The Art of Putting

by Stan Utley

  right hand do the aligning of the putter toward my intended line. I’ve already made my calculations for

  the break and speed, so at this point, just before I pull the trigger, I’m going into the visualization and

  swing-thought processes I described in the last chapter.

  (ABOVE LEFT) I use a marker to make a straight line on my ball, along the model name on the side. Then, when I line up my putt, I place this straight line on the ball directly on the line I want my ball to travel. That way, I have another alignment aid, and I can watch the line on the ball as the putt rolls to see if I made a good stroke. If I can still see the line all the way to the hole, the stroke was pretty pure.

  If the line disappears, that means I’ve come across the ball.

  (ABOVE) Once I’ve drawn a line on the ball, I place the ball in front of my marker, aligned with the line I want my putt to start on—not in line with the hole.

  (LEFT) I always draw the same number that’s printed on my ball right next to the pre-printed figure. I want to be able to identify it easily, even in deep rough.

  My goal is always to roll the ball as well as I can. Making the putt is nice, obviously, but

  watching my ball roll nicely is the primary feedback I’m looking for when I hit a putt. A great way to

  get an instant read on that is to draw a line on the ball. I use a Sharpie-type marker to make a straight

  line along the model name on the side of the ball. Then, I take a lot of care to align that straight line

  with the line I want my putt to start on—not on a line with the hole. When I stroke my putt, I want that

  line to appear as a continuous stripe on the ball as it rolls toward the hole. If the line wobbles, it

  means I’ve cut across the ball through impact.

  Another question I hear quite a lot from average players I see is about how “aggressive” I am

  when I putt, or how aggressive the average person should be on regular country-club greens. Again,

  that depends on what the definition of “aggressive” is. Aggressive can mean that if you’re standing on

  the green with a putter in your hand, you’re trying to make the putt—no matter if it’s ten feet straight

  up the hill or forty-five feet down the slope with two breaks. Aggressive can also mean you try to iron

  out any break in shorter putts by hitting it hard, right at the hole. I’d call my own putting aggressive

  from thirty feet out to about ten feet out, where I feel like my ability to roll the ball well is going to

  have positive results. In other words, I’m not trying to simply lag it up there close. From about ten

  feet and in, I feel like I should make almost every putt. Does that mean I do, or that I feel confident

  over every one? Absolutely not. When you add in tournament pressure, nerves, fast greens and the

  funky stroke here and there, you’re going to miss a few. But the fact that I feel good about my stroke—

  and the fact that a good stroke breeds putting confidence—helps put me in a frame of mind where I

  expect good things to happen when I’m standing over a ten-footer. I feel good about my read and

  stroke, so I don’t usually try to take the break out of a putt by hitting it harder, unless I’m really close,

  like inside four feet. Unless you’re feeling really confident about your own stroke—and you’re ready

  for a three-footer if you miss—I don’t recommend that strategy in your own game, either.

  What does my level of aggressiveness or confidence in putting mean for you? Well, “success” in

  putting is a relative term. You want to assess where your own putting is, and turn the dial to more

  successful results in terms of your own game. For you, that could mean getting a better handle on your

  long putting and reducing three-putts. It could mean standing over an important fifteen-footer for par

  and feeling good about your stroke, not absolute dread about what’s going to happen next. Maybe you

  have a very tangible scoring goal—like breaking ninety or eighty for the first time. Some changes to

  your fundamentals and a small amount of practice—just an hour or two on the practice green each

  week—can get you there.

  You can compare your success to what a tour player can do with a putter, but it’s important to

  keep a few things in mind. First of all, when you watch a tour event on television, it’s easy to get the

  idea that a tour player is a lock to make any six-footer he looks at. Even the putting records

  themselves are a little deceptive. I set the PGA Tour record for the fewest putts over nine holes at the

  2002 Air Canada Championship, with six. Everybody asks me if the hole looked huge that day.

  Actually, it didn’t feel like anything out of the ordinary. I missed a lot of greens and made some nice

  putts to get up and down, but the big thing was that I chipped in twice. That record is more a testament

  to my short game than to my putting. Just remember that when you’re watching a telecast, you’re

  mostly seeing the six or eight guys playing well and making birdies. Of course they’re feeling good

  with the putter that week. You also have to remember that the average tour player has a tremendous

  amount of skill and works a ton on his game. Tour players shoot low scores because they hit fairways

  and greens and make putts, and also because when they miss greens, they get it up and down. If I

  played in from a ten-or twelve-handicapper’s second shot, I wouldn’t shoot too many over par.

  There’s no physical reason you can’t take what tour players do in their putting games and use it

  to improve your own stroke. Just don’t beat yourself up when you miss the odd three-footer for par, or

  three-putt from twenty feet. I take it as absolute truth that the only thing I can control in the putting

  game is my own stroke. I know that I can make a great stroke and roll the ball great and the putt still

  might not go in. Maybe my read was a little off, or maybe the green wasn’t quite true. What we’re

  trying to do here is improve the average of all your putts—get the bad ones less bad, and the good

  ones consistently on line. If we can do that, you’re going to make more putts, leave yourself less work

  to do to clean up long putts, and most importantly, enjoy yourself a heck of a lot more out there.

  I’ve given you a lot of technical and procedural information here, but I have to point out one

  important fact. You can easily get too caught up in the process of reading your putt and disrupt the

  most powerful tool you have in your putting arsenal—instinct. I can remember playing with Ben

  Crenshaw in the first two rounds of a tour event many years ago, and I was amazed by the way he

  seemed to just walk up and hit his long putts without too much of a careful read. My interpretation of

  that was that he knew that a precise read from thirty or forty feet was impossible, so he was relying

  on his instincts and a good roll to get the ball close. Of course, when he got closer, he took his time

  and made a precise read—because he was in a position to take advantage of it.

  I’m not suggesting that you walk up and whack your putts with no thought about where they might

  go. But you want your routine on the putting green to be a mixture of conscious information gathering

  and positive visualization, and then you want to get out of the way and let your instincts take care of

  the rest.

  CHAPTER 7

  FAULTS AND FIXES

  When I’m working with a player—and it doesn’t matter if it’s a tour player or an average player—

  what we’re doing is exchanging stories. What I’m trying to do is
listen to your story—what you’re

  doing with your stroke, or, in some cases, what you think you’re doing with your stroke. Then I watch

  you hit some putts.

  For the first five or six strokes, I’m looking for your current fundamentals. I want to see how you

  stroke it, but also how you set up to the ball, what your grip looks like and what kind of stance you

  have. It’s amazing how the puzzle fits together. If I see your stroke going from in to out, nine times out

  of ten, you’re going to have a setup that aims you left. That’s because the in-to-out stroke makes the

  ball go right, and the faults have to offset each other for you to have any chance of sending the ball in

  the right direction. It isn’t some kind of “Rain Man” trick—we’re talking about a twenty-inch stroke

  here, so it usually doesn’t take very long to see what’s going wrong. Believe it or not, the problems

  that tour players and average players have are pretty similar. You’re dealing with grip and balance

  issues, or a stroke that is built to accommodate a putter with loft or lie-angle problems. The only

  difference is the matter of degree.

  My ultimate goal is to figure out the best way to tell my story, the one you’ve been hearing for

  the last six chapters, in a way that you can not only understand, but integrate into your own game, too.

  For some players, it’s as simple as showing them the reverse overlap grip I use and how it moves the

  pressure points down to the fingertips. The grip then releases the tension in their arms, and they

  immediately get it and start stroking the ball unbelievably well. A really talented tour player can

  usually “get it” in an hour or two, and feel comfortable in a couple of weeks. It might be a half hour

  on the putting green, and then a few bends on the lie-loft machine to get some more loft on your putter.

  That’s been enough to get some players off and running right away.

  When I’m working with somebody, I want to watch them hit a few putts first, to get an idea of what they do. It takes only five or six putts to get a feel for a person’s fundamentals, and what is necessary for them to change.

  Some players take longer to get comfortable, either because they’ve got more complicated stroke

  problems to work out, or because what I’m telling them is far away from where they were. It’s at this

  point where the art of teaching really comes in—something I’ve learned from great full-swing

  instructors like Jim Hardy and Rob Akins. You can feed a player only as much as he or she can digest

  at one time. Usually, that means one or two “thoughts” or “feels” in a lesson. Sometimes, that takes ten

  minutes to get across, and sometimes that takes two hours. People learn in different ways. Some

  players want me to show them how I do it, and then they try to copy what I’m doing. Others respond

  better when they set up to putt and I physically guide them through a stroke with my hands on their

  putter. Other people respond really well to descriptions and anecdotal examples, and want to be left

  alone to fool with what I’ve told them all on their own. Getting through to each kind of player is the

  challenging part of what I do—not actually giving out putting advice.

  If I had you in one of my three-hour clinics, there’d be plenty of time to give you an overview of

  the putting stroke I teach, and after watching you hit some putts, my objective would be to send you

  home with enough simple basics to move toward a more efficient stroke. My main interest is getting

  you feeling better about your game so you can make more putts. Your stroke doesn’t have to be perfect

  to do that, so I’m going to start by picking the few significant issues you’ve got—the ones that you’ll

  benefit most from correcting—and giving you some tools to address them. Many players—and I’m

  including tour players in that group—come to see me without any idea of where “better” is from the

  point they’re at. They don’t know how to take the next step. Even if I can’t solve your problems in an

  hour, hopefully you’ll learn where “better” is in our time together, and you’ll be able to practice on

  your own and recognize it when you make steps in that direction.

  The process I go through in a clinic with a half-dozen fifteen-handicappers isn’t fundamentally

  different than the one I use with the tour players who visit me in Scottsdale. As I said earlier, the

  problems tour players commonly have with their putting are the same problems you have. The degree

  might be different, but the fundamentals apply to everybody. Before we ever get involved in trying to

  make putts in a real hole, we work on the setup and the stroke itself, and getting those things nailed

  down. Once you’re feeling good about the new mechanics, only then do we graduate to things like

  alignment at a specific target and green reading. That’s just as true for a twenty-handicapper as it is

  when somebody like Darren Clarke comes to see me.

  A grip or an alignment change can make a tremendous difference in how you stroke your putts, even if you don’t make any other changes to your mechanics.

  Speaking of tour players, the rest of this chapter is devoted to the stories of professional players

  I’ve worked with over the last few years. These stories start out with the same sort of analysis I

  described at the beginning of the chapter—a feeling-out phase where I try to figure out just what the

  player is asking me to do, a stage where I tell my story to them, and then the process they use to

  incorporate the advice into their games. The added complication with a tour player is that you’re

  dealing with somebody who makes his or her living playing golf. You have to be sensitive to the fact

  that messing that player up has serious consequences. There have been times when a tour player has

  asked for a lesson and after ten minutes working together on the practice green, I tell him that it’s

  better we don’t work together because he has an approach or technique that isn’t what I would

  choose. One player told me he wanted me to help him putt in a way where he didn’t have to have any

  swing thoughts. I wouldn’t know how to go forward with that kind of request, and pushing the method

  I teach isn’t going to do the player any good if he isn’t receptive. It will probably just hurt his

  confidence with the method he’s already using. I know how that feels, and I wouldn’t want to do that

  to another professional.

  So the stories you’re going to read here are all about players who started out receptive to

  making some kind of improvement to their stroke. When I first get started with a tour player, I’m

  always fascinated by the relationship between what that player says about his or her stroke and what

  is actually happening. I find that it works in cycles. When a player is putting well, he seems to have a

  good understanding about what is really going on with his stroke. Then, when he starts to struggle,

  things can go one of two ways. Guys with a great grasp of the fundamentals—somebody like Brad

  Faxon, say—can diagnose the problem and make the necessary adjustments. But sometimes, even the

  best putters can’t “see” the problem themselves. That’s where I come in. I’m either helping players

  make fundamental changes to putt better, or I’m acting as a second set of eyes to confirm that some of

  their fundamentals are out of whack.

  Read through this collection of stories and I’m sure you’ll recognize some of your own puttingr />
  issues. The advice I gave Jay Haas about his grip certainly applies to your game, too, even though you

  might not be standing over an $85,000 putt. Darren Clarke had his putting grip down in the fingers,

  just like dozens of amateurs I’ve seen. When I tell these stories to the twenty-handicappers I teach,

  they’re really encouraged. Putting really is the most democratic skill in golf, and that’s what makes it

  so fun to teach. I couldn’t teach you how to hit a 320-yard tee shot like Tiger Woods does. Heck, I

  can’t even hit one of those myself. But anybody can learn to roll the ball well, and it’s liberating to

  know that players at every level struggle with the same faults.

  JAY HAAS

  My association with Jay really came from being in the right place at the right time. I was having

  dinner at my friend Dillard Pruitt’s house in April 2001. Jay, who is married to Dillard’s sister and

  lives across town from him in Greenville, South Carolina, happened to come by while I was over. We

  got to talking a little bit about putting, and Jay told me about some of the problems he was having.

  We went outside, and Jay made some putting strokes with a 6-iron. I could see right away that

  some of his fundamentals were off and keeping him from hitting consistently solid putts. He rocked

  his shoulders instead of turning them, and he shifted the grip back in his backswing instead of getting

  the putterhead moving. That first night, the only thing I said to him was that he needed to work on

  turning his shoulders instead of rocking them. He went on his way, and worked on that on his own on

  the practice green. I heard from him a week later, on the phone, and he said he was feeling a lot better

  over his putts.

  Believe it or not, our relationship actually developed that way, over the phone, without me even

  working with him in person. We’d talk about the putting stroke, and he’d make a few changes here and

  there. We first talked in April, and I didn’t actually watch him hit putts on the practice green until July.

  It’s a testament to how good Jay is that he was able to get significantly better that way.