Confessions of a Hacker – Five-foot putts

I speak on behalf of many (though undoubtedly, not all) club golfers when I say that five-foot putts are a menace to society. Short enough to you feel like you’ve failed if one fails to drop, but long enough for that to happen on at least a semi-frequent basis. Throw in the possibility of being able to see the hole with only minimal head tilt if your peripheral vision is good, and you have a recipe for regular disaster.

Going back to a round late last year, I had a five-footer for par at the par-5 first hole. I read it as a left edge putt and hit it to that point but the stroke was too strong – it caught a chunk of the left edge before racing on and leaving a two-footer for bogey, which was successfully negotiated. However the miss continued to play on my mind and when faced with a similar length putt for par on the following hole, I chickened out of the stroke completely, leaving the ball on track for dead centre of the cup…. but a few centimetres short.

Golf is a sport where the mental aspect often carries as much weight (if not more) than the physical – no more so than when on the greens. How do you quieten the ghosts of previously missed putts to give yourself the best chance to make the next one? To my mind, there are three key factors:

(1) Practice. I’m sure you’re sitting there saying to yourself “Thanks for that amazing insight, Captain Obvious“. Or even worse, you’re comparing my ability to illuminate an issue with that of Ian Healy. Nonetheless, the point remains that the more time you invest on the putting green finding a stroke/ pre-putt routine that you feel comfortable with, the better off you’ll be when the moment of truth comes. Everyone has different putting styles, but there is one key skill that all good putters share:

(2) Keep your head still through the stroke. The hole is so close, the impact of a made (or missed) putt on your psyche so profound, that the temptation to sneak an early peek at the hole mid-stroke is tough to resist. There’s just one problem though – if your eyes are already veering towards the hole as you make contact with the ball, chances are that you’ll be in for an unpleasant view. A far better strike rate comes from keeping your head still and trusting that your putt will find the cup, which brings me neatly to the most important aspect:

(3) Approach a five-footer like you’d approach a woman at a bar – with confidence. Let’s impose my story above into a bar scenario for a moment. I approach a first woman confidently, but get the cold shoulder. Later on I approach another woman* at the bar to talk to her but still reeling from the earlier knock-back, I’m tentative, unsure and wondering the entire time whether or not it is going well. How successful do you expect this second conversation to be?

More than any other part of the game, putting is about attitude. To my mind the best in the business on this front is Australia’s own Aaron Baddeley.

Watching Baddeley’s pre-putt routine is a short and sharp lesson in how to exude confidence. He assesses the break and speed of the putt, makes all of his practice strokes well away from the ball, then steps up to the ball and hits it almost immediately. There is no second guessing or mental cogs turning when he addresses the ball, no freezing at the critical moment. Instead it’s just a case of “I’m hitting the ball on this line, at this speed…… and I’m expecting it to go in”. If he wasn’t married and a devout Christian, he’d probably make an excellent wingman at that bar.

Golfers who struggle with nerves over short to mid-range putts could do a lot worse than trying to mirror Baddeley’s approach. When it comes to putting, confidence trumps almost any other card in the deck – you never know how many made five-footers you may start taking home with you each weekend…..

 

*This works on the presumption that the second woman didn’t see me try to chat to the first one – if she did, that poses a whole new conundrum. But as missed putts are inanimate and clearly can’t see each other occurring, for the purposes of the analogy it is safe to make this assumption.

 

Previous ‘Confessions of a Hacker’ columns:

(1)  Seeking help, (2) Racking them up, (3) Holding your nerve