The Art of Putting

by Stan Utley

  seemingly mundane details like grip, stance and alignment.

  The players who get those details right—grip, stance and alignment—almost can’t help but hit

  nice putts. The hands are neutral and set up to work with each other, not against each other. The eyes

  are in great position to see the line accurately. The grip lets the putterhead rotate back and release

  naturally through impact. In other words, it looks comfortable and easy. It looks confident. You’ve got

  a lot of the work that goes into a solid putt done before you even make the stroke.

  Let’s go over the different elements of a good setup step by step. We’ll start with the grip and

  work our way through stance and alignment. After that, you’ll be ready to learn the stroke and make it

  consistently.

  GRIP

  (LEFT) When I put my right hand in place, my thumb runs right down the top of the shaft, and my palm is facing the target. That’s a nice, neutral position.

  (RIGHT) The grip runs under the muscle at the base of my thumb and along the lifeline in my palm.

  My fingertips hold the grip in place, not my whole fingers. That’s a key component of feel.

  You’re going to hear me say the word “natural” a lot through the course of this book. That’s because

  “natural” body positions are the ones that your body will migrate back toward if you don’t interfere.

  For example, if you’re standing in a relaxed position, your arms will hang at your sides, not stick out

  at the elbows or extend in front of you. And however your hands hang is how you need to place them

  on the grip. So obviously, if you can put your hands on the club in a neutral, natural position—one that

  takes advantage as much as possible of the way your body is naturally put together—you won’t have

  to manipulate them to keep the putter in good position through the stroke.

  (LEFT) When I’m forming my grip, I put my right hand on first, then open my fingers just enough to slide my left hand into place.

  (RIGHT) When my grip is completed, both thumbs run parallel to each other, and my hands are

  neutral and directly opposite each other.

  When it comes to the grip, I want your hands to be on the putter in a natural position relative to

  the way your arms hang in front of your body. That means they should be positioned parallel to each

  other, and the back of the left hand and palm of the right hand (for right-handers) should be square to

  the target at address. Most people hold the putter in a way that gets their hands working against each

  other, instead of flowing together. In right-handed players, the left hand is usually shifted into a too-

  weak position (turned toward the target), while the right hand gets too strong (turned away from the

  target). If the left hand is weak, the face of the putter tends to open on the way through impact, which

  shoves putts as well as causes pulled puts. The easiest way to make sure your hands are in a neutral

  position is to check your thumbs. They should run straight down the top of the grip, not angle away

  from each other.

  By setting my right-hand grip along the lifeline in my palm and not in my fingers, the putter shaft runs in a line with my forearm.

  Having the hands in a neutral position is just the first step. The next piece of the puzzle is getting

  the handle of the putter in the right position in the hands. When you hold a club for a full shot, you’ve

  got the handle in your fingers, and an imaginary line from the butt of the club would extend below

  your arms, toward the middle of your stomach. From this position, it’s easy to make the wrist hinge

  you need in a full swing. You don’t use a wrist hinge in a putting stroke, so when you putt, you need to

  have the handle of the putter running much more in the palms, along the lifeline. This lines up the shaft

  of the putter with your forearms—the position it needs to be in for the putter to swing on the correct

  plane.

  When I let the grip drift into my fingers, notice how the shaft hangs below the line of my forearm.

  I use a reverse overlap grip on my putts—my left index finger extends outside my right hand, and

  runs straight down the shaft, on top of the knuckles of my right hand. (As a comparison, in the regular

  overlapping grip you’d use for a full shot, the little finger on the right hand sits between the knuckles

  of the index and middle fingers.) With the club in my lifelines and the reverse overlap grip, I feel like

  I have a lot of open space in some places between my hands and the grip. You can even see the light

  coming through between my hands and the grip in some of the pictures we took for this book. The

  overriding idea is that the hands and arms should feel soft and responsive, not tight and restricted.

  If you’re used to holding the putter really tightly in the fingers, this kind of grip is going to be a

  big change for you. The pressure points are dramatically different—down in the fingertips instead of

  closer to the palms. In the beginning, it might feel like you’ve got less control of the putter with my

  grip, but the opposite is actually true. Your fingertips are the most sensitive part of your body, and it

  can only help your feel and control to have them more involved in your putting. I’ve had people tell

  me that when they work on the grip I teach, it tends to relax their arms and shoulders after a few

  minutes because they aren’t holding the putter so tightly in their hands. A key part of what I teach is

  getting people in position to get out of the way of their own talent. This grip encourages you to use the

  touch and feel you already have. Can anybody do it? Absolutely. If you can sign your name, you can

  develop touch and distance control in your putting. Just think about where you hold a pen when you

  write something. It isn’t in your palm.

  This kind of grip gets the top of your forearms aligned along your target line. It’s a lot like

  pointing a gun. If your left forearm gets higher than your right at address, you’re going to lose the putt

  right if you don’t make some other compensating move, like closing the face of the putter at address or

  flipping the face closed with your hands through impact. The opposite is true, too. Get that right

  forearm higher than the left and you’ll have a tendency to pull putts left. You’ll have to use your hands

  to compensate for that move, too, by holding the face open through impact. As you might have

  guessed, that isn’t the most consistent way to putt. When those forearms get misaligned, it’s really

  hard to take the putter back on the right path and get the ball to go where you want it to. If I can get

  you to follow only one piece of advice when it comes to your grip, it’d be to set your hands so that the

  forearms are aligned. That can offset a lot of other errors.

  (LEFT) See the space between my hand and the grip of the putter? I’m not wrapping my fingers around the grip. The pressure points are my lifelines and my fingertips.

  (CENTER) From this angle, you can see the reverse overlap—my left index finger is running along

  the outside of the knuckles of my right hand. In a regular overlapping grip, for a full shot, my right

  little finger would be overlapping.

  (RIGHT) The first two fingers of my right hand have the most feel—if I was going to pick something

  small up from the ground, I’d use them. In my grip, those fingers control my feel.

  STANCE AND ALIGNMENT

  Once you’ve got a good grip on the handle of the putter, you need to set up the ball in a good p
osition

  and aim yourself at your target as precisely as possible. Getting back to the “natural” theme I talked

  about in the grip section, my stance advice falls along the same line. If you and I were having a

  conversation on the practice green, you wouldn’t stand there with your feet spread far apart, or so

  close together that they were almost touching. The same should be true for your putting stance. Your

  feet should be shoulder width apart or even a little bit closer together, so that you’re in a comfortable,

  balanced position. A relatively narrow stance also helps the shoulders turn slightly with the stroke,

  not rock up and down as they would from a wide stance.

  (LEFT) The tops of my forearms are aligned with each other and square to the target line. Get this alignment wrong—one forearm higher than the other—and you’ll struggle to consistently hit it where you aim it.

  (RIGHT) You can see the change in alignment here. My right forearm is set up higher than my left,

  which will cause me to miss putts to the left.

  I also like you to be tilted forward toward the ball from the hips, not slumped forward with a

  curved spine or standing too upright. Tilting from the hips will let you swing the putter very easily on

  a good path and release it with no extra effort. From a slumped position, your elbows actually get too

  far behind your body, and you’re forced to manipulate your hands to hit a putt. A too-upright setup

  isn’t as common, but when it happens, you’re forced to rock the shoulders up and down instead of

  turning them. It’s also an awkward, nonathletic position that doesn’t let you take advantage of your

  natural reflexes and senses.

  (LEFT) To determine where your eye line sits in relation to the target line, get into your posture and hold a ball next to your left eye.

  Drop it and watch where it lands.

  (RIGHT) The ball should land just inside the target line and an inch or two to the right of the ball

  you’d actually hit with your stroke.

  From a nice, tilted position, you want your eye alignment slightly inside the ball. Contrary to

  what you’ve probably heard, research shows that the vast majority of good putters have their eye line

  inside the ball, not over it. Scotty Cameron shared with me that for right-handers, the left eye needs to

  be one inch inside and one inch to the right of the ball. The way you check that is to get into your

  posture and hold a ball next to your left eye. Let it go and it should land inside the target line an inch

  and just to the right of the ball on the ground. I believe this is a simple fundamental that matches the

  fact that golf is played to the side of the ball, swinging on a tilted plane.

  (LEFT) In my putting setup, my feet are as far apart as they would be if you and I were standing here talking. My elbows are soft and close to my sides, and the shaft of my putter is leaning slightly toward the target.

  (CENTER) In this good setup postion, I’m tilted at the waist, but my spine is pretty straight and my

  chin is up from my chest.

  (RIGHT) If you let your weight get over your toes, your tendency will be to slump your spine and let

  it curve down toward the ball. Aside from being uncomfortable, this position prevents you from

  making a free-flowing putting stroke.

  A good grip is going to put you in good position when it comes to your arms and shoulders, but

  it’s important to keep these other setup fundamentals in mind. Your arms should feel very relaxed and

  sit close to your sides at address. I have a very conscious feeling of my elbows being “soft” at

  address and resting right up against my rib cage. If you feel like you have to reach or extend your arms

  to get the putter to the ball, you’re not standing close enough to it. You also want your shoulders

  almost level with the ground, with your left only slightly higher than your right (for a right-hander). A

  common mistake is to get the right shoulder too low in the setup, which promotes a shoulder rock

  instead of a turn during the stroke. Again, you’re trying to set up so that you’re very neutral at address,

  so that you won’t have to make any compensations. Your weight should be evenly spread across your

  feet from left to right and heel to toe. You should feel like you can stand in your putting stance as long

  as necessary without losing your balance or shifting from foot to foot.

  (LEFT) Here, my elbows are sticking out, away from my sides, instead of resting in a relaxed position next to my sides.

  (CENTER) Here, my hands are set too low, which forces the putter to go back too far to the outside.

  (RIGHT) My hands are set too high, It’s hard to make a natural stroke from this position because the

  wrists have to get too involved to compensate.

  One thing you will notice about moving to a neutral setup is that it will be much easier to

  maintain consistently. If your old putting setup had some unconventional pieces to it, like a big

  shoulder tilt at address or an exaggeratedly strong grip, you would have had to make subtle

  adjustments to your stroke every time you played just to get all the moving parts working in the right

  sequence.

  The next thing we need to talk about is the shaft angle of your putter at address. By pressing the

  shaft forward (toward the target) or pulling it back (away from the target) at address, you’re changing

  the shaft angle. Many bad putters struggle because they have the shaft leaning backward, away from

  the target, at address, which pretty much guarantees that they’ll start the wrong end of the putter, the

  grip, back at the start of the stroke. It also pretty much guarantees inconsistent contact. At minimum, I

  like to have the shaft angle at ninety degrees (straight up and down, when looking from a face-on

  angle) at address. It’s even okay to set up with the shaft pressed a little bit forward, toward the target,

  which is how I putt. Either way, it encourages you to swing the putterhead away first on the

  backswing, which is what we’re looking for.

  After paying all this attention to your grip and setup, don’t get careless with your ball position at

  the end. I like the putterface to be at the middle of the stance, with the ball obviously just ahead of

  center. If the ball position gets too far forward, you’ll run the risk of shifting the shaft angle backward

  to get the putter behind the ball at address. Move it too far back and the putterhead doesn’t have time

  to fully release, and you’ll start pushing putts to the right. Again, a neutral position—with the hands,

  ball and putter in the middle of the stance—is going to make it easier for you to make a stroke without

  any compensating moves.

  Of course, you can have the greatest grip and setup in the world, but if you don’t have good

  alignment, you won’t be able to translate the setup—and your read—into a stroke that sends the ball

  in the direction you want it to go. I highly prefer a square alignment, so that the forearms, feet, knees,

  hips and shoulders are all parallel to the line you’re trying to putt on. The quickest way to check these

  alignments is to hold a club across each one. If these lines get crossed—say your feet are open to the

  target line, but your hips and shoulders are square—you’re going to create inconsistencies in your

  stroke. To hit a putt on line from that position, you’re going to have to push your stroke out to the right.

  That’s adding a lot more guessing to putting than I think is necessary.

  At least once before ev
ery tournament I play, I find a place on the practice green that gives me a

  ten-footer with no break. I make sure my alignment is good, and I hit straight putts to that practice

  hole. It’s a way of recalibrating my eye, to make sure that when I’ve got putts with break out on the

  course, my feet, knees, hips and shoulders are all on the same line. You need to check yourself at least

  as regularly, because alignment—and ball position—can get out of whack very easily. It’s one of the

  most common things I adjust with the tour players I see—and it’s something that happens to them

  without them really noticing. It’s frustrating, because your stroke can feel really great, but the putts

  just aren’t dropping—because you aren’t aimed correctly.

  ALTERNATIVE STYLES

  If you happen to putt cross-handed, or with a long putter or a belly putter, does this mean what I teach

  doesn’t apply? Absolutely not. I’m a fan of more conventional putting styles, but if you do happen to

  use one of these other methods, you can still benefit from the mechanics in this book. Let me just give

  you an overview of some of the alternative styles out there, so that if you do use one of them, you’re

  getting the most out of it.

  Cross-handed putting is probably the most common variation I see, both with tour players and

  average amateurs. Players usually go to it because they have a breakdown in the right wrist on a

  conventional stroke. The cross-handed style puts the left wrist in charge of the stroke and locks down

  that right wrist. If you do putt with your left hand low, you have to be careful about maintaining the

  line across the top of your forearm that we talked about earlier in this chapter. The cross-handed grip

  can cause you to get the right forearm lower than the left at address, which affects your stroke. One

  positive is that a cross-handed grip helps keep a player from getting too much shoulder tilt away from

  the ball at address.

  When I worked with Craig Stadler on his putting, he incorporated the stroke I teach, but with one

  exception—he uses the claw grip. I don’t really have a problem with that, because the claw grip