Dear rj,
Jack Nicklaus aptly observed a few decades ago that the golfer who relies upon "feel" is subject to slumps and streakiness and difficulty getting back to form without undue lapses in performance, whereas the golfer who simply relies upon fundamentals of technique does not have this problem.
The problem with golf is exactly the vagueness in terms like "feel" (others are "touch", "muscle memory", "optics", etc.). The truth is "haptic" feel, or the sensory registration of vibration and weight in the hands, has very little to do with distance control, or at least not nearly as much as timing and distance perception and green speed perception. Vibrations are always "after the fact" and change with ball cover material, distance of putt, face inserts, grip pressure, putter shaft and length, putter hosel, putter head mass, putter face loft, grip type, personal strength that moment, putter head swing weight, and stroke dynamics. In addition, there is a very real limit on the ability of humans to tell the difference between two weights, and the often-heard and often-repeated claim of "feel" and "sensitivity in the fingers" simply is not scientifically happening. Golfers can't tell the difference between a putter head that weighs 325 grams (Scotty Cameron Newport) and one that weighs 350 grams (many, many other putters). Nor can golfers "tell" the difference from one sort of metal putter face and another, even if they "think" or "believe" they can. (In psychometrics, it's called the "Just Noticeable Difference" or JND.) About all that so-called "sensitivity" in the hands actually contributes to putting is in registering the timing of the transition at the top of the backstroke. The brute fact of familiarity with the mass of the putter (or the mass of a golf ball tossed underhanded) is not a special skill or talent of golfers and does not change from stroke to stroke or putt to putt or day to day, but is about as common to everyone on the planet who has ever picked up a plum and "thought": "yep, that's the mass I was expecting to feel -- about the same as all other plums".
Noise and vibration are two other forms of "feel", but you don't seem to refer to that. Kinesthetic "feel" is mostly about changing body positions and less so about tossing body masses about in the air during a putting stroke.
The reason golfers believe so deeply and fervently in "Saint Feel" is because they are not relaxed and casual. A person who is relaxed is not constantly testing the ever-present gravitational field to make sure he knows where it is and where his body is that moment. And a person who moves in consort with the objective timing of the world will not "feel" differences between his body and objects / tools moving in this same timing pattern. A golfer holding a golf ball on his palm in the Empire State Building's elevator will "feel" 45 grams "weighing" down against the sensory receptors in the palm, UNTIL, that is, someone cuts the elevator cable and the golfer and the palm and the ball all free-fall 120+ stories together. The ball will remain exactly where it is on the palm but will no longer "weigh" anything, and the golfer and his palm will both "fall" in exactly the same movement pattern as the golf ball as moved in an accelerating way by gravity. The golfer and ball will sort of "float" weightless side by side in a very pleasant state (until the bottom of the elevator hits the ground, that is). So a truly nicely timed stroke is one where the hands "feel nothing".
In contrast, a golfer who has a need to "feel" the putter head lag behind the hands will have to accelerate the hands FASTER than they naturally accelerate in free-fall due to gravity, because the putter head surely won't (it will accelerate "naturally" only as fast as gravity accelerates it; the hands will have to add the extra that creates the "lag" pressure against the hand receptors). No EXTRA-accelerating hands, no "feel".
So why do most golfers crave this "feel"? They do not know what relaxing is -- especially, they don't know how safe and predictable going with the natural stroke really is. Not knowing and lack of familiarity with safe and predictable makes the golfers nervous / anxious and lacking control, so they grab their putters and "feel" the living s...T out of them instead of making a nice, relaxed, composed, secure, manly swing.
Incidentally, you apparently are not aware that Tiger does not really have great touch. He doubtless has better touch than you and almost all Tour players, but what does that mean? Could he get a lot better? You bet. I don't say that; Tiger says that, his caddie Steve Williams says that, and his coach says that, and the stats say the same. He personally KNOWS he three-putts too often and that getting this under control is his number 1 priority not simply for putting, but for his whole game, and has been since at least the fall of 2006. Based upon what I've read and seen, he hasn't fixed this problem yet and he doesn't seem to have a good plan of attack on this problem because he doesn't understand what's key for touch, and hasn't ever in his life. He admits this in Golf Digest. (Every time I report this fact, people freak out and think I'm lying, so I've quoted Tiger and his caddie and coach about this on my blog if you care to read what they say about this --
Why Tiger is not yet a great putter.)
As to "optics", there is a very voluminous science of how vision works in the visual processing of objects and objects-in-space, especially as "tools" to be used for a specific sort of action or task, and I have never seen anyone in golf display the slightest familiarity with this science. Most offerings along the lines by golfers are third-hand derivative tripe from optometrists, and optometrists are clinically trained to prescribe glasses in trade schools and are legally prohibited from practicing any form of health care that requires real medical / surgical training about the nervous system for visual brain processes. (Opthalmologists have 4 years medical school, and at least 2 more years specialty training, and all tolled between 8-12 years real medical knowledge and experience, so there are very real legal restrictions on optometrists beyond referring people with visual medical or neurological problems to a licensed opthalmologist). And moreover, optometrists usually come to golf and putting from other sports such as tennis or baseball where the ball is thrown or hit AT the player and the player armed with a racket or bat is trying to hit the very fast ball, and this set of visual skills is called "dynamic vision". This "dynamic vision" has nothing whatsoever to do with golf, where the ball is stationary. As a result, "Sports Vision" specialists for putting sort of fudge it to come up with something to say about putting. What they come up with is pure baloney, like "eye vergence" (ranging inward of the gaze of the two eyeballs to cross-eyed in "convergence" or ranging outward to a distant stare in "divergence") is critical to distance control, "eye dominance" determines ball position and aiming accuracy, and "Lasik" surgery makes you a better reader of greens."
In fact, eye vergence is physically meaningless past about 20 feet in all humans, because at that point the gazes of the two eyes are parallel and set to infinity, and inside that range, eye vergence is the LEAST potent brain signal of 14 redundant brain processes for understanding distance, and optometrists never know that fact OR anything at all about the other more important 13 processes. A good setup with sound geometry eliminates eye dominance as an influence, and I've never heard of an optometrist who knows the correct geometry.
The most effort I've ever heard of for applying "optometric" trade-school lore to putter design is the effort by Nike's hired optometrist to up the contrast between the standard alignment marks and the rest of the putter head by making the rest of the putter head roughly the same green color as most greens while the "white" alignment lines are supposed to stick out more prominently against the same green background, but the actual design of the ICit has "holes" in the putter head that create a very ugly and confusing pattern of "dark" holes contrasting with the green and detracting from the rather conventional alignment marks. That's pretty weak, and not a good effort even if the "signal enhancement" of the lines is a valid objective. The editor in chief of the "sports science" journal Sports Vision does not in fact know how a "gaze" is defined, using the term in the rather ignorant sense of a lingering look, and not in the physiological or neuroscience definition of "the direction the focal axis of the eyeball aims in relation to the frontal plane of the head". And so on.
If golf instruction wants to stay with this sort of halfway (I have a more colorful term) approach, then you get what golf instruction has always offered -- plausible "lore" masquerading as "science" when it's really nothing more than old wives' tales and "someone showed me this years ago and it seemed to help me, so you try it too". In other sports, like football and baseball and soccer and any Olympic sport, the athletes are commonly shocked at how lame golf "science" is. Yes, there have been some advances in the equipment making drives go farther and helping golfers with not-so-hot skill make less of a mess than ordinarily, and yes, the full swing has benefited from some biomechanical analysis and fitness science. But hardly any of this full-swing science has translated to greater SKILLS by golfers across the board, and has had practically no effect at all on putting from both a technological point of view or a skills point of view. If you take a very skillful golfer for putting and hand him the worst junk putter you can find and then oppose him with a middle-of-the-pack Tour player for putting skill armed with the top-of-the-line putter design, I'm betting on the golfer with superior skill. Twenty years of technological "improvements" later in putter designs, I'm still betting on the more skillful golfer. If the lesser skilled golfer wants to catch up, he doesn't need science or putter technology -- he needs to improve his skills.
So, if this sounds like a diatribe, it's not at all really. It's certainly not directed at you or any golfer, but it IS directed at the perpetrators of the FALSE MYTH of science for putting. Real science explores and understands the phenomena hiding beneath the comfy-cozy widely-used-and-approved jargon of the sport; fake science just spins the idiot wheel round and round and calls it progress.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Coach and Theorist
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