Confessions of a Hacker – Missing one-foot putts
It’s the final round of the Kraft Nabisco Championship, the opening major of the women’s professional golf season. South Korea’s I.K. Kim has a one-foot tiddler on the final hole to finish at 10-under par, 278, and clinch the title by one stroke. She hits the putt….. it slips right, grabs a chunk of the hole and ‘horse shoes’ around the outside but fails to drop. Unadulterated shock and horror follow. She taps in and heads to the sudden death playoff, but the mental scarring is already apparent and compatriot Sun Young Yoo captures the title. How can you miss a putt so short? Sadly, after last weekend I can answer that to some degree.
The par-3 3rd hole at Yowani is a pretty straightforward “one shotter”; make sure you have enough club in your hand to carry the front right bunker and a semi-straight shot will find the putting surface. I did this on Friday morning, but my 9-iron approach left a testing 40-footer for birdie to a hole cut in the back right corner of the green.
A good lag putt left no more than a foot coming back for par….. which I shoved to the right and barely caught the edge of the hole. A little stunned, I wandered around to knock in a putt of comparable length for bogey…. and horse-shoed around the left edge of the hole – double bogey and an incredulous walk to the 4th tee.
Kim was later quoted as saying of her lip out: ''I played straight, and it actually just broke to the right, even that short putt.'' I can’t tell you if my putts broke or not (although it’s fair to assume they didn’t) because I don’t really remember how they happened. One moment it was an absolute “gimme” for par; the next I was stumbling off with any early momentum in the round shot to hell.
Such misses must fundamentally come from a mental black spot; if it were a technical putting stroke issue, putts of much longer length would frequently sail metres off the intended line. Much like so many aspects of golf, this one gets handled by the space between your ears, in particular the level of trust (or lack thereof) in your game. The same sorts of demons that cause you to worry unnecessarily when chipping over a bunker, avoiding an out-of-bounds area off the tee, keeping out of that water on the right, etc. are found in people with the ‘yips’ i.e. nerves over short putts that cause the stroke to become jerky and the outcomes to become unpleasant.
How do you solve a problem like the yips? People far more qualified than I have mused on this issue for decades with varying degrees of success – success that is primarily dependant on the mental strength of the ‘patient’.
I’m a subscriber (though not always a practiser – see problems associated with “strength, mental” above) to the logic of Dr Bob Rotella, who talks about the need for golfers to have selective memories – erasing any recollection of poor shots and only keeping good shots in their ‘mental bank’.
However you tackle mental hurdles on the golf course though, some patience is required – much like bad swing habits, bad thought processes take some work to fully eradicate from your system. Hopefully though, the end will justify the means, and wasted opportunities for easy pars will become much fewer and further between.
Previous ‘Confessions of a Hacker’ columns:
(1) Seeking help, (2) Racking them up, (3) Holding your nerve, (4) Five-foot putts, (5) Letting the Big Dog eat, (6) Slow play, (7) Trust the yardage , (8) Learning from low markers, (9) Learning from high markers, (10) Playing in the sandpit, (11) Shaping your shots
