Why putting is golf’s great gift to mankind
Given the importance of putting in building a decent score on the links, it’s remarkable how little time is spent discussing this simple yet puzzling art. Some readers may immediately dispute that noun, insisting that putting is more a science than an art. True, the laws of physics are at play on any green, but let’s not forget it’s a human being holding the putter. It’s my firm contention that there’s less science and more art in a golfer lining up a 30-foot putt or sweating over a curly three-footer.
Loyal readers of this column appreciate as I do the wisdom of the elders of the game. So let’s delve into the dusty, leather-bound books in the club library for a moment and peruse what was said about putting a century or more ago.
James Braid, five-times an Open champion, wrote a book called Advanced Golf in 1908. “The majority of golfers certainly do not take their putting seriously enough; if they did they would be better golfers,” he thundered.
In Taylor on Golf, published in 1911, John Henry Taylor wrote: “The game of golf is not won with the driver. More matches are lost or won on the green.” Clearly this is the original version of, ‘Drive for show, putt for dough.’
Harry Vardon, the greatest Open champion of all, had a more eloquent turn of phrase: “I do not intend to tell anybody how to putt. There are many ways of performing the operation successfully… The finest way to putt is the way that gets the ball into the hole. And confidence is half the battle. Without it, putting is not merely difficult; it is impossible.”
This raises the spectre of something that terrifies all dedicated golfers – the yips. Sam Snead fought the yips for much of his playing career. A close friend of my father’s, he once hollered to Dad in his hillbilly twang, “Got the yips yet, Pete?” Dad replied, “Not yet, Sam.” Snead laughed. “They’re comin’! They’re comin’!”
The great golf commentator Peter Alliss famously gave up his career as a professional tournament player when he got the yips so badly that he took eight putts on a green to hole his ball, leaving Gene Littler watching on in horror. Alliss’s father Percy was a renowned professional in the 1920s and wrote a book in 1926 called Better Golf. Alliss Snr was definite in his views on what was often called ‘green play’ back then: “Putting is almost half the game of better players. The chief weakness of theories in any game is that they aim at pressing all players into a mould of the same shape. They do not allow for the personal factor… It is in putting that a leavening of originality can be allowed with the least danger of immediate disaster… Once the individual has a satisfactory method it should not be varied.”
Alliss Snr also had an obvious point to make about the role of the mind in putting: “Nervousness has every encouragement in green play: the shot is frequently a critical one.” This, I think, is true not so much of long putts but of the short ones. The question of how to banish tension at critical times is hardly something we golfers cannot avoid. No doubt a pre-shot routine is crucial; performing the ritual of such a routine has a calming effect. So also does the habit of auto-suggestion: say to yourself before any short putt, I am going to hole this.
Yet the technical side of putting – the science, if you will – does also deserve respect. Willie Park Jnr was a Scots golf champion even before Young Tom Morris and the Great Triumvirate quoted above. Regarding putting, in his 1896 book, The Game of Golf, he voiced a theory thus: “Putting should be almost all done with one hand. The right hand is the hand which guides the club, and guiding the club is everything in putting, especially in short putts.” What, one wonders, would Park have to say about the long-handled putter? Or the claw grip? Or, God save us, this ludicrous AimPoint technique that has infected so many golfers? We may as well ask Cam Smith what he thinks of golf technique around the year 2090.
One thing is obvious watching old videos of golf played in the 1950s and 1960s – the slower greens in those days required a different style of putting, one in which the player rapped the ball rather than stroked it like a cat as is the case nowadays on fast greens. Certainly, reading a slow green is harder than reading a fast one. This is becoming a lost art, it seems.
Perhaps the biggest question of all is how to sink a putt when the slope is severe, either leftwards or rightwards? Bobby Locke had the answer: all putts are straight. Not the line to the hole, but your putt. As Henry Longhurst described Locke’s method, “You putt straight. The ground makes the curve.” How many of us have forgotten this basic piece of wisdom when struggling with a curly putt to gain two Stableford points?
The subject of the putter itself probably requires another whole column. The most modern designs strike me as ghastly things, possessing all the attraction of a garden implement you might buy at Bunnings. I doubt they work any better than an old blade putter from the 1950s, or even a hickory putter. But every golf shop has a shelf of them, and many golfers are convinced to part with cash for these things, so I concede my argument is lost before it began.
That said, nothing feels better to me than the beautiful tremor that reaches up into the palms and fingers when the old iron blade of my hickory putter gets the ball right in the sweet spot. Whether I make the putt or not, most of the pleasure is in the stroke. Putting is golf’s great gift to mankind.
Main image: getty images: Jeff J. Mitchell
