Dear anon.,
I personally believe that the belly putter has a built-in flaw in that the stroke path is forced by the setup to swing to the "pull" direction thru impact. Sergio Garcia missed his crucial putts down the stretch to the inside. I teach a "corrective" technique of "shut-up" for the belly putter, which requires the golfer to shut the putter face back to square by the middle of the stroke, but then to putt up and down the line straight away sideways instead of on an arcing path to the inside thru impact. The belly putter is also slightly flawed because there are two different main ways to make the stroke -- 1) with top of putter stuck against sternum and with hands and arms making the stroke while the chest / torso is stationary, or 2) with the top of the putter either stuck against the sternum or not but with the chest / torso as a whole making the stroke while the hands and arms are more or less stationary and inactive. I think golfers are never clear which of these two they are or should be using, and so often fall between the cracks and make an in-between sort of stroke in which the golfer is not well in command of the movement. That's a heck of a hole in your skills floor when you're stumbling around in pitch darkness under the pressures of a major, or any pro event really. Both of these stroke techniques have a handicap for touch. The arms-hands stroke has a limited range and so is not especially flowing and instinctive outside a certain range. The upper-torso stroke tends to challenge the inner ear and vision too much and worries the golfer about direction over distance. In both cases, the belly putter suffers for touch in comparison to the conventional style.
My feelings about the long putter are not that definite, but I also think that the long-putter technique is slightly less effective than the conventional technique. This mostly has to do with the relative one-arm motion of the long putter, with the lead hand and arm fixed on the top of the handle and more or less neutralized, leaving the rear and usually dominant hand alone to make the stroke. I am not one of those people who sees a lot of repeating accuracy with the underhand ball toss action, especially for line. I think that a bimanual, sideways sweeping action of the whole upper torso in a coordinated fashion has superior biomechanics for constraining the line of the stroke compared to the more free-form one-hand action somewhere ill-defined in direction away from the body. I also see no advantage in the long putter for distance control. But perhaps some improvements in long-putter technique might make the race closer with the conventional style.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Coach and Theorist
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