Geoff,

On a segment from the golf channel, which can be found on youtube, gary player compares tiger woods' and ben hogans release(full swing). In passing, he also says that the two best putters he has ever seen are bobby locke(duh) and tiger. I have seen your writing where you break down everything that is wrong with tigers putting stroke. Does this mean that tiger's putting abilities, aside from his stroke, are so good that they can make up for his stroke?

No, actually it means that Tiger has lots of room to improve his putting, and therefore his scoring. His stroke average could probably drop 1-2 MORE strokes lower, for a truly historic level of performance.

What you seem to mean by "Tiger's abilities" is something like "natural talent" or "special instincts" or "highly developed golfing skills" or "deeply learned experiences". What I teach is, frankly, that NORMAL HUMANS have innate movement skills at a very high level, and that even TOP GOLF PROS do NOT take full advantage of their own NORMAL innate movement skills on the putting green. Therefore, any and all PGA Tour Pros could improve their putting, some VERY dramatically and some less dramatically but nonetheless very substantially, if they did NOT use conventional putting instruction (stroke path mechanics, special impact dynamics, release, pop psychology, herd following, weird grips, fanciful fixes, etc. etc. ad naseum), and instead focused more on how the instincts actually work (for touch, stroke, aiming, reading) so the golfer can use them to great effect and on a consistent basis. The fact that pro golfers have comparatively sharper athletic processes (vision, balance, body awareness, movement competencies, spatial cognition, etc.) than amateurs does NOT MEAN that pros are taking full advantage of their capacities or "abilities." They aren't.

If amateurs learn how to do this, amateurs can make up lots and lots of ground between amateur putting performance and pro level performance, and some amateurs can surpass pro level putting in pretty short order, skipping the years wasted by pros on "trying this" and "trying that" from conventional instruction. What are pros capable of once they stop all the "trying this" and "trying that" and really focus on what they need to use from innate human perceptual processes (reading, aiming) and movement processes (stroke, touch)?

In my view, Tiger is perhaps putting at about 85-90% of his full ability, which is pretty good. But does he know how this is working, so he can a) not have it or lose it in streaks, and b) get better by design with focused, effective practice on these processes directly? Not at all likely.

Cheers!

Geoff Mangum
Putting Coach and Theorist
PuttingZone.com
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