Dear sammy,
My experience has been that putting "skill" remains essentially the same even when the equipment, the courses and greens, and the style changes. Most techniques usually thought fundamental (grip, stance, "eyes over ball", etc.), really aren't. All great putters throughout the history of the game, and not just white-hot streakers ("talents" without real skills), do the same thing very well: stroke the ball where aimed with great touch with a consistent movement pattern and rhythm, and then learn to aim that and read putts with that.
I've spent years learning how Bobby Locke and Billy Casper and Horton Smith and others have putted, not just reading about their technique but actually living with their patterns for years at a time. They are all doing the same thing. The stroke movements are all the same thru the impact zone: the putter face goes square and online without changing for at least two inches and sometimes a lot more. This can be done in a variety of ways, but there are trade-offs in the choices, and there are smart trade-offs and there are dumb trade-offs. Most historically notable putters were not especially aware of the choices. Bobby Locke, for example, concocted his stroke movement pattern based upon a dread of the cut stroke. It's basically one giant fear-based bandaid. Bily Casper's wristy style is one of those "eliminate a degree of freedom" approaches to putting: he rested his left hand slightly against his thigh and then moved the wrists, and on longer putts added some arm action, but he was always focused upon square impact thru the bottom of the stroke. Horton Smith hooded the putter straight back along a yardstick and then unhooded the blade coming back forwards straight along the yardstick. Ben Crenshaw brings the putter back to the inside but then resquares the blade prior to impact and then remains square as the blade travels straight down the line without curling offline usually at least for a foot or more past the ball. Jack Nicklaus uses a right elbow extension to "push" the blade squarely down the line straight at the target. These various movement patterns are all the same in terms of the important reality thru the impact zone.
What confuses people is the timing, as indicated by your question. There is a difference between tempo and rhythm. Rhythm is the proportionality and tempo is how quickly or slowly the rhythm back and thru is performed. For touch, rhythm is close to mandatory but tempo is optional. That means you can't look at just the timing of short strokes and long strokes and conclude they are generating different forces. I routinely demonstrate to students that two very different tempos will generate exactly the same instinctive force and roll two balls exactly as far as intended, but only so long as both strokes have the same back-and-thru rhythm. The most instinctive rhythm is same-same. Whatever the absolute time for the stroke, half of the time is from the ball to the top of the backstroke, and the other half is from there to the top of the follow-thru (twice as "far" usually, but always in the same amount of time). This is simply what everything does when naturally "swinging to and fro", as the human arms do several hundred times each day. A putting stroke's back and thru is a bit odd, since it starts from a dead stop at the bottom of one of the swings, and is really a "joining in" with the rhythm and tempo of a pendular swinging from the top of the follow-thru headed to the top of the backstroke, that catches up with this internal swinging timing only at the top of the backstroke, and thereafter the two strokes (putting stroke and internal timing back and thru) are synched up. So a putting stroke's backstroke has the SAME timing as the forward stroke, although the forward stroke travels twice as far. But it's fundamentally just a "swing". This timing is jammed into the brain by constant, unchanging, very repetitious experience common to all humans, and that is why it is the "wheelhouse" rhythm for movement. None of this is to say one CANNOT use a non-optimal rhythm and tempo and do very well; but it is to say that such golfers have plenty of room for improvement.
Timing for tempo and timing for rhythm both involve trade-offs for setup and stroke movement. There is nothing especially gained by seeking a robotic straight-back and straight-thru stroke, there is nothing gained by making the stroke symmetrical on either side of impact, and there is nothing special gained by a quick popping hit stroke. Everything starts with physics and the human body and basic instinctive processes. With respect for the realities of these aspects, and with a clear priority for scoring rather than technical perfection, the trade-offs start to make sense and start to look a lot alike from one great putter to another. If a golfer is worried about distance control, he basically is not a great putter and has made some poor trade-offs to get the sort of putting he has to live with. It's really the way the timing patterns and the trade-offs for stroke setup and movement fit together -- do they enhance the instincts and work well with the human body or not? Great putters make a great fit between instincts, the body, and the reality of the world in physics.
For today's courses and greens, the word is "smooth". The word in the 1950s into the 1970s, with the occasional exception like Augusta National in April, the word was "aggressive." That's the "Dark Ages" of golf where all this nonsense of "never up, never in" hails from, and the sort of junk science from the mid-1970s that claims falsely that the best approach to "touch" is to try to roll the ball consistently 17 inches past the hole regardless of grass type or condition or distance of putt or uphill / downhill considerations. The golf hole and the golf ball interact according to simple, unchanging laws of physics that quite frankly don't give a rat who you are or what year it is. Touch is based on the reality of that -- the human's ability to deliver the ball to all or nearly all holes regardless of grass condition or speed, cruddy equipment, bumpy greens, over hill and over dale, without whining and without the adolescent belief that something in the way a putter designer made the tool is going to make up for a basic lack of skill. ALL golfers will ALL settle sooner or later on just about the same delivery speed of balls to holes, not out of personal choice, but as a result of adapting smartly and effectively to the objective requirements of the world for sinking a ball down into a cup faced equally by all golfers everywhere on every putt. The old guys got this working, and probably knew something about their timing pattern that "caused" good or bad results.
So today's "better" greens sort of mask the sameness of the skills. Golfers look better on today's greens because the consistent results are easier for the mob to generate WITHOUT skill, or the apparent better results are not as dependent upon skill as they used to be. As a "field" of putters, the old guys don't compare too well with the "field" appearance today, but that is mostly greens, not styles or equipment or innate talent. If you merged the two fields today and equalized their experience level on good greens, quite a few of the old guys would be a lot better than almost all current guys. They'd get it figured out BETTER than many, many of today's pros, because they are basically "one-man problem-solvers" who had to rely almost completely upon themselves for their game and skills. If you think today's pros are skillful, you should spend some time watching Stuart Appleby and company putting the same 30-footer three times in a row over and over from the same spot for about two hours and compare that to what happens when Scott Simpson or Sandy Lyle comes on the green and cranks off a 60-footer that goes IN or a LOT CLOSER to the hole than ANY of Stuart's putts, and then repeat this with one ball to another different 50- to 60-footer at random. These guys are WAY better at touch than today's pros, who invariably are told to try some goofy timing patterns because some technological gizmo said so.
The strokes today that are great are pretty rare, to tell the truth, but the great strokes are "smooth" and "unhurried." This is a timing issue, period.
In the final analysis, it's sort of pointless to compare "old styles" with "modern styles" because both eras are choked with not-so-hot putters and the great ones are basically not that different for styles in the important matters.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Coach and Theorist
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