Dear Jer,
You should become friends with Dave Gunas, the barefooted golfer from one of the early Big Break shows. He putts barefooted (bearfooted?).
And of course Sam Snead has been run off courses for playing practice rounds barefooted. "Golf got complicated when I had to wear shoes and begin thinking about what I was doing." -- Sam Snead
I have thought a lot about footwork in putting. My views don't really suggest much for golf shoes, with a few minor exceptions.
Alignment of feet: Not really required if the shoulders are aligned parallel, and even that is somewhat optional or dependent upon individual physiognomy.
Bandaid usage: If you need help with alignment of the axes of the feet from heel to big toe so that the feet aim squarely into the line of the putt, perhaps a red dot on the inside heels to match one on the inside big toes will help square up.
Bandaid usage: One foot pulled back off line or standing too close to line: Lots of people have this creep into their setups without noticing it for long stretches at a time. It is basically an expression of fear of putting where the putter face aims and an attempt to orient more to the target during the setup and stroke than to the putter. This means the golfer "opens" up, either by pulling the lead foot back or placing the rear foot too close. The more experienced golfers tend to do the latter, as they consciously are pretty aware of how the lead foot sets to the target line but everything off to the side away from the target is shrouded in a colorless void of nonconsciousness. An effective bandaid might be something along the lines of red dots on top of the big toes, so the line from dot to dot can be more easily attended to.
Distance back from ball: Set by fixed distance from centers of shoulders up to centers of pupils when standing with military erect posture as expressed in the bending over of head and eyes in the setup. The "maximum closeness" to the ball is set by this, as this dimension of the body -- when the eyes are directly above the ball and sweetspot position and the neck and face are parallel to the surface -- runs from the balls of the feet out to the sweetspot of the putter. (The shoulders are "caught and balanced" by the balls of the feet when canting the torso forward out beyond the basic body center of mass in the abdomen.) A person who leans his head and neck farther than parallel upsets the inner ear for balance and proprioception and confuses spatial awareness and tightens the back of the neck excessively for a good stroke. (Contrary to what otherrs say, this posture does not result in an inability to run the eye sight straight away from the putter face, so long as the golfers still "faces" the ball.) Any bending that results in the eyes closer in to the feet than directly above the sweetspot raises the forehead higher than the chin and angles the neck up off parallel, which is okay so long as the golfer continues to face the ball and aim his gaze where his face points, but all these other postures from "high forehead" to face "parallels surface" lengthen the distance of the balls of the feet back from the ball and sweetspot.
Bandaid usage: The real skill here is balance and knowledge of the body as it benda for good posture, comfort and accurate targeting and stroke. Actually, the targeting postrure need not be continued into the stroke posture, once the targeting is checked beside the ball, as then the stroke posture is a different breed of cat that does not require the targeting geometry and has a higher premium on comfort and balance and force management. A good technique to check this is to allow the rear hand after setup to swing free off the handle, and if it sings freely only to the side, parallel to the target line, then the distance back has resulted in a neutral arm and hands hang. But if you need a bandaid instead of the real skill, one might be a graphic representation of your specific "metric" along the heel-toe side of the shoe from balls of feet back or across the top of the shoe over the balls of the feet from left to right, so you can look at this graphic and assess whether the ball looks to be the right distance out.
Width of Stance: Over the years, my personal width of stance has diminished considerably. Bobby Jones said: "I love to see a golfer setup to a ball like he is at home." The comfort and balance and force management that is required as a factor in determining an effective stance width varies with the physiognomy of the golfer and with the timing of the stroke motion. The faster the golfer swings the putter, the greater the reactive forces in the body required, becayuse faster masses have more momentum and inertia to manage at the transitions of starting and stopping and directional changes. The "blanket rule" that the lower body MUST remain motionless is simply "blunt-think" and not really applicable to top putters. Bobby Locke used a very narrow stance, as did Horton Smith, and Ben Crenshaw and Brad Faxon do not use anything that looks othewr than "at home" and comfortable. Padraig Harrington and others taking the advice of Paul Hurrion widen their stances wider than a driver stance, and frankly do not look at home and are tighter in the very muscles that make the stroke (in the muscles connecting the upper and lower torso skletal structures -- rib cage to pelvis mostly) in an attempt to cancel out a very minor and natural turning of the body's center of mass inside the lower abdomen. Both Crenshaw and Faxon expressly allow this natural motion in their strokes, the same as a dancer might. Have you ever seen the film of Fred Astaire dancing and swirling and tapping while flushing drives off a series of tees? The Ed Sullivan version is on my website via the Banjo Man on the bottom of the pages, under "Crazy Times" videos. The two ":natural" approaches to management of the forces in this area of the body are: learn a little rhythm and / or slow down and engage with less force.
Bandaid usage: But if you need a bandaid, just print the words "wide and wooden" on your instep.
Ball Position: The ball position only indirectly relates to stance and foot position, and instead relates directly to the bottom of the stroke arc. Find the bottom of your arc, and play the ball slightly forward of that, regardless of the feet and their position to the ball position. The width of stance may vary but the bottom of the stroke should stay steady unless you alter the putter, the grip style, your setup posture or stroke dynamic. So don't do that.
Bandaid usage: If you still need help with ball position, either because you don't know where the bottom of the stroke is or you think differently (i.e., thinking about "hitting" the ball instead of making a stroke in which the ball gets in the way nicely), then mark an arrow on the top of the lead shoe in the toe area that points back out to the line where the ball should be. The consistency then will depend upon distance back from line, width of stance, bottom of stroke arc, and orientation of foot to the line. Too much trouble, is what you be asking for here!
Weight at Setup: Many people advocate setting up with the weight more on one foot or the other. The "old school" from the 1900s is weight on the left, or "putt off the left foot." This is an historical oddity that has to do with the conditions of the game then and the equipment and the lack of sophistication in the skills set. The golfers then rather uniformly used heel shafted putters on shaggy green standing wide open and low down facing the target and making something like a push or shoveling stroke, not too far off from shuffle board! In so many words, these guys loved to "slice their putts" for line control (okay, more of a controlled "fade"). This at least avoided the "cut stroke" from out to in by the openess being overcome by delivering the putter thru impact from in to out, something like Locke did later (learned from Hagen, who learned from Travis). In more recent times, a few golfers advocate setting up with weight favoring the rear foot: this encourages an "away sideways while remaining back" stroke. I prefer nbeutral weight left-right, just "rooted" deep into the earth as in Tai Chi and other martial arts for body control in space. The image I have is two horseshoe-shaped planter stakes (plantar stakes?) extending my arches into the earth on two big spikes each foot, although the stakes are arther sharp and enter the ground effortlessly without conscious attention and don't remind me of their fixedness -- it's just a starting point when I step into the setup, nothing to belabor past that point. Neutral stance also allows neutral shoulders, arms, and hands, and this allows a neutral shoulder action to communicate most transparently thru the stroke.
Heel-Toe weighting at setup: The shoulders bending with the heavy head out of the plumb line of gravity thru the body's overall center of mass (usually about four inches below the navel and inside a bit between the pelvis bones) naturally calls up reactive posture and balance control signals, mostly in the cerebellum (which malfunctions when inebriated!). The basic reaction is to stick the rear out a bit like the counter weight on a crane, possibly to widen the stance a bit like the side supports that extend off a ghook-and-ladder fire engine when planting next to a tall building dor rescue, and to flex the knees a bit to use the thigh and calve muscles to "catch" the heaviness of the shoulder frame and head like aladder propping up an overladen apple bough in apple harvest time! The end result is either balance on gthe balls of the feet or balance slightly shaded towards the toes, like a Mongol creeping up on the Great Wall of China just for a quick look-see with no intention of climbing over the Wall. so, on the balls of the feet and not the toes, and possibly not even much onto the balls of the feet depending on how "at home" you stand to the ball.
Bandaid usage: But if you need something, make a thicker line along the inside of one shoe or the other as a reminder which instep to prefer for the left-right weighting at setup. The one with the greater weight bearing will have more pressure in that foot's inside edge as in the maintenance of the weight at the top of the backstroke on the inside of the rear foot, as per Nicklaus, and never allowing the weight to get to the outside edge of the rear foot.
Weight shift during stroke: The mega-bucks balance boards used by biomechanics people to observe, measure, detect, and quantify shifts of weight during a putting stroke certainly generate "information", but what is the significance of the information. The idea seems to be that ANY motion at all, however symmetrical and rhythmical, in the body's center of mass in the lower abdomen MUST BE ELIMINATED AT ALL COSTS. This is the "Colossus of Rhodes" approach to putting -- statuesque in a bad way, owing mostly to thinking of human motion in "mechanical" terms (that's why the science is called "bioMECHANICS") or engineering terms or robotics. Oh well.
Ben Crenshaw has written that his rear knee "flexes" in the thru stroke, so obviously if you move the pelvis and hips when the knee changes position coming forward, your center of mass will "wiggle" in a good way (rhythmically, symmetrically, and predictably the same). Brad Faxon has also written that he makes no attempt to prevent his lower bodyt from reacting in the stroke, at least for long lags. My take has more to do with getting to the primary stuff: making sure any motion as might naturally arise in the backstroke is astutely managed to result in square-online impact dynamics thru the impact zone. The choice comes down to "wide and wooden", "narrow and even more wooden", or "rhythmical and symmetrical" like a gentle dance shift. In order to understand the latter approach, you should know that both Seve Ballesteros and I teach anchoring the lead hip at the start of the backstroke so that there is a trail of bread crimbs in the muscle elasticity in the backstroke away from the skeletal "home" of the hip that brings the stoke-child safely back home before dark in the forward stroke. That is, anchoring the lead hip bone at the start of the backstroke makes it possible to tolerate a little variance in the backstroke wanderings, especially when using the lead shoulder to power the backstroke effectively eliminates ever sending the putting stroke away across the line where "here there be sea monsters" off the edge of the nautical charts, and instead keeps ther stroke headed either straight back or slightly inside but always with the muscles elasticity making a free return to home and square. And finally there is the "counterfall" weight shift described by David Lee and his "gravity golf", which is a pivoting around the lead heel like turning a refrigerator on one of its bottom corners for ease of force management. I don't go that far, as that entails a big turning up top in the torso that I find creates lots of timing issues I don't want or need. Consequently, if there is a minor weight shift, that's okay by me -- no big deal. I would still obseve the basic rule never to shift to the outside of the lead foot, though.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Coach and Theorist
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