The World of Putting

1 Table of Contents The Final Word on Putting By Al Barkow Foreword..............................................................................................................................3 Introduction..........................................................................................................................4 Chapter 1 The Hands and Their Connection to the Club.....................................................................8 Chapter 2 The Stroke..........................................................................................................................19 Chapter 3 The Address Position.........................................................................................................42 Chapter 4 Aiming and Figuring Out Where to Aim...........................................................................49 Chapter 5 The Psychology of Putting.................................................................................................57 Chapter 6 The Putting Personality......................................................................................................64 2 Foreword Having grown up around Pinehurst, N.C., and reading Golf World while some kids were reading Mad magazine, I had a pretty good grounding in golf. Then, as a young writer/photographer/editor at Golf World I went to work for Al Barkow, in 1986, when he was editor-in-chief of Golf Illustrated. In the five subsequent years around Al my knowledge of the game, particularly as it relates to golf history and technique, increased a great deal. This was because of Al’s enthusiasm and deep knowledge for those parts of a game that has been such a big part of his life from boyhood in Chicago to adulthood, when he was good enough to compete in the U.S. Amateur and in time become one of golf’s wise and seasoned observers. In no small measure because Al had some game himself, he always has been interested in the paths great golfers took to get to the summit, what shaped their personalities and how they mastered—if fleetingly—a game that can be so maddening. While golf at its most basic level is about “how many,” Al is captivated with “how.” This explains his lifelong fascination with golf instruction. He has queried many of the best players, over several generations, about how they go about their work and collaborated with them in countless magazine articles and several books. No golf journalist has taken the study of instruction more seriously than Al has. About seven decades since he found his first secret, he continues to look for them. Al and I manage to have a game every year or so, despite living on opposite coasts. We played not long ago near his home in California. Lately, Al has been thinking a lot about putting, the part of golf that really separates winners from losers, whether on tour or at the club. In a nutshell, Al theorizes that the best way to putt is to rely on your dominant hand, whichever it is, and to hit shorter putts with a descending blow. It seemed to be working for Al in our recent round. He hardly ever missed from inside ten feet, and lagged all his long ones up cozy. I know how excited he is to have the opportunity to explain this approach to putting to a wider audience. Bill Fields Senior Editor, Features Golf World 3 Introduction There was a time in golf when some average golfers could actually hit drivers and iron shots and pitches at approximately the same level of efficiency and effectiveness as the touring pros; not often, but once in awhile. And, they used equipment very similar to that used by the pros. It was also possible to play from the same tees that Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus did…once in awhile. All of which gave the relationship between the game’s best players and their fans a certain empathetic charm. There is only one thing left in that relationship. We who play for the fun of it will never be able to make full swings with the power of a Tiger or Lefty Phil or Bubba—fly the ball incredible distances, and put all that suck-back spin on the pitch shots. But, we can putt with the pros; even out-putt them now and again. Putting doesn’t require the seemingly improbable flexibility of modern-day pros, or the specially shafted and ground and weighted clubs they use. The only difference is, the pros on tour week after week after week putt on greens so marvelously conditioned, so smooth and fast, that we ordinary folk would have to practice a little on them before we could handle them. But we could. After studying the techniques of the game’s best putters over the past fifty years, and helping a few of them write books on the craft, I have come up with a consensus on putting technique that will put you in the tour pro class. I have found that there are some universals of technique that all golfers at every level of competence can put in their games and lower their scores. The consensus culminates in a stroke concept and method that almost all the great putters in the game’s history have employed, and a lot of very good ones, some perhaps without even knowing it or at least articulating it. You will find little to no mention of it in conventional putting instruction, even in the books on putting I have helped professionals write. I’ve collaborated with two distinguished putting masters to write their books on the art of putting (and there is an art to it, as well as craft)—the legendary George Low, who 4 Arnold Palmer credited after he won his second Masters, in 1960. And, modern-day putting star Dave Stockton. I also helped Billy Casper write a book of instruction that included a lot on putting, which was one of his great strengths as a champion. The same with Phil Rodgers, who learned at the fount of short-game expertise, Paul Runyan. I’ve also written hundreds of instruction articles for such magazines as Golf and Golf Illustrated, both of which I was at one time the editor-in-chief. In these pieces I collaborated with some of the most notable teaching professionals in golf—Jim McLean, Billy Harmon, Hank Haney, Carl Lohren, and many others—more than a few of them on putting. Those fellows aside, in my fifty years of hanging around the tour I’ve talked putting with all the game’s best putters, as well as the mediocre ones, and even the poor ones—you can learn, of course, from the mistakes of others; sometimes more than from the good ones. Finally, as a serious golfer who has played in a U.S. Amateur Championship (1972), and on an NAIA national championship college team (1959, Western Illinois University), I have fiddled around with what I’ve seen and heard and felt from my own real life experiences with the wand. I’ve been doing it for a lifetime. Ben Hogan said more than once that putting was a different game from golf, and in a sense he was right; it’s not in any way a power stroke. But in other respects there are certain intrinsic similarities between three-foot putts and bashing a driver as far as you can. You stand at the side of the ball, for one important thing. You have to aim properly, and have a feel or touch for the distance you need to hit a 6-iron or a putt. You even have to play the wind once in awhile when putting. It is an axiom in golf that the mediocre ball-striker who can putt well will more often than not defeat the superior ball-striker who cannot. That is to say, there is no substitute 5 for good putting. Even the great Tiger Woods, no matter how well he may be striking the ball from tee to green; when the putts aren’t falling he is not a sure- thing winner. And on those days when his ball-striking is not up to standard and he doesn’t make up for it by putting lights out, he is just another very good player out there. The year Billy Casper won his first U.S. Open, at Winged Foot Golf Club, in New York, he played a couple of rounds with Ben Hogan. After the second of the rounds, in which Casper missed a lot of greens in regulation but holed numerous putts to save pars and shoot a score that put him in the lead, Hogan said to him, “Son, if you couldn’t putt you’d be selling hot dogs for a living.” Perhaps, but Casper could putt and never ran a hot dog stand. Hogan’s remark to Casper reflected an attitude in golf that said it was not macho to be proud of your putting prowess. No one wanted to be known as someone who got away with erratic or ordinary ball striking because he could roll the ball well on the greens. The attitude was not unlike that in baseball when the bunt came into the game; it was seen as a cowardly way to play. Ben Hogan was part of that generation. In his famous instruction book, The Five Fundamentals, there is not a single word about putting. It wasn’t because Hogan didn’t know anything about putting, or didn’t care about his putting. He wouldn’t have won the major titles and all the tour events he did if he didn’t give putting any thought. It was, in his mind, a necessary evil and he just didn’t care to discuss it. For Hogan golf was cutting 2-irons into tight pin positions, nicking 6-irons low under the wind, turning a driver to the left into a left-to-right wind. That’s what golf was all about. Can you imagine what his record would have been if he put his terrific golf mind to putting, and practiced it as much as he did 2-irons from tight lies? He could have.

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