Dear Ronnie,
In turning pro a couple of days ago, Michelle Wie's handlers let it be known that perhaps her eyes are at fault for her not-so-hot putting.
This is the same old story of people in golf not really understanding how the body and brain work for putting. Here's the "news" about Michelle Wie and her eyes:
Wie sees solution to putting problem, Atlanta Journal Constitution:
As well as Michelle Wie swings the club, there is some concern about her putting. Her father thinks the solution is in her eyes.
"We discovered a vision problem with Michelle," B.J. Wie said. "Somehow, the left eye it too dominant, and when she looks at an object, the right eye is not paying attention. She has a problem with depth perception."
He said his daughter was doing exercises for her eyes to help improve her vision, and a doctor she saw said the problem could be corrected in a month.
"She has a good putting stroke," B.J. Wie said. "But I noticed she cannot read putts well because of the eye vision problem. Whenever she has a caddie who can read putts, she improves her putting."
There are a number of problems with this story. First, Michelle Wie has been working with David Leadbetter and his staff for a few years now, and the issue arises why her left-eye dominance has not been identified before now. (It's a ridiculously simple test.) This is what David Leadbetter had to say a couple of days ago in the
Daily Telegraph:
The fact that Michelle's swing is so sound has left us free to concentrate on her short game which is improving all the time. As applies with her irons, she has a wonderful variety of shots to bring to bear. Chip-and-runs, flop shots, specialist bunker shots, you name it.
More consistency with the putter is what we are looking for at the moment. Interestingly, the biggest problem lies in her ability to read putts. In the last few weeks, she has had her eyes checked and it was discovered that her left eye was dominant. She has been given exercises to make the right eye stronger and that could make the difference.
This is the same thing that happened with Tiger Woods. Despite being the most famous junior golfer in the world since age 2 or so, and despite having the best college facilities at his disposal at Stanford, and despite having Nike and all its millions and Butch Harmon and all the golf coaches money could buy for years, Tiger had played on Tour for over six years before he wandered into a gunnery school at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where the US Army tested his eyes and told him for the first time in his life that he was left-eye dominant. Now, folks, that makes no sense at all.
The second thing that is wrong with this is the "science" -- flawed at best, misguided and wasteful at worst. So what if Michelle Wie is left-eye dominant? I've never met a medical doctor of any sort who understands how the brain functions on the green, specifically in reading the surface. (I've met many, many doctors and grew up with two in my immediate family.) This is not an issue of eye function, but an issue of how the body and brain AS A WHOLE processes information from a number of sources (eyes being only one) about surface contour. Doctors study DYS-function and what to do about it. They don't really study specific uses of the senses. So there is a "guess" being made here by the doctor -- starting with a clinical observation about eye dominance (so far so good, the doctor is still in his field of expertise), the doctor (or some golf coach) then interprets the clinical finding to MEAN that there is a problem and that the left-eye dominance CAUSES problem in "reading putts." This is where the expert for clinical testing of the eyes leaves his field of expertise and starts guessing, albeit with an authoritative-sounding "scientific" manner of pronouncement.
What is the theory here? The theory is just the same stuff "optometrists" talk about for vision and putting -- "eye teaming". Eye teaming is the natural pattern of eye muscle coordination that aims both eyes at the same target in a process called "vergence". The eyeballs "converge" to look at a nearer target and "diverge" to look at a farther target. In combination with the person's specific eyeballs and lenses (some are shaped for far-sightedness and some for near-sightedness), the two eyes converge to "fuse" their separate images into a unified in-focus image. This process is ONE of over a dozen processes used by the brain to assess distance and spatial relationships of self and object or between objects and locations on the green. Esophoria is when a person chronically aims the eyeballs a little short of the true location or target, and exophoria is when the eyeballs chronically aim a little long. (Orthophoria is, like in "Goldilocks," just right.)
Dr Craig Fansworth (an optometrist, and not a medical "Dr" -- that's an opthalmologist) has made this something of a staple in golf teaching by his book "See It and Sink It," and other optometrists have been encouraged to do the same (e.g., Dr Steve Kaluzne, D.O., in "Master the Art and Science of Putting".)
Optometrists take a leap from what is a normal variation in human perceptual processes (vergence) and extrapolate from this a "problem" of perception of distance. (I've never seen any "science" to pin down this connection between esophoria and misperception of distance for purposes of putting.) Farnsworth teaches that people with (some degree of) esophoria "see the target short of where it really is" and THEREFORE "leave putts short." The typical therapy for cure is the bead string to train the eyeball muscles to aim a little more or less farther along:
This is just the same old case of someone in one field of expertise (here, optometry) using the "scientific" tools of their clinical practice to inject an opinion about putting perceptions and performance.
I asked Jim Furyk a few years ago whether he was esophoric or exophoric, and he said he didn't know and didn't care, because whatever he might be, he was sure he had adapted to the condition for putting.
The real fact is that esophorics may have eye teaming that leaves the eyeballs aimed a wee bit short of the real location in space, but this does NOT mean that the golfer therefore misperceives the true location or that he therefore leaves putts short or that he has not adaped to this one minor misperception among a whole group of perceptual processes all cooperating together. There is no simple cause and effect between esophoria or exophoria (of varying degrees of significance) and perception of distance OR accuate stroking for the distance.
Eye teaming is only ONE of over a dozen distance cues relied upon by the brain, and in a ranking of these different cues for effectiveness in judging distance, eye teaming comes in at the bottom of the pile. And eye teaming is not the be-all and end-all of "binocular" vision, either, but is only one component of the whole stereoscopic visual process, and that visual process is (again) only one of a number of overlapping, cooperative processes. "Depth perception" is not really a separate process like binocular stereopsis, but is an "emergent" property of a number of related visual (and other) processes. And binocular vision is not in any case the MAIN visual process relied upon by the brain for accurate perception of green contour. Nor, for that matter, is "depth perception."
The main process is figure-ground gradient perception, which relies mostly on MONOCULAR processes and visual accuity (sharpness of vision in one or both eyes, regardless of stereopsis). Figure-ground gradient is how the pattern of a standard size of a visual "figure" (in this case, a grass blade or a speck of color on the green) appears to change with distance (think of holding a checkerboard flat in front of your eyes and tilting it first far-side down away from you and then far-side up nearer to you to observe what happens to the standard-size "checks" in perspective. -- this pattern reveals the tilting of the surface, and this collection of tilts is the contour.) In neuroscience, contour perception is a very specialized area of knowledge, and is not something optometrists study or really know much about. The reason LASIK eye surgery helps golfers on the green is because the surgery reshapes the eye lens so that the golfer has enhanced "visual accuity" at distance. The reason the surgery helps on the green is because the enhanced sharpness of figure-ground detail at greater distances off from the golfer makes reading the shape of the surface clearer and easier and more accurate. This perception of contour is certainly not HURT by enhanced stereoscopic processes, but thay are not vital to the perception of contour, and slight dys-function here does not really hurt much, and correcting the slight dys-funvtion will also not HELP much either.
Notice that in NONE of this is eye dominance the issue. Eye dominance is invoked only when the brain is sighting a specific directional relationship between the head and a location or object in space. The purpose of eye dominance is to simplify directional signalling by eliminating one of the eyes, since two eyes are "looking" from two different starting locations in space in the head when the brain wants and needs only one eye for this purpose. Direction sighting with the dominant eye effectively "blinds" the brain to the non-dominant eye during the directional sighting process. Obviously, the doctors in this story probably do not intend to suggest that one-eyed looking with the eye dominance invoked is the best way to see surface contour, while the other eye is effectively "blind." The assumption tha eye dominance matters all the time in all visual processes is just wrong.
In contrast, "eye teaming" is the issue for stereopsis (in its limited role for contour perception). Eye dominance really only matters much (if not only) when sighting the line from ball to target from behind the ball, and even then the sighting process can be accomplished perfectly well with the dominant eye closed altogether. If you analyze at what stage of the total perceptual process that takes place on the green when putting at which eye dominance comes into play, and in what way, and then also do the same for the separate visual processes, connecting each process with the separate stages of perception (distance reading, surface reading, target selection, energy perception, speed-of-green perception, lining up ball and target, aiming putter face thru ball at taget, and a few other perceptual processes), this sort of vague "guessing" by "doctors" is much less likely to occur.
What appears to be the case with Michelle Wie is, first, she has a problem putting that may or may not be down to a problem reading greens and putts. Reading a green contour is not all there is to reading a putt, by the way, and I've not heard anything about what Michelle Wie has been taught about this. It could be that she see the contour fine but just doesn't know what to do with it in terms of seeing the "read" or path of the putt that she needs to understand. Next, the "doctor" (very likely an optometrist and not an opthalmologist, and in any event neither a perception specialist or a putting instructor) then identifies what is usually just a NORMAL clinical finding (left-eye dominance), since everyone has dominance one way or the other in varying degrees. Third, someone "guesses" that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the two. Then the fun starts: what MIGHT the connection be? The connection might be that eye dominance CAUSES poor eye teaming, and poor eye teaming is substandard stereopsis or binocular vision, and since (as everyone thinks they know) binocular vision is depth perception and depth perception is distance perception, and since distance perception is key to green reading, THEREFORE Michelle Wie's left-eye dominance CAUSES poor green reading and poor putting. All nicely packaged with the aura of "science."
Nick Faldo prior to working with an optometrist just before the Masters in 1996 was in the top 20 for putting. Immediately after winning the Masters in 1996, Faldo fell like a dead cat in putting to 183rd out of 185 players and STAYED there for four years. Look it up.
I could be slightly wrong, and there could be an exercise to strengthen the "dominance'"of the right eye or weaken the dominance of the left eye, but my educated guess is that the doctor has pulled out a bead string for Michelle to work with. Even if that is not quite correct and there is some other eye exercise being used, in my opinion "eye dominance" has NOTHING or very next to nothing to do with perception of DISTANCE or SURFACE PERCEPTION, and relates only to DIRECTIONAL sighting on specific occasions. The 'theory" that it does, and that "excess" eye dominance has a cause-and-effect relationship to surface perception is just bad guessing by people trained about eyes and not trained about perceptions or putting perceptions.
I don't see the harm, really, except to the extent the misguidance prevents Michelle Wie working on what actually matters. What Michelle really needs is a good putting coach who knows how to teach reading greens and putts.
Incidentally, here are
nearly 700 news articles about Michelle Wie turning pro.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
Geoff Mangum's PuttingZone
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