from their technique, but from their approach. Ben Crenshaw has mastered getting out
of the way of his athletic ability and trusting his reads. Faxon has so much confidence in his stroke
that he almost doesn’t have to practice. Watching either of them is like watching a really talented
musician play up on stage.
Tiger Woods falls somewhere in the middle—he has what I call a very efficient stroke, with
great fundamentals, but with the intensity and focus Jack had. If you look at the guys who are
considered good putters on tour now, Tiger is the guy who has the skill, but also backs it up by doing
it consistently under pressure. Tiger’s mechanics might not look as graceful as Faxon’s, but I wouldn’t
put Brad or myself on the line under pressure instead of Tiger. He stands over big-time Augusta ten-
footers with a foot of break as though he’s playing a practice round at Isleworth. Of course, it’s a bit
putts it so well in the first place. All of that big-moment experience gives him such an advantage
compared to a lot of guys on tour. They’re standing over five-footers thinking about what it would be
like to win a major for the first time. He’s standing over the same putt thinking about nothing but
making it. And if he doesn’t make that one, he’s completely convinced he’ll make the next one. That’s
a rare, rare skill.
It’s impossible to overestimate how important attitude is to putting. I know for a fact that I miss
putts even when I’m making a great stroke if my attitude is bad. If I stand over the ball resigned to the
fact that I’m probably not going to make it, I won’t unless it happens by accident. It’s incredible how
much of an impact your mindset can have. Even when I have a day where it’s hard to see the line, or I
just don’t feel right, I can stand over the putt and trust my stroke. My goal here is to give you the
foundation of putting-stroke repeatability. That’s really the secret to building confidence—feeling like
you’re doing something on purpose with your putting stroke. Learning the mechanics and stroke in this
book will help you feel like you can do the same thing with your putting stroke—and have a
reasonable idea where the ball is going to go—time after time. Once that happens, you’ll start to
experience something kind of cool. Instead of getting discouraged, you’ll be mad about missing putts
you should have made. That’s part of the attitude I’m talking about. Guys like Brad Faxon really stand
over putts thinking they’re going to make every one, and are honestly surprised when they miss, even
though they totally understand the reality that they won’t all go in. You might not quite get to that point
—after all, Brad’s about as good as you can get with the putter—but it’s a great goal to shoot for.
CHAPTER 5
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUTTING
Tour players spend hours every week working on the fundamentals we’ve been talking about over
the last few chapters, making sure they’re comfortable with the stroke and getting ready to take it out
on the course for competition. If you have decided to make some changes to your own stroke, you’ll
be doing the same thing on the practice green, hitting putts and experimenting with the things I’ve been
talking about, finding out if they will work for you.
But the practice green is different from the first green in a real round of golf—whether you’re
playing in the B-flight of your club championship or trying to win a professional tournament. The
psychology of putting is all about getting your real-world putting stroke to look as close to your
pressure-free practice green stroke as possible, and keeping it that way when the stakes are high. It’s
about understanding that a good stroke is the best you can do, and accepting whatever happens after
that as a part of the game.
You’re probably thinking to yourself right now, “Wait a second. Isn’t putting all about
making
more putts?” Yes and no. When I’m standing over a ten-footer for birdie, I’m definitely intending to
make it. But I also know there are factors I can’t control in the process. I could roll the ball perfectly,
and a dent in the green could throw it off line. I’ve hit plenty of putts that have been—believe it or not
—blown off line by the wind. If you set up a machine to roll ten identical twenty-foot putts along the
ideal line at the ideal speed, one or two of them wouldn’t go in, just because of those imperfections.
If the sole measuring stick of your putting stroke is the number of putts you make, you’re going to
have some very frustrating days. You can hit great putts that just don’t go in. You can also stroke the
ball poorly on some days and slam them in off the back of the cup or bounce them in off a spike mark.
It’s dangerous to get too caught up in either kind of day. On the day you’re stroking it good but not
making them, it’s tempting to start monkeying with your stroke to try to make things happen. That’s
how putting slumps get started. I work with plenty of tour players who are struggling with their putting
simply because they just got away, bit by bit, from the solid fundamentals they used to have. And
when you’re hitting it poorly but making them, it’s easy to get overconfident and miss the signals that
you should be spending more time on the practice green.
My treatment for the psychological ups and downs players inevitably go through in putting is to
relegate the idea of making putts to secondary importance in the sequence of things to worry about in
the pre-putt routine. When I look back on my own professional career, I see a common thread among
the four professional events I won, and it stands out like a giant, glowing marker. Three of the four
times I won a tournament, I had recently had a conversation with Dr. David Cook, my sports
psychologist and good friend. I was really focused on process, not outcome.
One of the main things David has taught me over the years is the idea that you need to immerse
yourself in the process of hitting the putt, not the outcome of the putt itself or the consequences of it.
That means building a physical and psychological routine that you go through for every putt that starts
from the time you finish your read and ends when the ball leaves the putter. If you’ve done the first
part right, you’re really just a spectator for the second part. I know my stroke is good, and if I can put
myself in position to make that good stroke time after time, I’m going to make my share of putts.
Dr. Cook’s technique has two major advantages. First, it helps depressurize the entire putting
experience. I don’t care if you’re playing a $2 Nassau with your friends or trying to make a putt to
win a match in the club championship—you’re going to be faced with a nerve-wracking putt. It’s part
of the game, and it’s what makes this game great. The more you can immerse yourself in a process-
focused pre-shot and putting routine, the more you can distract your mind from the consequences of
making or missing and concentrate on making a good stroke.
The second advantage is that it helps smooth out the peaks and valleys in your overall putting
performance. If you’ve missed a batch of makeable putts early in a round, it’s very, very easy to get
discouraged and stand over the rest of your putts that day with some seriously negative thoughts. And
trust me, if you don’t think you’re going to hit a good putt, you’re almost always going to be right.
Focusing on the process instead of the result liberates you from beating yourself up about something
you can’t control, and lets you make a much more realistic assessment of your performance.
Sounds great, you say. But how do I do it? It doesn’t take anything more than concentration and
practice—you don’t need any other special skills. It starts with building a checklist to follow before
you make every single putting stroke. How dedicated you are to following this checklist will
determine how consistent your results will be because of it. Dr. Cook broke the checklist down into
five parts for me, and I’ve found that it works very well. After observing the situation and deciding on
your strategy, you then do three things over the stroke—See it, Feel it and Trust it.
First, observe the situation and come up with your strategy. Are you looking at a sixty-footer
with ten feet of break? Would a lag up to three or four feet be a great effort? Is it a fifteen-footer
straight up the hill that you can be a little more aggressive with? Your green reading (I’ll show you
how to read putts in the next chapter) and strategy process should happen very early, before you’re
even thinking about stroke.
See It: Once you’ve committed to that strategy, get into your putting setup and make your
practice stroke. Take the read you’ve just made and try to visualize the curving line your ball will
actually take, and then the ball rolling along that line. It definitely takes a lot of discipline to do it on
every single putt, but as it becomes an ingrained part of your process, you’ll be able to block out
distractions by immersing yourself in the routine. I can tell you from personal experience that when
you’re coming down the stretch and trying to win a tournament, the adrenaline gets pumping and
everything starts to speed up. It’s easy to lose control. Having a routine to go through before you putt
slows things down and restores your comfort level.
Feel it: Once I finish visualizing the path I want my ball to roll on, I plug in one or two of the
swing thoughts I’m playing with on that day. What is a swing thought, and how do I pick one? Good
question. It depends. In the process of learning the stroke I teach, you’re going to come up with an
array of thoughts and feels that help you roll the ball well. Every day I play, I’m applying one or two
of those thoughts and feels as the swing key for my stroke. The thought or feel might feel great for two
or three days, then start to lose its effectiveness, and then it’s time to plug in another one. One day, I
might be thinking about rotating the putter with my left forearm to start the putter back. Another time,
I’m thinking about moving my left shoulder around toward my chin. I’m physically doing the same
thing with my stroke every time. I’m just using a different thought to trigger it. I’m definitely not
standing over the ball with a blank mind, stroking the ball toward the hole. I’ve heard that a few
people try to do that—go completely blank—but my mind doesn’t work that way. Keeping a single
swing thought (or, at the most, two of them) in my head as I make the stroke reinforces my
fundamentals and connects the psychological part of putting with the physical mechanics we’ve been
talking about. It’s also a great way to keep little mechanical flaws from growing in your stroke. My
caddie might notice that I’m picking my putter up a little bit on my backswing. My key for that day
might be concentrating on keeping the putter low, and my stroke is better for it.
Trust it: The idea here is not to get overcome with the desire for the ball to go in the hole.
We’ve all been there: Standing over an eight-footer that just has to go in. That desire can easily get in
the way of a good stroke in the form of anxiety. By trusting your stroke, you’re deciding to give the
best effort you can on the mechanics and
let the rest just happen. Measure yourself by the mechanics
of the stroke, and if you do the mechanical things well, you’re going to make some putts. The whole
“Trust it” idea also enforces a kind of honesty about your putting game. If you go through the entire
routine I’ve been talking about and, in the end, trust your stroke, you’re going to know pretty quickly if
you’ve done enough work on the practice green to develop fundamentally sound mechanics. Poor
contact on the toe or heel and bad misses aren’t going to make you very happy, but you can use that
feedback to get better.
Does all this mean that you’re going to be perfectly consistent with the putter? No, we’re not
machines, and we all go through hot and cold streaks. But having a process helps you understand
when and why a streak—hot or cold—is happening, and what to do about it.
The hottest putting streak I had in my career is so vivid in my mind. It’s like I was making the
putts yesterday. It coincided with the week I won the Louisiana Open Nationwide Tour event in 1995.
When I went through that visualization process I just described, the lines looked so obvious, and my
stroke was pure. When those two things come together, look out. You’ll make them all. It’s called
catching a case of the drains.
On Sunday that week in Lafayette, I was eight shots behind going into the final round. The wind
was blowing so hard that I couldn’t even wear a hat. In those conditions, I went out and shot a course-
record 62 and made every single putt I looked at—from forty-footers on down. I made ten birdies and
had something like twenty-two putts for the day, and ended up beating Keith Fergus by two shots.
Ultimately, when you get in the “zone” like that, your own success is what jars you out of it. You start
to notice all the putts going in, and even if you try to get out of the way and just let it happen, you start
to get tight thinking about trying to make the next one. The streak takes on a life of its own.
The streaks of misses are obviously a little tougher to deal with than when you’re draining them