Dear Jim,
Thanks for the kind words!
I have just been reading Jerry Korte's book,
The Proof is in the Putting (2005), and it's quite good about the stroke. He and I are on the same wavelength for most issues. So I would first of all recommend his book as a training aid.
During the winter, you can work mostly on straight strokes and perhaps tempo. A cheap training aid is to lay a card table on its side and stand between the legs with the putter's heel running along the table top, on the far side of the table from you. Any sort of "plane" surface at a slight tilt (not a big angle, and as small as you can get away with) works fine -- plank, metal plate, etc. Three training aids like this are:
The True Plane trainer (a tilted plastic plane), the
Easy Putt (a vertically oriented curved rod along which an attachment to the shaft glides back and forth along the "smile" shape), and the
TapIn ( a straight metal bar along which the heel of the putter runs). The TapIn is probably the best of this group, as it is versatile and includes features for eye and feet positioning in the setup and is the easiest to use. The first two aids can be found on my website in the "Aids" section. Another aid, also from Wisconsin, is Vlad Gribovsky's
Putting Stick. This is an interesting aid that challenges you and also insists on good setup posture.
I can copy and mail to you the Templeton book for $20 total (postage included). That's the only way I know you can get it.
With respect to Joan Vickers, while I think her so-called "quiet eye" is a very minor step in the right direction, overall I have little regard for her approach. She knows very little about the brain and the body. For example, although she purports to study the "gaze" in sports, she does not appear to even know what is meant in neuroscience or visual science by the term "gaze" (i.e., the direction the eyeball is aimed out of the head). What she seems to think of as a "gaze" is a momentary "looking" of the eye at a fixed location. In brain science, this is just the very beginning of understanding the perceptual process, and is meaningless without relating the eyeball to the head. She does not study the eye-head relationship -- only where in space the eyeball aims, without respect to the head. This, frankly, is ignorant and results in pretty meaningless statements cloaked in vague metaphorical language lacking functional definition (i.e., "quiet" eye, meaning momentarily motionless eyeball fixed on a single location). I have critiqued her work in the article:
The "Mechanics of Instinct" in Putting: The Neurophysiological Paradigm for Applied Research. I have also written about her on the
Flatstick Forum. There is a lot more to eye control in putting than a "quiet" gaze at the target or the ball, and Joan Vickers is not knowledgeable about anything other than the "quiet" gaze.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
Geoff Mangum's PuttingZone
http://puttingzone.com
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