Dave Stockton has become the putting guru of the moment. One of his bits of advice is to not take a practice swing. Get your feel for speed as you make your read and go with it.

I tried that yesterday and putted like I’d never played golf before. All my approach putts stopped short and left. Way short, like 3-4 feet short.

By the seventeenth hole (I don’t give up easily) I’d had it. I went back to making practice swings, and what do you know? I left approach putts on the last two holes less than two feet past the hole!

Just goes to show you. Be real careful with what you read in a golf magazine. You can trust whatever is in this blog, though.

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

I was out at the range yesterday. I hit my usual small bucket (30 balls) in about 20 minutes, then went to the practice green. Truth be told, I would rather spend all my time on the practice green, but I’d feel guilty about not paying anything to use the practice facility, so I always buy a token.

Every time on the green there’s a new lesson to be learned, and yesterday’s was good one. I find it hard to read downhill breaking putts. The contours don’t stand out like they should. So I walked around once behind the hole and took a look. Wow!

I could just see the putt rolling down and curving into the hole, and I could see how fast it would be rolling on its way. Line and speed in one glance.

I got my starting line, walked back to the ball parallel to it, put my putter down square to it, and was ready to go.

Now I‘m not going to say I made everything I looked at, but I was much more at ease over difficult putts, and I did make more than my share. I tried lining up from behind the hole for every putt, and got much better results.

Another advantage of reading from behind the hole is that you get a clear picture of what’s happening around the hole, which is a key factor in leaving the ball close.

Try it yourself. Just because everyone reads the green from behind the ball doesn’t mean you have to. Whatever works.

Being a good green reader means entering into a partnership with the green. Instead of seeing the green as an adversary, an obstacle course that you have to navigate to get the ball into a tiny hole, look at the green as a helper that’s showing you exactly where and how firmly the ball should be sent off. Thinking outside yourself like this makes putting much less stressful. It will let you see clearly how to hit this putt.

So think not how am I going to sink this putt, but how are we going to sink this putt. You do your part, the green does its part. Your part is to start the putt with the right speed on the right line so the green can carry the ball to the hole. Give the green what it needs to work with so it can do its job.

See more at www.bettergolfbook.com

In the interest of keeping my putting practice fresh, I invent new drills from time to time. This one is my latest.

I practice in my back room, which is covered with deck carpet. The lid of a can of whole tomatoes, which is 4” across, acts as the hole that I putt to. I put a dozen golf balls in an old quart-sized cottage cheese bucket, stand over the lid, and gently roll them out of the bucket. They’ll end up anywhere from two feet to six feet from the lid.

The drill is to putt them all out from where they end up. You might have to move one or two out of the way to hit another ball. The catch is that if you miss one you start over. Don’t quit until you’ve putted out all twelve.

In addition to working on your stroke, this drill teaches you to putt under pressure. Every putt counts, so you have to take every putt seriously. By the time you’re putting those last few balls from five to six feet, you’re teaching yourself how stay composed when you face the same putt on the course.

See more at www.bettergolfbook.com.

You had a six-footer all lined up and you missed it. You thought you had it in the bag and it just didn’t happen. What went wrong? Did you make a bad read? Was it your stroke? Maybe a bit of both? How do you know which?

Well, you can’t know, but you can make sure it wasn’t your stroke by getting your stroke schooled to the point where every putt directs the ball exactly where you want it to go. Let’s mention a few little things that will help you get it right.

Posture. Stand up to the ball, bent over comfortably at the hips, lower back straight. Hang the putter straight down with the end of the putter grip in front of your left eye. The shaft should cover the ball. This ensures your eyes are directly over the line of the putt.

Aim. Find a no-break putt on the practice green. Lay a club down in front of the ball, pointing at the hole. Lay another club down parallel to it, about a foot away on the side where you’ll be standing. Pick up the first club. Line up your feet and shoulders parallel to the second club. Your stroke is now aimed at the hole.

Alignment. Draw a line around a golf ball’s equator. Put the ball on the ground with the line running right through the pole of the ball, i.e., not tilted to one side. Putt the ball. If the line does not wobble, your putterface was square and aligned at impact. This is a critical point.

Sweet spot. Impact on this spot transfers all the energy of the putt to the ball, in line with the stroke. Tap the putterface with your fingertip rapidly back and forth along the face until you find the spot were the putter does not rotate when tapped. Practice hitting the ball on the sweet spot. When so hit, the ball will leap off the face, your hands will feel no shock of impact, and the ball will make a distinctive sound.

Path. The putter should be swinging along your starting line for short putts. Rock your shoulders back and forth when you putt, and have a feeling of the right upper arm continuing forward on the follow-through.

Stroke. If you think of the putting stroke as a movement back and a movement through, that’s two things, and your mind can stop in middle. Even though the stroke changes direction, think of it as one movement, not two. This is calming to the mind and body.

One Correction. I see golfers all over breaking their left wrist in the follow-through. None of ‘em can putt worth a lick. Enough said.

After you get your stroke fixed up, getting the ball in the hole is up to your read and the vagaries of the imperfect ground the ball rolls over, but that’s another lesson.

See more at www.bettergolfbook.com

Recently I was watching the PGA tournament on television. One of the players hit a terrible drive into a thicket of trees, just like you and I do. He hacked out into the fairway just like you and I do. He pitched onto the green to ten feet, just like you and I (sometimes) do. All similarity ends there because he sank the putt for his par.

A good putt washes away our sins. It forgives us our trespasses. It leads us beside still waters. There is no reason not to become fiendishly good at it.

Yet, when I go to the range, it’s full of people hitting one worm burner after another with their driver and no one is on the putting green. I’ll spend an hour there, and maybe three other people will wander on, knock the ball around for ten minutes, and leave, thinking they’ve practiced their putting.

Incredible.

Let’s say you take 38 putts per round. Probably fifteen of those putts are tap-ins under one foot. That means you have 23 putts that you have to pay attention to. That’s about one-quarter of the strokes you make.

So do you devote one-quarter of your practice to putting? Actually, I think you should practice more than that. Try this. For every ball you hit on the range, spend one minute on the practice green. Do you buy those big buckets of ninety balls? Friend, you’ve just signed up for an hour-and-a-half of putting practice when you’re done.

Study putting, try different things that might work better. Take putting lessons! My pro tells me that out of the thousands of lessons he gives every year, less than one hundred are for putting.

Swing technique is hard. We’ll never have a great swing. Putting technique is easy. There is no limit to how good we can get.

I read in a golf magazine about some amateur who wanted to get as good as he could at putting. He did. He’s under 30 putts per round routinely. Once had a round of 18 putts, and twice he’s had rounds of only 19 putts.

Putting is our salvation, our chance to shine. I sing a song of praise to putting. Join the chorus.

Short putts are the ones from four feet and under. They’re the ones you just have to sink and are so afraid of not sinking. So you miss. Is that you? That was me. Here’s how I solved the problem.

The hole is a negative space. We’re trying to hit the ball at something that isn’t there. How can you hit something that isn’t there? That doesn’t make sense to me. What does make sense is to hit the ball at something that is there. That gives our mind something positive to aim at, something much easier to hit.

Whenever I practice short putts, I put a water bottle in the hole, and practice hitting the bottle. It’s so simple it should be a crime. Really. You can’t miss. Instead of trying to ease a ball into a tiny opening in the ground, you’re aiming at the broad side of a barn and actually hitting it. There’s a real target to aim at, and that takes off all the pressure. Try it.

Best of all, you will never see the ball roll past an empty hole. Never. That implants a wonderful affirmation: “I never miss the hole.” Now your conscious mind might say, “That’s because you never hit at one!” but we don’t listen to that mind. We’re training the subconscious mind, which knows only black and white. If it never sees the ball miss the hole, it comes to believe, “I never miss.”

After you’ve practiced this way for long enough, the image of an object sticking out of the hole sticks with you. When you’re playing, even though you’re looking at an empty hole, you see the bottle sticking up out of it. In your mind, the task becomes, hit the bottle. If you do, since there’s really no bottle there, the ball goes in the hole. Simple.

If the short ones give you fits, if you’d rather putt from six feet than two, try putting at a bottle on the practice green for a few sessions. Warm up this way before you play, too. It will change everything.

Data from shotbyshot.com, published in the July 2009 issue of Golf Digest magazine, stated that the distance from which the average high 80s shooter is as likely to one-putt as to three-putt is fifteen feet. What can we make of this factoid?
Let’s look at how professionals perform from that distance. Data compiled for forty golfers playing in a 72-hole invitational tournament, and presented in the book The Search For The Perfect Swing, show that of 152 putts played from a range of twelve-eighteen feet, 35 went in the cup, and only 2 led to a three-putt green. That’s a long way from a break-even ratio. How do we explain it?
Looking further, the data for these 152 putts also show that 122 of them, which count includes the ones that went in, finished no more than eighteen inches from the hole. There we have it.
No one is good enough to make a fifteen-foot putt for the asking time after time, but someone can be good enough to give luck a chance much more often than not. Eight out of ten of the subject putts were hit well enough that one-quarter of them found their way in. Anyone who putts that well won’t leave the others far behind.
It would be silly to expect to hit a 6-iron like professional golfers do, but there’s no reason why a recreational golfer can’t learn to hit a fifteen-foot putt like they do. No reason at all.
Here’s how. Drop four balls on the practice green and putt each one with about a two-foot backswing.
Important! Do not watch the ball roll out. Keep your head down and do not look up until all the balls have been hit.
If your stroke was consistent, you will have four balls very near each other, about fifteen feet away. If they went too far, do it all over with a shorter stroke. Once you get the right stroke and memorize it, you now have a stroke that guarantees you’ll leave a fifteen-foot putt next to the hole.
You might try developing a standard stroke for twenty-five-foot putts, too.
Oh, yes. The break-even distance for professionals in the Perfect Swing study was about thirty-three feet.
My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.