Dear Bob,
The comment was by Nick Seitz, the article author. I'm not sure Burke used the term, although the author of a Rice University profile of Burke states this explicitly. By the way, the full articles are online here:
Golf Digest: Nobody's Fool: Jackie Burke, by Nick Seitz, Golf Digest, July 2002
Par for the course - Jackie Burke, Rice University Magazine
This was a technique Burke used to win the 1956 Masters, when the winds blew at gale-force 40-50 miles an hour on Sunday. The term "Tap" putting was then associated with Bob Rosburg, who came on Tour from Stanford in 1953. Rosburg won twice in 1956 and won the 1959 PGA Championship and finsihed second in the US Open to Casper by one stroke at Winged Foot in 1959. Jackie Burke's buddy Jimmy Demaret was one of the playing editors for Golf Magazine's 1959 book, Your Short Game, which featured an artcle by Rosburg entitled "The Tap Putt" (page 166). The Tap putt is there described as a wrist putt in which the left wrist powers and controls the stroke to the exclusion of the right hand's pull tendency, by rotating back and under in a counterclosckwise way for the backstroke and then un-rotating in a clockwise fashion for the thru-stroke, giving the ball a solid, percussive "tap." It's pretty close to Casper's action, perhaps with a little less arm movement(?)
You can also see Rosburg's technique in The Putter Book of 1960, a much more detailed exposition of his technique.
Here are some resources about Rosburg's career:
PGATOUR.COM presents -- Bob Rosburg
ABC Sports - Rosburg, Bob
Bob Rosburg, Total Putting Guide videotape
Stroke Animation from Rosburg "flipbook" pages in his 1960 Putter Book
I think of the Tap putt as mostly a distance control stroke -- at least that's what is going on mostly in the head about what the stroke produces. In the context of a very windy day at Augusta, with rain-slicked greens already baked and flattened into a cardboard-like near-dead Bermuda that on a dry day would "crunch" as golfers walked on it with spiked shoes, the Tap putt is akin to a punch shot into the wind -- a controlled and explosive shot with a low trajectory and a curtailed follow-thru. The Tap putt doesn't have a real fluid and long follow-thru, and in fact Rosburg didn't much care about the follow-thru.
I would imagine that such a stroke would tend to put some skid into a putt that otherwise might not be there, especially on rain-slickened greens. This may have been a way to over-power the trouble water sometimes causes on the line of a putt while keeping good distance control in the wind and rain.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
PuttingZone
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