Dear Bill,
Thanks for your nice words!
Yes, I do. Cutting across the ball in putting is the one flaw Bobby Locke personally worked hardest against. In my experience, the reason for the putter head moving across or outside the line in the takeaway is the use of the hand and forearm muscles in the starting of the putter away from its static address location. The natural motion of the arms starting from a relaxed position is "into the world" to do something out away from the body's location, principally defined by the location of the stance on the ground. This is especially the case when the thing that is getting moved is down on the ground with the feet, as the putter head is. So the arms and hands "lift" or "heave" or "toss" or "hoist" the putter head up off the ground and generally back along the feet. In this movement, the elbows "close" as the angle between upper arms and forearms becomes more acute instead of remaining at the natural angle of relaxed hanging. The wrists may also get involved in "picking up" the putter head off the ground at the start, with the front wrists bowing palm inward and the back wrist breaking palm backwards (just a little of this is too much unless you're aware of it and control it).
The cure for all this is use the torso as a whole to start the triangle of the setup (shoulder frame as the base of the triangle, arms to hands as the sides of the triangle -- really an inverted "Y" when the putter shaft and putter head are considered part of the system). This motion recruits a completely different set of muscles and leaves the arms and hands out of it, so they remain relaxed throughout the stroke, and especially at the start. The idea is that there is just enough tension in the body parts of the triangle so that, in the head, the "triangle" is a unitized body part so that if any part is moved, the rest moves with it in a coordinated shape of the whole. With this initial concept in mind, the takeaway move is accomplished by tipping the lead corner of the triangle, which is the lead shoulder, and this moves the putter head back away from the static address position without using the arms and hands.
The drill that helps you experience or feel this sort of movement is to set up facing a wall with the toe of the putter close to but not quite touching the baseboard. Then tip the shoulder down to start the putter back on line. You should find that it is very difficult to make this move in a manner that sends the toe into the baseboard, and the putter head will track straight back along the baseboard or at worse come a little inside, depending upon whether your shoulder moves vertically downward or moves outward and downward on a tilt of some sort. In order to make the putter start into the baseboard with this shoulder move of the triangle, you would pretty much have to unbend the torso in a standing-up sort of motion. So long as the shoulder motion moves along the line of the shoulder frame or parallel to that line of the line of the feet, the putter will NOT move away from the feet and hit the baseboard.
This takes care of the basic problem of starting the putter head out across the line, leading to a loop in the stroke path that cuts out to in with open face across the ball. For the forward stroke, you can still "cut" the putt if you open the putter face with the hands or arms and/or pull the lead shoulder of the triangle back from the parallel line of motion in relation to the line of the intended putt. So the forward stroke really just needs to be a no-hands, triangle-only retracing of the backstroke and a continuation upward in the same direction after the down-stroke returns to the address position. In other words, going back in the back-stroke and coming down and then thru and up, don't use the hands and don't let the shoulder frame skew off the line so that the pivot and base of neck chase after the putter head going back or going forward. The line of the neck stays aimed square at the line of the putt and the pivot at the base of the neck remains motionless in space, hovering even if rotating as the shoulder frame rocks back and forth about this point (where the clavicles meet the top of the sternum).
The muscles that move the torso as a whole so the triangle as a whole moves in a coordinated unit are those muscles in the gut and lower back that connect the upper body to the lower body. The shoulder stroke is "felt" in the gut and lower back, not in the shoulders or arms or hands. So once the setup is taken and the triangle conceived of as a unit, the shoulders, arms, and hands have a preset level of tension that should stay constant at all times in the stroke -- no changes. The only changes are felt in the gut and lower back. Feeling this keeps the hands and arms out of the stroke. Combined with keeping the pivot and base of neck oriented in space appropriately, there is nothing else really to concern yourself with.
For the pivot to remain still, it is probably useful at first to allow the head to roll with the shoulder rock by aiming the face at the top of the putter head and following the backwards and forwards progress of the putter head with the face keeping up. This action helps you leave the hands out of it and feel what the trajectory of the handle in space inside the hands feels like when the only thing moving is the triangle as a whole. After a little of this face/head rolling with the shoulder rock, then aim the face and nose directly at the putter head at static address position and leave the face there as the shoulder frame rocks beneath the neck. leave the hands out of it and feel the only thing moving is the front tip of the triangle (lead shoulder) as the gut muscles and lower back muscles power the motion.
So try all this along a baseboard. You can also use a line on the floor with the toe near to the line. On the putting green, you can set a club shaft just beyond the toe of the putter as a substitute for the baseboard.
Let me know how this works.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
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