Dear Mike,
What a fantastic email explanation! Thanks for giving me the details like that, and I appreciate the opportunity to try to help.
The two things I didn't hear are: how is your GAZE oriented at setup over the ball, and which is your DOMINANT EYE. I assume you putt right-handed. I would also like to know a bit about how you get the line from behind the ball. Give me some info on these and I'll respond. meanwhile, here's a stab at it:
If the putterface alignment is on target but appears headed to the outside of the hole (right), then that indicates your targeting is telling you the hole is to the left of where it really is. If you orient the putterface according to what your perceptions tell you, it aims left of the actual hole. That indicates to me that you make an effort to get your eyes over the ball, and succeed, but without quite getting your forehead at the same elevation above the ground as your chin. Your forehead is likely higher a bit, and this results in your gaze being directed a bit down your chin by the same angle off straight-ahead that the forehead is up off horizontal. With this gaze orientation, plus a very regular head turn towards the target or more likely a head turn that has the chin closing in toward the shoulder as it goes forward, your gaze will tend to curl to the left. If you are content to look in the direction of the target and get it into your field of view (30+ degrees wide for focal "looking" and covering a span nearly 20' wide at the hole seen from 20' away), then it is likely your eye muscles don't get too active to correct the gaze curling left of the target.
And this is a common pattern for many, many golfers. It is MORE NATURAL to direct the gaze this way, as this is the way we gaze when reading a book or walking and watching the ground three steps ahead. And the head-turn typically sends the chin towards the shoulder rather than turns with the chin staying equidistant from the shoulderframe the whole way, since this is the way we turn while standing in a room to talk to someone to our left. Most golfers have jumpy eyes and irregular head turns, and they struggle mightily to learn the location of the hole with a mixed and variable combination of eye-muscle shifts, gaze shifts, and funky head turns to look towards the target or even at the target. These guys are stumbling thru targeting, but can get used to it if they work hard enough or long enough (not likely). But if you are a good golfer, you learn the importance of consistency of movements in your routine, including the use of quieter eyes. But there is a point in your skill advancement where this works against you for targeting, because you feel confident that since you are a better golfer (handicap-wise), then your current routine ought to be something you can rely upon. So you really want to trust your eyes and your targeting, and overcoming this pressure to trust is more difficult. In a sense, the better you get, the more flawed perception-building is a problem unless you specifically come to grips with it, understand it, and fix it.
So, if these are part of your process, sensing a well-aimed putterface as pointing right is what I would suspect you to feel -- forehead up a bit, gaze down the cheeks a bit, head turn very smooth, gaze steady without much shifting of direction by eye muscles, looking towards the target but not focused specifically on a tiny part of the target. These are all readily fixable to an extent that it probably a bit unexpected by most golfers.
The notion of "trust" is a bogus psychological concept in this context. The "lack of trust" is really a physical sense of unease with the situation at address, and is not the result of any thought process about whether you should or should not alter your setup or putterface or stroke path before pulling the trigger. What comes first is the physical reaction. What generates this sense of unease is a conflict between your setup and the mental simulation of the stroke and putt that naturally occurs in the run-up to pulling the trigger. This is the same unease that forces second-guessing compensation in mid-stroke. The conflict is between what your eyes have resulted in for a setup versus what your body wants from its simulated stroke. The simulated stroke is body-knowledge in action, and very likely has it right, whereas your eye-produced setup is flawed. If you "ignore" the conflict, your body-knowledge wins the competition. This is called "trusting," but what is being trusted is never really discussed clearly.
The second-guessing problem can also work the other way: your eyes got it right, but your body-knowledge has it wrong (rarer). If you feel you are having to ignore something to make a straight stroke in accord with what your eyes have done to aim the putterface, then I suggest you have some ever-present flaw in the relation between your setup and a straight stroke. The trick in both cases is to get the eyes and body-knowledge on the same page AND the setup and a straight stroke on the same page (no unease at address, no second guessing midstroke, no compensatory moves in a straight stroke).
The three things I do to overwhelm this natural tendency to misaim are: 1) rely upon a good and accurate procedure for sighting the startline from behind the ball (based on a total reading of the curve of the putt from start to finish, with the appropriate roll speed of the ball at all parts of the curve along the way); 2) anchor these perceptions in anticipation of the loss of targeting when I walk into the putt and place the putterface behind the ball and orient it in accord with what I got from 1) above; and 3) treat this as an approximate aiming of the putterface until I have addressed the approximate putterface orientation and squared my setup to THAT PUTT necessarily implied by the orientation, and then used a good and accurate sighting procedure of head turn and gaze control from beside the ball to verify or finetune the putterface orientation and then re-squaring to the new orientation if necessary. At this point, I should "feel" setup square to the straight putt necessarily implied by the putterface orientation, AND my stroke dynamics of a straight-back straight-thru pendulum stroke WILL DELIVER this SAME PUTT, as I simulate the putt mentally while standing at address. Hence, no unease, no conflict, no second-guessing, no compensations in the stroke. What I'm looking at is what I stroke -- straight out of my setup over exactly the same spot just off my left big toe every putt. If it doesn't go in, then I didn't do a good enough job in reading the putt or aiming (or it was just the rub of the green), but in any case it is NEVER because I allowed a compensatory irregularity to infect my straight stroke action.
So, it's complicated, but one thing stands out a bit: go for a straight stroke out of a straight setup no matter what! Unless you do this, you will never come to grips with reading flaws, perception and aiming flaws, setup flaws, or stroke flaws. Once you start isolating what is wrong, you will get it fixed and believe in your fix, so you can leave the problem behind permanently.
To be more specific, as to 1) above, that is my tip "Dead-Eye Putting Routine" for sighting from behind the ball and walking into the putt and placing the putterface. For 2) above, see the tip "Setup to the Ball." For 3) above, see "Gaze Dead Straight for Dead Aim." You might also be interested in reading "Light Up the Target with Your Putterface" for an aiming trick.
Also, I always concentrate on identifying the last 2-3' of every putt as the ball dies into the hole, noting this exact path along the grass over the lip. I regard the lip as a clock with 6 o'clock being on a direct line from ball to hole, so a right-to-left breaking putt approaches the hole deadon from, say, 4:30 o'clock, and a left-to-right breaking putt approaches the hole deadon from, say, 7 o'clock. I then read the ball's roll backwards up out of the hole and along the last 2-3' of the path until the curve gets back to the break-point and more or less straightens out headed back to my feet. This teaches my body the startline AND what is needed at the end to sink the putt. This visualization is really targeting, and this targeting focus on something "out there" at the far end of the putt tends to narrow the perceptions into a smaller range of left-right error on longish putts. This process tends to organize body-knowledge better and more precisely, so you get a better sense of whether you are "square" to the startline (and the ball) for what is really required for the putt.
Another trick I use comes from the "Light Up the Target" tip. This tip envisions a dowel rod projecting off the center of the putterface horizontal along the ground all the way to the target. I envision sweeping the tip of this rod in an arc across the target until I "feel" a "lock-on" square at the target. Again, the sense of what is "out there" at the target seems to be the key to finetuning a sense of the startline of the putt. For this particular trick, it seems to be important to start the imagined tip well inside the target, and then dial in outwards just to the target (rather than crossing outward to the right of the target and vascillating in to a lock-on). I'm not clear yet why this is better, but it has always seemed the most accurate pattern for me.
Let me know what you think.
--
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
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