[PHOTO: Sam Greenwood]
Having the ball hit the back of the cup and bounce out is one of the worst breaks in golf, but did you know it can often be caused by how we remove the flagstick? No, we’re not talking about that putt that you hit with enough speed to roll 20 feet by. Occasionally, a ball rolling at holing speed towards the centre of the cup hits the top of the cup and bounces straight out.
To learn more about why this happens and what we can do to prevent it, we asked Amanda Fontaine, superintendent at Ledges Golf Club in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Fontaine is a three-year member of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America.
Golf Digest: Amanda, this happens once or twice a year to me – I’ll hit a putt at a normal speed and it will hit the back of the cup and bounce out. What causes this?
Fontaine: Sometimes if you putt it way too fast, it’s just luck of the draw, but sometimes the problem is the cup depth. This can happen for a couple of reasons. What can happen is if golfers yank the flag out too fast or if they’re using their putter to get it out, it’ll mess up the cup a little bit. The cup might now not be deep enough, which could cause the ball to hit the metal and bounce out. The other issue could be that the cup was cut too shallow from the start.
Very interesting. So how do you typically judge whether a cup is cut deep enough?
Fontaine: You’ll have your regular cup cutter set to a specific depth. Usually about 7½ or 8½ inches. If your cup needs to go deeper, you can pull the cup back out and take more dirt out and reset it. You can reset it as many times as you need to. It’s all preference.
What I’m going for is 1½ inches of dirt between the edge of the cup and the surface. Less than that, and the shallow cup could cause balls to bounce out. If the cup is too deep, then it also doesn’t play correctly. If there are two inches between the edge of the cup and the surface, then it doesn’t look or sit right. You can just drill the ball in, and the sod gets soft. The cup can also move a lot more because you don’t have a solid root base around it. It’s just dirt under there. At Ledges, our greens are sand-based, so [the cups] need to be the proper depth or else they can move around a lot.
Fontaine: Especially if it’s been raining, all the dirt that’s in that cup is now all going to the bottom of that cup, where it’s called the ferrule – where the bottom of the flagstick is now. Now you’ve got all that dirt, and every time you yank the flagstick up quickly, the friction pulls up the cup a little bit.
What I always tell people to do is to twist when taking the flagstick out. Don’t just pull straight up, twist it.
