There are so many putter training devices on the market that promise improved putter stroking, but I have my doubts about them. They come in all forms but what seems to be consistent between them is forcing the golfer to restrain or carefully move their putter along a desired path and you are punished with failure if you go off path.

How can such artificial biomechanics be transferred to the putting green, when we know that there has been nothing permanantly imprinted or engrammed into the body's neuro-muscular system, let alone the cerebellum? How can you make the transition from conscious training aid use to semi-conscious course putting with the confidence that what you superficially practiced will magically happen on the greens?

The hands are the last control mechanisms on the distal putter head, and to think that one can consistently control such an unstable assembly seems .... problematic. In my experience, the only way to master a putting stroke is to adopt a preferred putter design and then work on it for a long long time ... and alone for a lonely lonely grind. Then go test it on the course and perform distance and direction decisions with confidence.

Mickelson uses a heel-shafted blade .. Anika made the Two-ball famous .... and Tiger sports a custom-milled SC with colored dots .... but all have one thing in common .... a lot of backbreaking putting practice to get it down pat. Maybe they occasionally used a training aid but only for confirmation purposes.

At best, all these putter trainers can do is be an indicator of how poorly and insecurely you putt ... and how much more practice you need. Practicing for hours, days, weeks with these so-called trainers would make you an invalid on the course ... guaranteed, because once removed you lose your crutch.

Sorry for my cynicism, but biomechanically I am not convinced there is a putting "trainer" that will train you to putt when and where it counts. The putting stroke is too delicate and simple to be trained by external imposition and putting conditions on the greens too variable. There is no substitute for concentrated and varied practice. Agree .. disagree ..??

Dear BillG,

To the idea of "practice, practice, practice" I would definitely add "knowledge of what works and why." This knowledge is what you really want to gain from using a practice / training aid, and the application of this knowledge is what you practice so that on the green you a) never doubt what to do but always simply do what you know is the best way to putt straight the right distance, and b) you know whether you have performed what you planned to do, and c) you gain rich feedback from the experiences on the green that keeps sharpening up your performance.

There are different "schools of thought" about "what works BEST and why," and personally I'm pretty confident that what I teach is the "best of the best of the best, sir!" (Will Smith in MIB) , but the golfer / player better get in mind what he thinks and believes about how best to putt. This has to be settled once and for all (or at least "once and for a great long while").

The best putters in golf always settle their technique early and keep it (Bobby Locke, Billy Casper, Horton Smith, Paul Runyan, Brad Faxon, Loren Roberts, Ben Crenshaw -- they ALL always putted only the same way all the time). Some golfers "know" more about what works and why than others. The ones who don't know as much as they should or could better practice a lot and not change technique much! I suspect Chris Riley falls into this category, as do most Tour players. If you try to rely mostly on "feel" as what you practice and try to recall and repeat, you won't really "know what works and why" and you'll most likely be a streaky putter. When KJ Choi won in Greensboro last year, he just got lucky and somehow remembered (or at least reproduced) the "feeling" he once had in putting years earlier. Boy, is that a crap-shoot or what? Not a good plan for a stellar pro career!

Take the experience of Jay Haas, for example. Haas for years was a steady, very good putter, better than 75% of the players on Tour, year-in and year-out. But he hit a slump for a couple of years and was missing cuts and blamed his putting. He had previously been around 40th in putts per GIR, but in 1999 and 2000 he fell to about 110th. So what good was all the years of "practice, practice, practice" to him in pulling out of his slump? Nada! Zippo! Buttkiss! What pulled him out was Stan Utley giving Jay "a single concept of the stroke." Jay didn't really care WHAT CONCEPT -- the benefit came from "a single" concept to simplify what he thought and believed about "what works and why." (I think he could get even better with my ideas about "what works and why".) After getting this concept in mind and "making it his own" (over at least a year's period of practice, practice, practice), Haas came out of his slump. He didn't really get BETTER than he had been before, but for at least two-three years he ended his slump. In 2005, his final year on the PGA Tour before transitioning to the Champions Tour, Haas' putting went backwards, as he ended the year 158th in putts per GIR (worse than before he started the Utley stuff). he seems to be righted on the Champions Tour, but its a little early in the year.

The lesson is that "knowing or at least believing you know what works and why" settles you down into a technique, and then the practice, practice, practice is experienced in relationship to that technique. This makes the feedback from practice a lot more useful and understandable in terms of the dominant concept. The knowledge organizes the experience of practicing and playing and also organizes the learning from practicing and playing.

So, back to training aids: they can be useful if they help you learn more about "what works and why." But all training aids are based upon certain implicit notions of "what works and why" that may or may not fit with your notions. So there is always a little judging and analysis of a specific training aid that needs to occur before using it -- don't just follow the herd and use a training aid because others are using it; instead, figure out whether the training aid has something of value to offer you about your understanding of "what works and why." Then, compare that specific training aid to other training aids or even drills available to you, to select the most helpful approach to practicing and learning "what works and why."

The simplistic notion of "muscle memory from massive rote repetition" is the main engine that allows sellers of training aids to avoid dealing with the efficacy of the training aid straight up. Even if a training aid could be tested and proven to "improve" the putting of any golfer to some degree, there will always remain the need of the golfer to learn "what works and why" so he can benefit most efficaciously from practice and play.


Cheers!

Geoff Mangum
Putting Coach and Theorist
PuttingZone
http://puttingzone.com
Golf's most advanced putting instruction -- you're either in the PuttingZone, or not.

Thanks again for your information-filled response to my query on putting trainers. I think I better understand your approach/philosophy to the dark art of putting. I am particularily impressed by your references to the tour players and their travails and confusion.

In your dealings with tour players, do you find that they are creatures of natural instinct rather than knowledgeable constructs insofar as putting is concerned? Can you or dare you reveal your mass of knowledge to a vulnerable struggling pro who has mysteriously lost his putting prowness ... or would it overwhelm them with fear and withdrawal? Do you exercise a compassionate bedside manner when dealing with vulnerable minds?

In Harvey Penick's Little Red Book on page 74, he says: "The golfing area of the brain is a fragile thing that is terribly susceptible to suggestion. Golfers are gullible." ... and further on: "Playing golf you learn a form of meditation." Do you subscribe to any of the observations and rustic beliefs of Penick?

I guess what I am leading up to is whether you believe that most tour pros may have developed great natural putting instincts but lack a full and objective knowledge to be able to understand and explain what they are doing right or wrong? And when things go wrong prolonged, they are lost in their quandary. Do they fear an objective diagnosis of their condition and just blunder on oblivious of readily available knowledge to cure their putting disease?

As for the so-called putting trainers, I gather you believe they are more a testing or diagnostic device rather than a "trainer" tool to give you an instantaneous putting stroke you can apply on the putting greens.

(p.s. Nice graphics ... throw in a few Mandelbrots to tantalize the minds.)

Dear Bill,

Many, many pro golfers at the top levels of the sport are in fact afraid to think about their putting. And the word "afraid" is not used casually. These pros have reached heights of financial and social success that are completely unfathomable and the success persists for decades, but only so long as whatever putting skills (and other golf skills) they have managed to cobble together stick with them. The sense of "fragility" among these pros is, in a sense, a little amusing.

On Tour, it is a lot easier to go backwards than it is to get better. And almost all pros have experienced a trial of new technique that sent them reeling backwards. So, the "trust" barrier is very high. Tiger Woods "trusts" his father, and does not trust people he is willing to pay several million dollar a year to help with other aspects of his game. Sergio Garcia also trusts his father. Jim Furyk and Chris Riley and Dave Stockton and many, many others mostly repose trust in their fathers.

Peers on Tour constitute a substitute authority for players. If the herd likes it, it must be safe to "trust." This whole state of affairs is, of course, sort of looney.

The only alternative to this fearfulness is a sort of lone-wolf bravado, like that of Seve Ballesteros. For these pros, there is an egotism that blinds the golfer to the idea that someone can help them, and that correspondingly fuels the idea that they know best. I think Lee Trevino once said he would never take a golf lesson from someone who had not beaten him, and so might reasonably be considered "better" than himself. This is not exactly the balance one would hope for.

So, Tour pros who believe they are "good putters" are more interested in not going backwards than in considering / trying new approaches. Of course, they really are not "good putters" in comparison to their peers, and this reality leaks into consciousness from time to time, as when a series of back-nine putting gaffes blow the golfer out of contention and cost him several hundreds of thousands of dollars in a week when he seemed to be on track. Others get hit in the face with poor technique but don't seem to notice a need to do something different or new, and just redouble efforts of "more of the same." There are many, many Tour pros who chronically "suck" at putting in comparison to their peers on Tour, but who do nothing about it year after year, content to keep their place in the top 125. These pros usually fall back on the belief that "putting is individual" and "somedays you've got it, and some days you don't" and "no one putts lights out all the time." This collection of defensive attitudes shields the golfer from the need to get a lot better, even at a risk.

The abiding belief on Tour for almost all pros is that, if the golfer just keeps working at putting in the same way, and maybe tries out a tip or two a friend tells him about, with a bandaid here and some scotch tape there, aided and abetted by the belief that great putting "comes and goes", there is no need to get serious about "getting a lot better", as that most likely puts at risk their staying at the top level -- better to just keep plugging along and hoping that practice will make the whole enterprise less bothersome. In a word, putting is something the Tour player cannot tolerate being "bad" at, but it is not typically something the golfer thinks makes him the best golfer in the field day in and day out.

In direct response to your question, I don't really believe Tour pros have "great putting instincts." They often have a certain "athleticism" for movement and perhaps timing, but this doesn't always get employed with great effectiveness for putting. There is too much room for goofy or even slightly goofy notions to mess up putting, even if the golfer has native athleticism. Some Tour pros find a way to channel their athleticism into good putting, but not that many. It's much more hit or miss for most pros. Really great putters get to a simple technique early, and then the athleticism is allowed to emerge and to merge into good putting skills, but this is not too common.

To the extent Tour pros have better "instincts" for putting than most golfers, this can be a hindrance at times to the Tour player reaching his highest level. Some great putters can only be described as having "unusual" brains for spatial awareness and movement. Ben Crenshaw has said he can smell the dirt in the bottom of the hole. Greg Norman is said to have such a powerful orientation to the external world that he can be blind-folded and spun around and never lose his sense of where things are. Moe Norman is commonly regarded as something of a genius for ball-striking. When a golfer has this sort of "native talent," he is able to putt well without understanding technique particularly. Given this, it is perhaps reasonable for this golfer to fear exploring how he gets good putting done, in hopes of getting a lot better.

In the end, pros on Tour who in fact are "good putters" day in and day out may or may not know much about their putting -- they may just be blessed with certain characteristics in their brain functioning or they may just have gotten lucky over the years in the way their athleticism emerged in their development of putting skill -- but they don't see any need to learn something unless they will get "a lot better" and there is "next to no danger" that their current skill level will degrade or (heaven help us all) disappear entirely. Tour pros who defensively consider themselves "good putters" but who in fact have a great deal of room for improvement, as shown to them year after year by the example of their better peers, end up making a choice between "merely staying in the saddle" or trying to be a world beater. It's tough for these guys to opt for dramatic changes in their putting, since it requires them to confess in public that they are NOT world beaters (despite what the public tells them) and the longer they remain on Tour without being a world beater, the less likely it seems to them that the effort to fix the putting would pay off, and the more likely the effort would pose a serious threat to staying in the saddle. These guys are usually very good or even great ballstrikers, so they can occasionally contend and even have a fabulous round. But the great majority are simply not world beaters and never will be and they know it. The example of Paul Azinger struggling for years with poor putting, finally reaching the point where he said "I don't care what anyone thinks or what it takes -- I'm going to do anything that makes me a lot better putter", exemplifies the rare case where the choice runs towards dramatic improvement. But that's pretty unusual.

To a certain extent, Tour golf does not offer the right incentives for players to try to play the best golf that can be played. Krusty the Clown gets it about right:



Cheers!

Geoff Mangum
Putting Coach and Theorist
PuttingZone
http://puttingzone.com
Golf's most advanced putting instruction -- you're either in the PuttingZone, or not.