Category Archives: putting

What I learned at the range – 1

Every time I go to the range I learn something new. This is the start of a series of posts telling you what that was so you can go try it out for yourself.

1. Reading subtle breaks
I have noticed that I can stand to the side of someone putting and tell if they will miss to the right or left. I’m always, correct, too. I got to wondering what it was I was seeing from that angle. Maybe it was something difficult to see from behind the ball, which was why all those putts were missed.

I set a ball down on the practice green about fifteen feet away from the hole on a flattish surface and looked at the putt from both sides (at a right angle to the line of the putt). It was clear that on one side I was looking into a slope and on the other side I was looking down the slope. That was not clear when I looked at the putt from behind.

Then I stepped behind the ball and looked toward the hole. Like I say, the ground looked flattish. So I took one big step to the right and saw the ground coming toward me. I went to a point one step to the left of the ball and saw the ground falling away from me. It could not have been clearer.

This meant the putt would break to the right. I aimed inside left, and the ball went in. Easy as that.

I tried reading the break in this way on many different spots around this rather large green, and the two looks from just off to either side always told the truth.

Now most of the time it’s obvious that the green breaks one way or another. But there are times when you can’t tell. This method fixes up those putts that you swear will go straight in, but miss to one side by two inches.

2. Problematic chip
I had a shot around the green in the last two rounds I played that gave me fits. It was a short chip over a mound to a tight pin. I have 8-10 yards of mound to carry, and about half that distance to stop the ball. Long story short, here’s the shot I came up with.

Take out a lob wedge. Play the ball back of center. Take the club generous distance back for this short of a shot, and let the clubhead fall into the ball. Don’t swing the club, just let it drop in a controlled way. Hit down on the ball and there won’t be much of a follow-through.

The ball pops up and lands with enough roll left to get to the pin. When I tried this with a sand wedge, the ball rolled out too far.

Hope this all helps.

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.

Plumb-Bob Putting: Does It Really Work?

I have this thing about plumb-bobbing and putting.

I don’t get it.

Some people say it’s bunk and other golfers swear by it. They plumb-bob everything. I even saw Karie Webb plumb-bob a putt of under two feet, for cryin’ out loud. So I thought, maybe she and they are on to something. I decided to give it as fair of a test as I could.

First I read all the stuff on the Internet about how it works (there doesn’t seem to be complete agreement on this point). Then I went to the range with an Acushnet Bulls Eye putter, built in the early 1960s. This putter has the advantage of being symmetrical from front to back, so that when it hangs down as a plumb bob it hangs down 90 degrees to the earth. Most putters to day are built asymmetrically, and do not hang straight down, which makes their use for plumb-bobbing suspect from the very start.

I also took a metal track that can be used to roll a ball to determine the true contour of the green. I found a 12-foot putt with three inches of break from left to right. This is a good test putt for this experiment, because many golfers looking at it would not be certain that this putt would indeed break to the right. The idea of plumb-bobbing is that the putter would make the direction of the break clear in cases like this.

I held the putter between my thumb and index finger and let it hang down. I lined up the shaft so it covered the hole and the ball. Then I closed my right (non-dominant) eye. The theory of plumb-bobbing is that the hole (in this case) will appear to the right of the shaft, meaning the putt will break to the right. No go. Both the hole and the ball disappeared behind the shaft (below).

I tried closing my dominant eye just to see what would happen. Both the hole and the ball appeared to the right of the shaft, which is what I expected (below).

My 13-year-old grandson was with me. He tried the same procedure and he couldn’t get it to work, either. With only his dominant eye open, the shaft covered the ball and the hole. There was no indication of break.

One caveat of plumb-bobbing is that it works if there is only one break in the line of the putt. When I rolled the ball down the metal track to find the direction and degree of the break, the ball rolled on a continuous curve to the right, so there was no problem on this point.

So, I tried, and I couldn’t get it to work, but I’m still open to the matter. If you plumb-bob and it works, please write a comment with a detailed description of how you do it and how you interpret the visual information you get.

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A Strategy For Reading Greens

Much of green-reading is based on the experience you have had, remembering what greens looked like they would do and what they actually did. When you read a putt, you reach into the bank of putts you remembered and pick out the one that looks the most like this one, weigh the two, and come up with a solution. That’s really what green-reading is. This post is about how to organize your reading so you can store your memories in a way that makes them easily and accurately retrieved.


When you walk up to a green, maybe from 100 yards out, notice if the table of land that it rests on is sloped in any way. You might not be able to see it from the angle you have, but it’s there. That slope will tend to pull putts in that direction.

When you get on the green, find the high point and the low point. Forget about where your ball is for the moment. Just look at the green in general. Most of the time this slope will conform to the slope of the land you looked at coming up the fairway.

These first two looks show you slope that must be taken into account. Your putt might break a different way, but if you’re going to ignore the overall slope of the putting surface, you have to know what it is first and have a good reason for ignoring it.

Now look at your putt from the low side, to see changes in elevation that would cause you to hit the ball harder or softer to get the ball over the distance to the hole. The farther from the hole the ball is, the more important speed is, and the more important it is that you take this look. Try to do it when someone else is lining up their putt so you save time when it’s your turn.

Look at the putt from behind the ball unless you are putting up or down a slope. In that case, look at the putt from the downhill side looking uphill. Contours are easier to see. Look first for the general shape of the putt—if you were to hit the ball straight at the hole, would it go in, or end up to the right or to the left?

If the ground gives you two breaks, say right to left at the start, the left to right at the end, account for both, but give the latest break more allowance, since the ball will be traveling slower and be more affected by the slope of the ground.

It is not entirely necessary to look at green contours from close to the ground. You can see all you need to from a standing position, maybe bending over a bit to look from a height of four to five feet.

Reading longer putts from behind the ball does not let you see contours around the hole clearly, and that is where you need to pay the most attention. Walk up to about ten feet from the hole and straddle the line of your putt so you can get a good look at slopes near the hole. Don’t guess from way back there.

You should have a good feel for how hard you want to hit the putt. Put that information together with what you see on the ground to pick a starting line for the putt. Do that with this next bit in mind, probably the most important thing I will say today. Beyond a certain distance, you’re not realistically trying to sink the putt. You know that if you did it would be good fortune rather than your skill that got the ball in the hole. Your skill, however, is what gets the ball close and gives it a chance to go in. Your goal then is to see how to send the ball across the green to place where good fortune can take over. That’s how you leave yourself tap-ins, and that’s how those twenty- and thirty-footers go in every now and then.

Organize your green reading this way, going from the general to the specific, step by step. That pulls out one recognition at a time and lets you build our read logically without guesswork.

Remember that you will never read greens perfectly. Did you ever see a pro on TV let a putt slide by the hole a hair on the right and have an expression of complete disbelief? Have you ever heard the announcers on TV say, “This putt goes left, doesn’t it Roger?” “It does Johnny, but it looks like it goes right, and no one so far today has figured out that it doesn’t go that way.” All you can do is read the green based on what you know, and if you get it wrong, file away the correction for next time.

See also Vector Putting

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Vector Putting

Most people will tell you that reading greens is an art that can never be reduced to science.   While that is mostly true, there is more science in it than you might imagine.   Say you’re on an idealized green that is perfectly flat, but a bit tilted.   It is entirely possible, knowing the speed of the green, the amount of its tilt, and the speed of the putt, to calculate the exact path to the hole.

In 1984, H.A. Templeton published a book titled Vector Putting, that lays out a plan which shows you how to analyze a green in just those terms.   The keys are what Templeton called the zero-break line, and the gravity vector.   I will explain them in a simplified, but still accurate way, retaining the term, “zero-break line”, but replacing “gravity vector” with “aiming point”.

The zero-break line is the line that follows the slope of the green straight downhill.   The aiming point is the spot on this line, extended now above the hole, where you aim your putt.

Find the zero-break line on a sloping green by walking below the hole in its vicinity.   You will at first sense that you are walking downhill, but when you sense you are now walking uphill, you have crossed, and thus found, the zero-break line.

The aiming point for your putt is a spot on the green on this line but on the uphill side of the hole.   The precise location of this spot, as said before, depends on the speed of the green, the slope of the green, and the length of the putt.

The aiming point (the X in the diagram) will be closer to the hole along the zero-break line when: the green is slower, the slope is less, and the distance is shorter.   The aiming point will be farther from the hole along the zero-break line when: the green is faster, the slope is greater, and the distance is longer.   The one constant is the speed at which the ball approaches the hole.

For a 10-foot putt on a medium speed green (normal daily fee course) that slopes two degrees, the aiming point (the X on the diagram) would be six inches above the hole on the extended zero-break line.   A ball putted toward this point with enough speed to finish one foot past the hole will go in the hole — regardless of where the ball is in relation to the hole.   If you imagine a clock around the hole with the zero-break line running from 12 to 6, it does not matter at what o’clock the ball is.   A ball 10 feet away will go in the hole if it starts out toward the aiming point with the right speed.

The chart below shows you how to find the location of the aim point on medium greens, as used in the example above. Read down the right-hand column to 10 feet, across to 2%, the slope of the green, and you will find the aim point be 6 inches above the hole along the zero-break line.

This method works best for putts of 10-12 feet or less.   Over that short distance, the slope of the green is usually constant, making the green act like a tilted plane.   Longer putts that might have several different breaks between the ball and the hole do not lend themselves as well to this technique.   But for the shorter putts, this method is like money in the bank.

There is a refinement built into the chart, which shows you the aiming point for putts at 90 degrees to the zero-beak line. Putts like in the picture above, played from below 90 degrees, or others played from above the 90-degree line will spend a different mount of time rolling across the green.

The little numbers in the boxes show you how many inches to add for putts played from above the hole (superscript) or to subtract for putts played from below the hole (subscript), to the basic aiming point to compensate for this effect.

Play with this on the practice green. Remember, you are not trying to figure out how far outside the hole to aim your putt, but how far up the zero-break line you are aiming for. You could have one putt that would pass four inches to the side of the hole, and another one passing six inches to the side of the hole, when both times you would really be aiming at a spot ten inches above the hole on the zero-beak line.

I provide a fuller description in my Living Golf Book,section F7.

You might also enjoy Geoff Mangum’s extended discussion of this technique.

Note from February 2022: It comes down to this. Read a putt one way and you look for the one curved path that will guide the ball into the hole. How often do you find the right path? Another way is to assess the amount of slope in the green (easy), in which direction is runs (easy), and use that information to find the spot to putt at that will carry the ball into the hole. I have much more success with #2.

USGA To Rule On Anchoring the Putter

The April 30 edition of GolfWorld magazine magazine contained a brief article saying that the USGA and R&A are seeking a way to ban or limit anchoring the putter for inclusion in the 2016 rules revision.

The opening paragraph in GolfWorld reads:
“A change to the Rules of Golf that would limit golfers’ ability to anchor long putters and other clubs against the body is looking more likely, judging from R&A officials’ comments during a press conference April 23 to promote this summer’s British Open at Royal Lytham & St. Annes.”

The article described “discussions with the USGA on the matter as proceeding at an intense pace.”


Further, “The governing bodies are looking at Rule 14, which defines a stroke, as opposed to restricting the length of the club.”

So far, this looks to me like a solution in search of a problem. There was no controversy until last year when Webb Simpson won twice and Keegan Bradley won a major championship, both using an anchored putter. If you look at the Strokes Gained, Putting rankings, there is no trend for players who anchor their putter to be at the top.

However one putts, one still has to read the green correctly, get the speed right, aim oneself properly, get the staring line right, make a flawless stroke, and have supreme confidence all the while. I don’t know how an anchored putter makes those things easier to achieve. I have seen both Simpson and Bradley putt in other tournaments where they couldn’t hit their hat.

How a Rules change would affect the career of players who have established themselves putting one way and would in 2016 have to learn a completely different style, I will leave to the players affected and their attorneys.

The real issue for the world of golf concerns players who have a bad back. I wrote earlier this year in this space about the effect that banning a long putter would have on the many thousands of amateur golfers who play with a bad back and need a long putter in order to keep playing.

By targeting Rule 14 rather than restricting the length of the club, it would appear that the USGA is taking our needs into account. We can only encourage them by writing to them to express our concern.

If you need an accommodation in putting because of a bad back, please write to the USGA to express your concern over any rule change that would affect your ability to play.

The USGA does not seem to have an e-mail address for general correspondence. Their mailing address is:

The United States Golf Association
P.O. Box 708
Far Hills, N.J. 07931

You may also telephone them at 908-234-2300, FAX 908-234-9687.

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An Experiment With Uphill and Downhill Putts

Short post today. Yesterday morning I was at the range and I tried something different on uphill and downhill putts to get the distance right. For the uphill putt, I gripped the putter at the very end of the handle. My left little finger was barely on the club. That has the effect of lengthening the club, giving the stroke a little more speed without any more effort. I usually leave uphill putts short of the hole, and this trick did get the ball closer.

I tried the opposite for a downhill putt, by gripping down from where I usually hold the putter, thereby shortening the club, which takes off speed. That didn’t help as much, though I must say that I’m pretty good at downhill putts already and don’t need this kind of assistance.

You might try it, though, lengthening or shortening up on the grip to adjust for slope. Then you hit the ball using the same pace as you would for the length of putt you are facing as if it were a putt across level ground. I can’t say anything conclusive about this trick, because I only played with it for a few minutes. It’s just another variable that might help.

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A Morning Around the Practice Green

I went to the range this morning to get a little practice in before I settle down to watch the Masters broadcast. I took a putter, and 8-iron, and four balls. I started chipping with the 8-iron to holes different distances away to see how close I could chip effectively with it, and how far away. I plan on doing that with all my chipping clubs, 6-iron through sand wedge. Someone else can chip with their lob wedge, but not me.

In addition to finding out what I wanted to know about the 8-iron, I found an effective way of judging the strength of the stroke. It’s fairly intuitive. I was just looking at the hole and waiting for a feeling to appear that said, in its own way, “This hard.” It is a feeling that is in your mind, but is felt in some way in your body, too. I found that if I executed that feeling with my body turn, and not with my hands and arms, my distance control was really good. When the feeling got into my hands, all was lost.

As for putting, I worked on approach putts by dropping balls at 20, 25, 30, and 35 feet, then putting them toward a hole. Again, looking at the length of the putt and letting the right feeling of power to infuse itself worked like a charm. For these longer putts I am finding that the best power generators are the oblique muscles of the abdomen. They are big muscles, not subject to flinching, and are the muscles of the moving stroke farthest away from the hands, which are the last source of power you should consider.

Short putts: Remember how, in the real old days, golfers would putt their putter in front of the ball, then lift it over to the back and make their stroke? They were checking to see if the clubface was square to their starting line, and that is easier to do without a ball in the way. If you have an alignment mark in the top surface of your putter, all the better. Mine doesn’t, so I drew one with a Sharpie.

You put the putter in front of the ball, line things up, lift up the putter and replace it behind the ball without disturbing the alignment of the mark, and stroke along that line. Works great. You don’t have to spend all that time fussing with the mark on the golf ball.

One last thing. Two last things, actually. Set the putter down gently so it barely touches the ground. That gives you a freer start to the stroke. Keep looking at where the ball was for a few seconds after you have hit the putt. I don’t know why, by this greatly improves your accuracy.

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A Controlled Putting Stroke

When I write these posts I like to keep two rules in mind. First, write only about things that a reader can learn from reading the post. If something is experiential, too open to interpretation, I won’t write about it, because I don’t want a misinterpretation to send anybody off in the wrong direction. Second, keep my own game out of it. What applies to me may not apply to you and may even be detrimental to your game. I try to write about golf’s universals–things that anybody can put into their game and become a better golfer.

This post breaks both of those rules, but I want to mention it for whatever it’s worth to you. If it makes you think about putting a bit differently and encourages you to make explorations on your own, even if they don’t end up where I am now, that’s fine with me.

Since my back surgery seven weeks ago, I have been putting. Nothing but putting. You can imagine that with nothing else about golf to distract me, I am getting to be a better putter than I was before. One problem I have been trying to solve for many years is how to take the putter back smoothly from the ball and in such a way that the putterface doesn’t open so that it can’t get square again when it gets back to the ball. That sound like two things, but it’s all of the same piece.

The square putterface is clear enough, but let me explain exactly what I mean by taking the putter back smoothly. It’s hard to bring something from a dead stop into motion without having a little jiggle at startup. Not impossible, but hard to do. With the putter, the little jiggle is expressed with the putterhead moving a bit along the Y-axis of the stroke path and the putterface turning slightly. (The Y-axis is at a right angle to the X path toward the hole, just like in your algebra book.)

When the putterface moves in that way, returning to it your carefully positioned starting point is seldom going to happen. As a consequence, having the ball go where you intend to putt it will seldom happen, too. Another putt you should have made gets missed.

A few days ago I fell into doing this one thing which seems, so far, to have cleared up the problem. My first move back is to take the handle of the putter back with a very gentle push by the left hand. The putterhead stays where it is for only the merest instant before it starts back, too. This move is so subtle that if you were looking casually you wouldn’t notice the lag between the handle and the head of the putter. That lag also puts light pressure into the palm of my left hand, since for an instant the handle is moving but the head is not. I maintain this pressure throughout the stroke.

The result is that the putter has no Y-axis drift, and the putterface stays where it needs to be to return to the ball squarely. I feel like Zach Johnson looks.

There’s more to it than this, in that this move is combined with my particular stroke, which I’m not going to try to describe (Rule 1). I need to check out Eddie Merrins’s book, Swing the Handle – Not the Clubhead, to see if this is what he had in mind. Incidentally, I tried this same move with a driver (not swinging in fully, because I’m not up to that yet, but just making a takeaway) and it feels promising.

Like I say, this is my personal exploration, and I found something that means something to me. If this opens you up to new possibilities, so much the better. The only thing I would remind you of if you want to try it for yourself is the subtlety of the movement. The added pressure in your left hand is very slight, and the lag in the motion of the putter is almost unobservable. More in those two things might not be the ticket.

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Is the High Side of the Hole Really the Pro Side?

One of the first pearls of wisdom that every new golfer acquires is that on the putting green there is a “pro” side of the hole and an “amateur” side. Professional golfers always miss the hole on the uphill side, so the wisdom goes, and amateurs continually miss on the downhill side. So to have at least something in their game that looks like they’ve been around the block, these golfers will start trying to miss putts on the high side, and every now and then accomplish it.

The reason for preferring the high-side miss is not hard to understand. A putt that approaches the hole from above might curl in or catch the lip on the way past and fall in. At least there’s a chance, which is not the case with putts that pass by on the downhill side. The only way the ball would then go in the hole would be to stop and head back uphill. I’ve never seen that happen and I doubt I ever will.

Miss on the high side, not the low side. Case closed. Or is it?


Remember that all this makes a difference when our object is to have the ball fall into the hole. While we would like every putt to do that, most golfers distinguish between putts that are makable and ones they lag up to the hole for an easy second. How long is a sidehill putt that most recreational golfers would consider makable? Eight feet? Ten? After a point, the goal becomes leaving the ball close. For those putts, the pro side and amateur side change places.

The purpose of a lag putt is to leave the ball close to the hole, AND in a spot where the next putt is as easy as possible. If you miss on the high side and leave it on the high side, or leave yourself with a sidehill comebacker, you haven’t helped yourself out. A putt that goes straight uphill, which you earn by missing on the low side of the hole, would be much easier. Depending on the slope, three feet straight uphill could be a more inviting play than a downhill slider of half that length. Then again it might not be, but thought needs to be given.

The point of any golf shot, from tee to green, is to leave the ball in the best place for the next shot. Indeed, we might not even be talking about putting. If you have a greenside chip of about 50 feet, you aren’t thinking of holing out, but of leaving yourself with an easy putt for the up and down. If there is a downhill side near the hole, that’s where you would want to leave your chip.

Guidelines are only guidelines. Wisdom is not a command. The fine points of playing golf serve merely to lead our thinking along relevant lines. We must never forget the primary rule of course management: look at the course and adjust to what is there.

See also Reading the Green From Behind the Hole

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How To Use a Belly Putter

It’s all in your posture. Stand up straight. Line up the putter to the starting line and then align your stance parallel that line. Now comes the key point. Stay your standing posture and step forward so the putter contacts your abdomen. There is no need to bend over and get small. It doesn’t matter where the putter hits you. Wherever it comes to rest is where you anchor it. Now make your stroke, being sure not to move the end of the putter that lies against your abdomen. You have established a pivot point that must be fixed. (The same goes for using a very long “broom-handle” putter. That hand the holds it against your chest must be a fixed pivot point.)

This is how you would hit short putts up to about twelve to fifteen feet. Longer putts are harder to hit because pivoting the club around a fixed point takes power out of the stroke. You must, beginning at some distance, detach the putter from your abdomen and let the putter swing freely. Such a long putter will be somewhat unwieldy when used in that manner, however, so anchor the putter in a different way by holding your upper arms gently, not locked, against your side and stroke the ball by allowing your arms to slide on your torso.

Having missed all those short putts at Pebble Beach two weeks ago, and now short-putting himself out of the WGC Match Play event, it seems to me that Tiger Woods could benefit by having a belly putter in his bag. We don’t always get to see what he is doing on the green, but at the AT&T we saw one putt looking right down the line and it was a push from the very start. Very uncharacteristic of him. You can link his putting in the past few weeks to how he putted in the Masters last year – lots of short putts missed. Just sayin’.