One Stone – Two Birds

Improving your putting stroke won’t make you hit more fairways with a driver.  Correcting your “over the top” move with the long clubs will not help you become a better green reader.  When we think about the game of golf we can break it down into separate pieces.  Let’s say:

• Full Swing
• Partial Swing/Short Game
• Putting
• Mental game/Course Management

While there may be different parts of the game, you do have a chance to work on one skill that will benefit you in two areas. Specifically, becoming better at pitch shots, will improve your full swing.  In essence, a pitch shot, that soft landing 40 or 50 yarder is nothing more than a smaller and therefore slower version of your full swing.  Well if there is ever a chance to get multiple benefits from working on one skill, why would you not take advantage of that?

So what are the skills that we need to be good at hitting pitch shots close to the hole?

1. Posture, Grip, Aim. 
2. Solid contact.  If you sometime hit the ball thin, sometimes solid and occasionally fat, you will not be able to control the trajectory or the distance of the shot. Without Solid Contact the rest of the skills listed here won’t help you.
3. Clubface control.  The ball’s initial direction is dependent mostly on where the clubface is looking at the time of impact.  If your pitch shots tend to fly short and right of your target, or long and left you have a clubface issue.
4. Length/speed of the swing.  Because you need to control the distance of the shot, you will need to have a good ability to vary the length of the swing and the speed of the club as it goes through impact.

If you look at the first three skills that are required to be  a good pitcher, they would also be some of the basic skills needed to be a good ball striker with the long clubs. 

One Stone          Two Birds            Go Practice Your Pitching

Get Your Priorities In Order

What skills do you need to be a good putter?

A good putter posses three main skills.  These I refer to as the

1. The ability to start the ball on the intended line.
2. The ability to roll the ball at the proper speed.
3. The ability to read the green so he/she knows what line and speed the putt should be started on.

This is the goal.  If you have received suggestions on how to improve your putting, be sure to ask yourself if the suggestions goes directly to one of the three priorities listed above.  Too often, suggestions from one player to another or even from a “golf instructor” are generated from the look of a stroke or stance.  Watching tour players, I see many different postures and stances.  We certainly see a variety of hand positions (cross-handed, claw grip) and of course we see every length putter imaginable (at least for now).  Putting allows a variety of looks and styles.  Many of the accepted “facts” surrounding putting are simply not true.

Take for example, eye position.  I have had many conversations with students as well as coaches who go under the assumption that your eyes must be directly over the line of the putt.  Upon further review, my most trusted putting mentors have confirmed that of all the tour players they work with, virtually none of those players have their eyes directly over the ball!  Why? Because they are better at starting the ball on the intended line if they have their eyes slightly inside the line.  Another way to say this is, they used the Big Three Priorities rather than old sayings to dictate how they set-up to putt.  You should put any suggestion through a similar vetting process.  If it directly addresses the Big Three, great.  If it helps another, less important aspect of putting without being detrimental to the Big Three, that’s fine too.

Ryder Cup Viewing

Don’t make the hole smaller than it has to be! As you are watching the Ryder Cup you will see over the next few days, countless “must make” putts.  A player will have a long putt to halve the hole.  All too often, even at this elite level players will adopt a different attitude towards these putts and start rolling the ball much faster than their normal pace.  As these putts miss and roll 3,4 or even 5 feet past the hole.

Amateur golfers are guilty of this as well.  How often do you hear your partner or your own self talk saying “don’t leave it short”?  I encourage you not to adopt this attitude and here is why.

As the speed of the ball increases the size of the hole gets smaller.  Think of speed in the sense of time.  The faster the ball is moving, the less time it spends over the opening.  As it spends less time over the opening, gravity has less time to suck the ball below the level of the green.  So here are some examples of how small the hole becomes.

A putt that would travel reduces the size of the hole to the size of a poker chip.

A putt traveling at a speed that would travel 4 feet past the hole shrinks the size of the hole to a US Quarter.

At a capture speed of 5 feet past the hole, you would have to hit a dime sized target in order for the ball to stay in the hole!

On must make putts, the speed must be proper!