Dear IDkipper,
The short answer is "perception" is the main problem for "left to right" putts for a right-handed golfer, but this is usually accompanied also by a "technical" problem. The "perception" issue is the oddness of tossing a ball into a bucket whose bottom is fixed to the ceiling off sideways some distance from the ceiling directly above you, as compared to tossing a ball into a bucket on the floor off to your side. The "technical" issue is that for ANY golf shot, failing to conform the clubface / putterface and setup to the slope when the ball is above the feet or below the feet results either way in losing the shot to the "downhill" side, which in putting is the "amateur" side. This technical issue would appear to be neutral for left-right breaks and right-left breaks, but it is not, and affects "arcing stroke path" golfers differently, depending upon whether the heel of the putter is "above" or "below" the ball: when the heel of the arcing-path stroke is "above" the ball (i.e., any putt that has the ball below the feet), the tendency is to lose the putt to the downhill or amateur side, whereas this is not the case for putts when the ball is above the feet.
To keep things handedness neutral, it is better to refer to breaks as "towards the feet" or "to the inside" and "away from the feet" or "to the outside." Although this might seem "overly technical", it has the purpose of clarifying the thinking and perceiving of the golfer to get rid of goofy "old wives tales" sort of myths and bring the golfer starkly to reality as it is..
In addition, the use of "uphill" and "downhill" for breaks is confusing and inaccurate: Except in rare and undesirable situations avoided by pin placement guidelines, uphill putts don't break back "downhill" towards the hole in the sense that the golfer hits the ball uphill and THEN once he ball's energy is expended at the "apex" gravity takes the ball and rolls it downhill the rest of the way "downhill" to the hole, except in the fanciful imagination of golfers who flunked high school geometry. Nor does gravity ordinarily "take" a ball in a downhill putt past the point where the energy of the putt would send it. Balls start straight away out of the setup and then either break "away" from the feet towards the fall line or "in" towards the feet towards the fall line. All balls always curl "downhill" in the sense that they curl TOWARDS the fall line, but the fall line is simply left or right of the ball and left or right of the start line of the putt, and the break is always "more" left or right off line in the direction of the fall line, whether the putt is directed uphill or downhill by the start line. In relation to a "baseline" (straight line across a slope from ball to hole), all breaking putts start away from the baseline at a target "higher uphill" than the cup and then break back towards the baseline and hence back "down" towards the cup. But "uphill" putts (any putt starting from below the 9-3 sidehill line across the clockface definesd by the 6-12 fall line thru the cup), do NOT ever break "downhill" after the energy of the putt is spent in any meaningful sense. This happens only on greens where the ball will not stay still at the end of its trip because the combination of slope and green speed is too severe and the grass cannot resist the "lean downhill" of the still ball and the ball cannot help but roll back down hill. These situations are almost always supposed to be avoided by NOT locating pin positions wherever this is the case. (Uh, right, talk to your local greenkeeper ....) On almost ALL uphill putts and downhill putts as well, once the energy of the putt is drained by the friction of the grass, the ball stops and comes to rest and does NOT get pulled along any further downhill by gravity. The grass prevents it, except in those undesirable situations as occurred with great embarrassment to the USGA setup folks at Shinnecock Hills.
Putts that break away from the feet, considered simply as a single break with slope tilted but with the same flatness all the way from ball to hole (no multiple breaks), have the following characteristics:
1. For right-handers, the fall-line (straight uphill / downhill putt thru the center of the cup) is to the right of the ball when facing the ball uphill on a line parallel to the fall line;
2. For right-handers, the ball is on the left side of the clockface -- the same side as as 9 o'clock, when the 6-12 line is the fall line uphill from 6;
3. For left-handers, the fall-line (straight uphill / downhill putt thru the center of the cup) is to the left of the ball when facing the ball uphill on a line parallel to the fall line;
4. For left-handers, the ball is on the right side of the clockface -- the same side as as 3 o'clock, when the 6-12 line is the fall line uphill from 6;
5. In both cases of left-handers or right-handers, the ball is "below the feet";
6. In both cases of left-handers or right-handers, the ball breaks "away from the feet";
7. In both cases of left-handers or right-handers, the heel of the putter is to the inside of the stroke path and the toe of the putter is to the outside of the stroke path;
8. In both cases of left-handers or right-handers, an arcing inside-inside stroke path causes conflict with the uphill of the slope and the heel of the putter unless the golfer "conforms to the slope" with the putter face and posture at setup;
9. In both cases of left-handers or right-handers, a putt that breaks "away from the feet" entails the perception of a ball's curving "up" as it breaks towards the hole (either going uphill or downhill doesn't matter, as the ball breaks "up" any time it breaks away from the feet), with "up" being "towards the top half of the visual field";
PERCEPTION ISSUE
The brain and body respond differently to the world in the lower half of the visual field and to the upper half of the visual field. The "lower visual field" means whatever in the external world outside the skull is "below" the direction the eyes are aimed, and the "upper visual field" means whatever in the external world outside the skull is "above" the direction the eyes are aimed (in relation to the vertical axis of the body).
Basically, the body lives upright on earth in gravity, so everything that usually matters is "below" the height of the eyes and the direction the eyes aim out of the skull in the "lower visual field", because the surface of the earth is below the height of the eyes when standing upright. Human's have a "resting state" of the eyes in the skull that aims the eyes slightly downward out of the face, and their necks also typically have a "resting state" forward bend that aims the face a little towards the ground as well. In general, humans are concerned much more about the possibility of a snake lying in the savannah grass 3-4 strides ahead than about a vulture swirling 100 feet overhead. Humans chronically "look" with eyes down and face bent slightly earthward about 3-4 steps ahead along the path. This tilted orientation of the head and eyes eventually over the eons of evolution ALSO tilted the inner ear organs that sense when the head is "upright" in gravity or which way the head is moving with respect to gravity and inertia. These organs are called the "otoliths" and the "semicircular canals" (one set of three canals each on each side of the skull):
These "semicircular canals" have three planes defined by three semicircles for each organ, and there are organs in both the left and right sides of the skull for each ear. These three canals are called the "anterior" or "superior" canal, the "posterior" canal, and the "horizontal" canal. They are mutually at right angles (90 degrees) to each other like a "floor", a left-right "wall" and a front-back "wall". The horizontal canal is the floor, the anterior / superior canal is the left-right wall that runs from ear to ear inside the skull, and the posterior canal is the wall that runs front-to-back from back of skull to face inside the skull. The peculiar feature is that the "floor" is not level in gravity, but is tilted up and back on the front nearly 20-30 degrees off horizontal. (See C. Santina et al.,
Orientation of Human Semicircular Canals Measured by Three-Dimensional Multiplanar CT Reconstruction, JARO - Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, Volume 6, Number 3 / September, 2005, 191-206.)
[See "B" and "E" above for orientation of the "horizontal" canal tilted up and back.]
The "resting state" tilt of the head and eyes is the same characteristic posture and line of sight attended in the ergonomics used to design the screen angles of desktop computers, to avoid neck strain and workers' compensation claims and days out sick and poor performance and discomfort at the desk. (See, e.g., Ankrum, D.R. (1999).
Visual Ergonomics in the Office Guidelines. Occupational Health & Safety. 68, 7, 64-74; Ankrum, D.R.,
Viewing Angle And Distance In Computer Workstations, Ergonomics at W
http://www.allscan.ca/ergo/vangle.htm.)
That means the floor of the semicircular canals is not "usually" level in gravity unless the human is tilting the head downward the opposite tilt (down and forward on the front, leaning the forehead closer to the ground than otherwise) -- that is, unless the human is "facing" the ground about 5-6 steps ahead. Combined with a slight downward "resting state" of the eyes, the human is chronically "looking at" the path he walks about 3-4 steps ahead -- time enough to spot a sleeping poisonous snake in the leaves and stop and go around it, just outside of the striking range of the snake. Police officers have a similar "danger space" rule in that when confronting a potentially dangerous person, the person is kept at least three steps away from the officer so the officer has time to react to any aggressive lunge for his weapon. So, the human is oriented naturally to the "lower visual field" -- either what is straight where he usually looks or closer in than that.
The semicircular canals are all about balance and equilibrium in gravity and whether the head "seems" tilted top-of-head-left or top-of-head-right or top-of-head-forward/downward or top-of-head-backward/upward from the ground. This "vestibular" organ feeds straight to the cerebellum and combines with vision and body proprioception to coordinate movement of the body in the external realm of the planet and its gravity. Accordingly, the "visual fields" are intimately integrated with the inner ear and also feed straight into the cerebellum. Vision, balance, and body are coordinated in the cerebellum for movement in gravity. The realm of the world that is "below" the direction the eyes are looking sends parallel and straight beams of light reflected from objects in the world into the back "bowl" inside the eyeballs onto the "top half" of the inside of the bowl. The world "above" the line of sight sends the sight onto the "lower half" of the inside of the bowl at the back of the eyeball. This inner bowl is lined with a sheet of nerves in a retina, and then the excitations of all of these nerves are carried via the bundle of optic nerves out of the back of the eyeball into the brain to parts of the brain where this upper/lower spacing of the objects in the world is preserved, or mapped topologically. Punch line: the upper and lower worlds are sent to DIFFERENT parts of the brain, and the lower visual field is the "normal" one that most seminally concerns humans, and the upper visual field is sort of like a forgotten stepmother, largely ignored until provoked.
All this means that it is "not normal" for an inanimate moving object to move on a curve by itself from the lower visual field into the upper visual field. It violates our sense of physics in gravity, where every inanimate object moves by itself ONLY "down" and in a "straight line". Sure, when a ball rolls on a surface, it looks "normal" for a ball to curl "from uphill to downhill" as it does (or seems to do) on a putt that breaks in towards the feet and starting with the ball "above" the feet. Visually, this curve breaks "lower" in the visual field as the curve progresses. Since a putt that breaks "away" from the feet towards the upper visual field is not "normal", humans have a difficulty imagining the action and imagining making the action happen with a stroke.
The "solution" for this is to develop a skill of not looking at the ground as if the golfer were simply facing off into the environment when standing upright, but instead to regard the surface below the face as it actually is -- a "tilted floor" where things rolling along the "floor" will indeed curl away from the feet if the tilt is that direction. This skill is essentially a more direct and meaningful engagement with the actual situation of the space involved in the putt than is usually the case. Humans are set on "default" 90% or more of the time, and this is simply not good enough when playing golf and putting on the space of a contoured surface of the green.
TECHNICAL ISSUE
The second issue is that golfers habitually default to setting up their posture in gravity, even when standing on a sloped or tilted surface. This is another "default" failure to engage with the contoured surface of the green as it really is for any given putt. Combined with an inside-inside stroke path, this creates a conflict with the heel and the uphill slope to the inside, where the greater the arcing inside in the backstroke, the more the heel will tend to "dig into" the green. Unmindful golfers respond to this reality by changing the stroke path in the opposite direction to avoid the conflict, and this results in an outside-outside stroke path that tends to knock the ball "downhill" away from the feet. This dynamic / conflict between heel and hill does not occur when the break curls "towards" the feet ( a right-left break for a right-hander or a left-right break for a left-hander). In that case, with the ball "above the feet", the conflict is between the toe and the hill, and this leads to a bit of stroke modification that curls the stroke even more inside-inside than otherwise, and this sends balls "higher" away from the feet to begin with than usual. Since golfers typically under-read all putts anyway (for other reasons), the putt that breaks in towards the feet gets a better start than the putt that breaks out away from the feet.
The solution for this is to ALWAYS flatten the sole of the putter onto WHATEVER surface contour presents itself at the ball, and then to CONFORM the setup of the body posture to the waiting putter handle without respect to gravity and the usual default orientation of the body in gravity. Once the body conforms to a "ball below the feet" setup, the head and inner ear will be leaning more downward than usual and this will "bother" the sense of balance and equilibrium and force a different postural control set of muscles to stay steady (weight onto the balls of the feet and toes rather than heels, tighter calves, tighter core, etc.) The golfer's skill is to "ignore" this disequilibrium and adjust to it.
My thought is that all strokes must move the putter sole so that the sole "lifts off the runway" of the surface of the green with straight and level flight so that both wheels of the landing gear separate from the surface at takeoff at the exact same moment. That's great so long as the green surface is "flat and level" like the tarmac at LA International, but of course green surfaces for almost ALL putts are "flat but tilted / sloped" for purposes of setup. Because of that, I imagine the "runway" really is the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, and the tilts of the deck due to the rolling seas is simply something the pilot has to engage and live with when taking off -- the two wheels STILL have to come up off the deck at the same moment with straight and (relatively) level (to the deck) flight at takeoff. So, imagining the stroke action in this metaphorical manner to organize the body posture and action, it helps to ignore the fact that the body is out of kilter in gravity and simply regard the "deck" of the flat-but-tilted green surface AS IF it were "flat and level". This neutralizes the tendency to avoid the heel-hill conflict with a stroke path that sends the ball downhill away from the feet -- putts seem to start more uphill, but this is illusory, as they are really just starting off straight where intended sideways out of the setup as they would on a flat and level surface.
Of course, all this is just another reason NOT to think an inside-inside stroke is such a hot deal for you. And by the same token, all the weird little bandaids people come up with for these putts that break away from the feet are just that: bandaids COVERING a wound, and not CURING a wound. If you use bandaids, you are basically saying you cannot or don't want to bother addressing the real problem.
In summary, engage with the reality of the surface slope as a matter of perceptual skill and as a matter of technical skill, and leave the "default" behaviors to the hacks.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Coach and Theorist
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