Dear Greg,
Sorry for the delay! I've been in Europe and just recently returned.
Let me try to answer these questions:
1) My practice time is very limited so I thought I would work on my game at home in my garage. What indoor/outdoor putting surface should I buy?
If your garage has a smooth concrete surface, you might consider some sort of green felt covering. So long as the fabric is tight, it is probably as true as you can get. The trick would be gluing it down in a good way. Not sure about that. That would make your garage floor into a nice pool table for putting.
You want a "true" surface more than you want to worry about the speed of the surface so much. So long as the speed is in the ballpark -- something as quick as 9 or faster up to 12 or 13 even -- but avoid a "nappy" surface. There are coverings that have very serious "grain" in the fabric, so that putts one direction are immensely slow and in the other direction are normal speed. Avoid that at all costs.
The
LinksPutt contourable surface is very nice. It has a styrofoam platform with pedestals to shape the overall surface (comes in 3 meters, 4 meters, and 5 meters sizes), so you can work on uphill breaking putts and downhill breaking putts both ways (left or right), or simply breaking putts or straight putts. There are two holes at the far end, one centered left and one centered in the right half of the surface. The 5-meter unit sells for $865.
There are several other offerings (listed on my
Putting Aids page), including:
The
Putting Challenge by GL-Tech (electronic 72 shapes with games, $1,495)
The
Steve LaPorte greens (5'x11' $869 with mat for contours, 2.5'x12' $269 strip mat)
The
Dream Green by Duffy (from 2'x8' with 50 breaks at $1300 to 4'x20' with 3 million breaks at $8000)
The
Tour Links 13' training platform ($493)
The
GolfGreens Systems (12'x16' with chipping pad, email for pricing)
In case you want to keep things very simple and inexpensive, you can try a large section of indoor-outdoor synthetic carpet from Home Depot or Lowes hardware stores. This article from Lowes describes
installation of indoor-outdoor carpet. This article describes types of fibers. These carpets have pretty variable surfaces, but they are very cheap to buy and not difficult to install.
Felt used on pool tables and poker tables is sold in 36"x62" runs for $30. (There are many other options, including color, thickness, weight, etc.) You might try that, gluing it to the concrete, if you want a simple straight putt. I have called "The Felt People" company for some technical advice about the suitability of this material for a garage floor application in putting. We'll see what they say.
2) I am a full time golf instructor and love the short game! Putting is way over looked by most of us teachers (not you). I am thinking about buying a SAM PuttLab. What are your thoughts on this product?
The
SAM PuttLab is a neat piece of ultrasonic measuring equipment that displays loads of parameters in putting. It is all about the stroke, and not about aiming, touch, or reading putts, so it has that basic limitation. I believe the unit sells for about $5,000. It has two basic uses: your watching how your stroke parameters are working and perhaps "chasing" after one or two or more specific parameters at a time in search of consistency, or comparing yourself to certain supposed Tour models and trying to engrain one of these. All technology is seductive, because it offers such absolutists illusions of achievable perfection, and the SAM Puttlab is no different. Not all the parameters are the best ones to pay attention to, and chasing one parameter to the exclusion of others is like trying to cram a cat into a bag already full of cats. The so-called Tour model is really three sorts of strokes, not of equal goodness, so there is an issue of whether the technology is a good teacher. The tendency is for people to get fascinated with generating "perfect" parameters as a show, but this is not really learning that carries over to playing golf. The way the human thinks about making the stroke is more important to learning and repeating the stroke than watching results on a monitor and trying to "feel" the better way to make the stroke happen. It is of course very interesting to any golfer to see how their stroke "shows up" on the monitor, but this initial attractiveness eventually gives way to a concern for permanent improvement in a useable manner. Since the Puttlab is not a putting coach, it is too much to expect it to know what is good or bad in a given stroke or to be able to coach the golfer from bad to good. There is the pretense that this is what the Puttlab can do, as it incorporates technique suggestions, however, and I personally don't find that to be the case.
Some people are set free with a Puttlab, left to their own devices, and usually come away appalled to see how their particular "sausage" of a stroke is made -- bad aim, bad path, bad face angle, etc. This bothers the golfer's confidence for about three weeks before the Puttlab experience can be forgotten. This is what seem to happen occasionally at the David Leadbetter Academy.
All this is to say that the Puttlab is like a gun -- dangerous in ignorant hands. It is somewhat useful in the hands of a skilled coach who can differentiate what is good from what is bad in an overall putting pattern, can communicate efficaciously to move the golfer/student from bad to good, to avoid unhealthy obssessing on parameters for their own sake, to use the stroke training in conjunction with reading, aiming and touch training for real putting, and for certain technical uses.
If you can afford it, sure, buy it, but is it needed? There are cheaper alternatives like
DV Putt / V1 Visual Putting System ($1,200 to $2,500) and the
Mitchell Golf Putting Teaching and Fitting system ($3,500). But more broadly, the stroke is hardly the be-all and end-all of putting -- the whole process is much more involved and complex than that, requiring reading, aiming, and touch skills in addition to stroke skills, and an exclusive focus on stroke will only take you so far. What the golfer really needs is the skill to putt the same line the putter face aims on a consistent basis with simple technique, and that is all that is required for good strokes. This can be trained quite well by a chalk line or an elevated string line or a similar training setup. The ball will either roll straight on line or not, and the golkfer will either be able to perform this consistently or not.
3) I believe in an arc style of putting, but when I putted best in my life I just read a Pelz book and was putting straight back and through. I wish you had a book on the market! If you were only going to buy 1 book to use as your putting guide what would it be?
The two that come closest to what I teach are on the front page of my website, the ones by
Yvon Legault and
Jerry Korte. But really, putting is so much more than stroke, and there isn't a good book in existence (yet) for the whole enchilada.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum's PuttingZone.com & PuttingZoneŠ Magazine.
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