Dear Bradley,
I would recommend first trying to sort out the targeting skills putting right-handed.
Try standing slightly open beside the ball when aiming the putter face, as that turns your left side slightly back off the target. With left-eye dominant, your left side wants to react to the target from beside the ball, and if you are square, there is no way the target can be in front of the left side. Opening up gives you some room to "face" the target a bit with your left side. I suggest pulling the left foot back about 1 inch -- not a lot. It is really more important to open your shoulder frame slightly to the target, but opening feet, hips, and shoulders all together is probably the cleanest approach.
This is only for getting you a better sense of target location when standing beside the ball. That leaves two other issues: 1) what about aiming from behind the ball, and 2) should you make the stroke while open as described above or should you re-square after aiming the face while open beside the ball before making the stroke?
Obviously, you will continue to aim from behind the ball. I am assuming that the aiming problem you have been experiencing crops up not when standing behind the ball, but either when initially placing the putter face behind the ball and aiming it or when aiming from beside the ball.
The problem of aiming the putter face after walking up from behind the ball is very, very common. Behind the ball, stand with your dominant eye on the line, not your nose, and aim straight thru the ball at the target. Use your putter shaft as a visual ruler to "connect the dots" of the ball and the target, and then look along the edge of this ruler to identify grass spots that are exactly along the line. I teach that the golfer needs to be very careful to "anchor" what they see as the line from behind the ball with spots on the grass near the ball or with specific dimples on the back of the ball, and then "walk the line" into the back of the ball so that these anchors for perception of the line are conserved while moving. Then the golfer carefully aims the face of the putter with these perceptions still accurately maintained.
Too many golfers don't even try to aim the putter face until they have left the position from behind the ball, walked in some random wandering way up to the ball, more or less setup beside the ball, and then try to aim the putter face. This is a mess. Be careful what movements you make when moving from behind the ball into your placement of the putter face and into adopting your setup.
My rule is to place the putter face as aimed from behind the ball with the sole of the putter flush to the surface, and then step around to the side without disturbing the aim and "bring your body" to the handle of the putter and place your grip on the putter without disturbing the aim or the lie angle.
That said, once the golfer steps around to the side of the ball to adopt his setup position, he still has to "check" the putter face aim again or he won't feel confident. In this process, I have found that almost all golfers do not know how to use their head and eyes accurately when looking to see where the face of the putter is aiming. The basic trick is that the eyes must be aimed or directed or gazing straight out of the face when looking at the ball, whether the eyes are directly above the ball or slightly inside. This straight-out gaze mostly means you are not peering any down your nose, as one might when reading a book, but more like a pirate looking thru a telescope for a "booty" ship on the far horizon.
The way to prevent gazing down is to hold you right hand level across your nose like a salute but just below the level of your pupils, to block any tendency to peer down the nose. Then bend to look at the ball with the line of the salute matching the startline of the putt. Then when you turn the head down the line, your straight gaze will be carried in a straight line by the head and you won't have to shift your eyes with eye muscles.
If you are setup square to the putt line, a good head turn will deliver your eyes' line of sight straight on the ground either in the fashion of a Ferris Wheel of the head with two eyeballs like gondolas (line of sight oriented vertical with eyes gazing straight AND vertically positioned above the ball) or in the fashion of a Tilt-a-Whirl (line of sight angled like the base of a Tilt-a-Whirl and eyeballs positioned slightly inside the ball). Both of these sorts of head-eye-gaze combinations deliver the line of sight in a straight line that matches where the putter face is aimed.
Getting the face aimed is one thing (as discussed above), and checking it is another (as discussed above), but in between these two comes squaring the body to the line of the putt in the setup. For this, forget the line and square the body to the putter face. You will then check to see if the putter face is really aimed on the line or not, but after you square up to the putter face. The technique for squaring the body to the putter face as aimed is based on the realization that your skull bone has a line horizontally across your eyes, thus: top of ears, temples, outside corners of eye socket, inside corners of eye sockets, and bridge of nose. These 7 points in your skull make a straight horizontal line across your eyes. When your eyeballs are aimed straight out of your face, the pupils also are along this line, so that makes 9 points when using a straight gaze.
If you hold a shaft horizontally out in front of your face so that the shaft matches this skull line when using a straight gaze, and then bend head and shaft as a unit to look at the ball, the matching of the shaft to the start line of the putt on the ground or the aim of the putter face is what squares the skull to the putt. (Obviously, you would need two putters to do this when trying to match the skull line across a shaft to a putter face aim on the ground, and normally you would match your putter to a line thru the ball only, but ultimately you will do this skill without needing to hold a shaft out in front of your face because your will learn to feel and recognize where the skull line always runs across your face, and it's there everyday you play golf, so it's sort of cheating!)
Once the skull is squared, the rest of the body follows -- the neck squares the shoulder frame, the shoulders square the hips, the hips square the knees, the knees square the ankles, right down to what I call "happy feet." ("Happy feet" are feet stable beneath hips and there is no body-sense of twist in the torso or elsewhere that creates a vague discomfort in the setup.) Whenever aiming the face, or altering the face aim, the last thing to adjust is the feet, to get back to "happy feet", as there is always a different placement of the feet for any different putter face aim direction.
Checking the aim of the putter face then requires two skills: using the "aim spot" or your dominant eye, and turning the head correctly so the head turn accurately delivers the line of sight in a straight line along the ground. When your skull line matches the putter face and your gaze is straight and your feet are happy, you can then turn your head to the side with gaze fixed and steady and simply wait and see whether the target is at the end of your line of sight moving straight across the ground or not. (If you instead look from ball to target, you are very likely to shift your eyes' gaze direction without knowing it, and heaven knows then whether you are aimed accurately.) You will know the aim is correct only when, by virtue of the head turn of your dominant eye's field of vision, the target arrives exactly in your "aim spot."
The "aim spot" is a spot in the full view of the world you have in your dominant eye, and is located on the skull line about 1 inch inside from the bridge of your nose. This is where the pupil of your dominant eye is looking with a straight gaze. You can close the other eye, rest your right index finger on the bridge of your nose so the tip extends 1 inch to the pupil of your left (dominant) eye, square the skull line to the ball, then turn the head and wait and see if the target shows up at the tip of your finger. or you can form a slim tube with your fist, look thru the tube with your dominant eye so the tube is aimed straight and level out of your face, and watch the gaze being delivered in a straight line from ball to target as seen solely thru this tube.
The other aspect of this is a correct head turn. The head needs to rotate about an axis of rotation that runs from the center of the base of the neck out the top of the head. This axis can rotate, but cannot shift or tilt about. Specifically, the top of the head needs to stay in one place as the face turns to the side. If the top of your head wanders backwards as you turn to the target, you will misperceive the target's true location. A good head turn keeps the chin always the same distance from the shoulder frame, and a poor turn has the chin either getting closer or farther from the shoulder frame as the turn proceeds.
So, to summarize:
1. Get a good perception of the line from ball to target from behind the ball (using dominant eye and visual ruler), and anchor this perception with cues on the ground so you can reconstruct the perception after walking up from behind the ball along the line.
2. Aim the putter face with help from the anchors, before adopting your setup.
3. Once the face is aimed and the sole of the putter is flush to the surface, be careful not to alter the putter when stepping around to the side or when "bringing your body to the putter" and adopting your grip.
4. Squaring the body starts with matching the skull line to the putter face as aimed and then works down to happy feet.
5. Checking the putter face aim from beside the ball requires a straight-out gaze and a good head turn to wait to see whether the target ends up in your dominant eye's aim spot.
6. If the beside-the-ball targeting check matches the aiming of the putter from behind the ball, then all signals are 'go." If the two conflict, then try the beside-the-ball targeting once more. If the conflict persists, start over from behind the ball.
7. However you finally get satisfied that the face is accurately aimed squarely at the target, forget the target. Your setup is square to the putter face, and so will your stroke be keyed to the putter face as aimed. Just putt straight with good touch.
Now, all the above is just fine regardless of whether you are cross-dominant (e.g., right-hander but left-eye dominant). But it takes some getting used to. In the meantime, aim with your dominant eye from behind the ball as described above, place the putter face, and then check the aim while standing with feet and shoulders a little open. This will make the skull line a little askew the putt line, but you will really in the beginning be using your dominant eye mostly rather than the skull line as you look from ball to target. Try to keep your head turn with a fized gaze so that the head turn delivers the gaze straight along the ground to the target. You shouldn't need to fiddle with the putter face aim much if you have done a good job aiming the face from behind the ball. It will "feel" better when you are slightly open beside the ball. Eventually, though, you will also learn to "feel" good checking your putter face aim when square to the face and using the skull line and the head turn.
You can also putt while still standing slightly open in feet and shoulders. this is what Jack Nicklaus does, and he putts great. You may have to practice to make sure you are moving the putter face squarely thru the ball down the line, as there is something of a "push away' feel from this setup. If you don't, you'll surely miss left.
I would also recommend that on the practice green facing a straight 10-footer you should setup square at the ball and then adjourn and move over to the hole (or target) itself and setup again as if the target were the ball. Notice just how offset to the left your feet are next to the hole. Then return to the ball and setup again, and visualize your feet in both locations (at the ball and at the target) at the same time, as if there is a small railroad track connecting your feet at the ball to your feet at the target, and this track runs parallel to the putt line offset inside (left for right-handers). This will teach you that the target is "out there" a little more off to the right than you might otherwise think, see, or feel.
Also, be sure that you have a sound diagnosis that targeting is really the problem. Many, many, many golfers have a lazy stroke path that either runs out to in and misses left or they have some unnoticed rolling of the forearms closed thru impact that sends the ball left. These movement flaws are not targeting problems, and working on targeting while leaving these unnoticed flaws alone might make you think what I say about targeting is b.s. as it might seem not to make any difference due to the persistence of movement flaws.
So I would tighten up aiming from behind the ball, aiming and placing the putter face, and then try it both ways for checking the aim from beside the ball (open with dominant eye or square with skull line and dominant eye) and also try making the stroke both ways (while still standing open with a Nicklaus-style push-stroke or after re-squaring to the putter face and putting straight down the line).
Please give my best to Blake, as I was telling some Georgia guys about him yesterday. Best to you in golf as well, and please don't hesitate to contact me again for clarification or further discussion or just to let me know how things are going.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
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