It happens to most of us by age 28 but there are solutions
When the pandemic shut down Dave Stockton’s travel, the 79-year-old PGA Champion-turned-instructor went from playing three rounds in the previous three years to clocking 30 in four months at Redlands Country Club, his home base in California. He even acquired a handicap so he could play in the weekly money games with other members.
▶ In his prime on the regular and senior tours, where he won six combined Majors, Stockton made his living from 150 metres and in. “I didn’t care where my drive went because I knew I was as good as anybody in the world with the short clubs.” Not anymore. He found that his plus-1 handicap index comes despite his putting, not because of it. The deficiencies with what had been his favourite club were especially painful on Redlands’ 10th hole – an Alister MacKenzie-designed par 3 that plays 134 metres and, as the index-18 hole on the card, the place where Stockton has to add a shot to his score.
▶ “I guess the good news is that it took 79 years for my putting to go,” Stockton jokes, as he notes a recent round of 70 with three three-putts. “That must be when the downward trend starts. I have the same feel with the putter, but my eyes aren’t as good. The connection between what I see and what I do isn’t as good as it used to be, for sure.”
Stockton’s delayed putting decline is an outlier in more ways than one. Big data from the PGA Tour and human physiology research points to what seems to be a surprising conclusion. The peak putting age for elite players is much closer to the beginning of their careers than the end. Examining the strokes gained/putting statistic since its inception in 2004 (the tour’s statistic that compares what an individual player’s putting contributes to score relative to the rest of the field), peak putting comes at age 27. By 35, a player’s edge on the greens declines by more than two-thirds. And by 41, the average tour player is losing strokes to the field when putting.
What does that mean for you, an amateur golfer who probably doesn’t have access to the same intensive one-on-one coaching, elaborate data analysis and vast blocks of uninterrupted practice time? Does that mean that if you’ve passed your late 20s, you’ll never be any better than you are at putting right now? Not exactly.
The truth about putting is a fascinating mix of physiology, psychology and engineering. Intuitively, you might expect that a skill like putting – one that is less tied to strength and speed like hitting a driver – would be the best way for older players to keep up with younger ones. But you would be wrong.
Humans can and do get physically stronger throughout their 20s and into their 30s, but some of the delicate co-ordinating functions that make complicated physical movements work – those controlled by the pre-frontal cortex in the brain – begin a slow and steady decline after 27. That means Phil Mickelson can still swing his driver at 120 miles per hour at age 50, but the relationship between his eyes, brain and muscles isn’t the same as it was for his 25-year-old self, no matter how many special coffees he drinks.
But the vast majority of elite players have optimised many of the factors that go into good putting. They know how to read greens. They have appropriate coaching. Their equipment is precisely matched to their bodies and strokes.
That means you might be past your peak putting age in physiological terms, but your best years rolling the ball could be ahead of you with some adjustments to your routine, your stroke and your mindset. In other words, there’s hope. It starts with understanding what’s
going on with your body.
Dr Michael Lardon is like a peak performance Swiss Army knife. He’s a practising psychiatrist in San Diego who works with athletes, executives and elite military units, and has research background in psychopharmacology (the effect of drugs on mood) and psychobiology (the biological basis of behaviour). He studies the intersection of mind and body, and all the reasons one or both might not be functioning efficiently. He even has some experience as an elite athlete. In between high school and college, he toured Europe as a professional table-tennis player.
Lardon says the primary physical hinderance for a putter of any skill level is a baseline physiological tremor. Think of it as a connection between your mind and your hands, operating like the mobile signal on a phone call. When you’re young and healthy, the connection is clear and distortion-free. But as you get older and succumb to environmental factors like sleep deprivation, caffeine consumption and stress, the tremor’s impact is more prominent. “It’s the reason surgeons have to undergo dexterity tests as they age,” Lardon says. “Your fine-motor co-ordination and proprioception start being affected. That touch in your fingers, your vision, your hearing – it’s a symphony of stimuli that makes you good at putting. When those senses start to dull, you can’t see a putt or perform as well as you used to.”
The seeing part is important figuratively – through the ability to use all the senses to create a picture of what you want to do in your mind – and literally, says Stan Utley. Like Stockton, he’s another tour winner turned short-game instructor. He holds the PGA Tour record for fewest putts over nine holes (six, at the 2002 Air Canada Championship), and his skill around the greens prompted dozens of tour players to seek him for help when he was still an active player – which ultimately started Utley’s coaching career. “I know my eyes suck compared to the way they used to be, and that makes my green-reading not as good as it was,” says Utley, 59. “I didn’t realise how good I could see until I couldn’t anymore.”
Although these slight changes in a player’s vision and proprioception are happening, other factors present for tour pros also chip away at performance. “As your brain develops into adulthood, the parts that do the analytics get better. For life function, that’s a good thing. But for an athlete, a more developed analytical cortex means you’re getting in your own way, overanalysing and overreacting to negative outcomes,” Lardon says. “Your analysis of what’s happening gets better, but your performance doesn’t.”
Tournaments provide weekly feedback in the form of missed putts, missed cuts and missed opportunities to win. An unlimited array of technical measuring tools can definitively reveal when the putterface is a few degrees closed or open, or if a stroke isn’t repeating. “I’ll ask a player what’s going on, and he’ll usually respond with some technical mumbo-jumbo,” Lardon says. “That’s further contaminated with frustration from not seeing the results he wants. The answer isn’t ignoring the technical stuff that needs to happen in a good stroke. It’s trying to help somebody learn something to the point where they can forget it and let the stroke happen. There’s a time for tech like SAM PuttLab, but at some point, you need to get up there and hit the putt.”
Too much emphasis on analytics can end careers, Lardon says. “When you putt badly, you usually get hyper-focused on technical things – which just makes the process even more conscious. Then performance just gets worse, which initiates the cycle all over again.”
Ironically, the fact that the average amateur’s competitive environment is so different from a tour player’s means you actually have an advantage when it comes to improvement. You can close the biggest skill and knowledge gaps – like green-reading – and sidestep the performance feedback loops that pressurise the pro tours (it also helps that you don’t need to make a 10-footer for a million dollars or a green jacket).
Here’s how you can make your putting better than ever.
Get better at rudimentary green-reading
The biggest gulf between elite players and average amateurs is the ability to identify the contours on a putting surface. Not only do tour players have a full-time caddie with them to help figure out break and speed, they develop real reading skills. That’s substantially different than what you probably do, Utley says. “Most of the amateur players I teach come in saying they know how to read greens, but what they’re really doing is remembering what a similar putt did on a hole they play a lot,” he says. “And the sad thing is, they’re bad at remembering, too.”
Going to a putting clinic to learn a comprehensive system for green-reading, like the classes conducted by AimPoint, pays lifetime dividends for less than the cost of a premium driver. In basic terms, AimPoint shows you how to use your feet to feel the prevailing slope in a putt, then use your fingers and the horizon to pick a spot to aim based on that slope. But even if you aren’t willing to attend a clinic, you can improve your pre-putt routine with a few simple adjustments.
Instructor Todd Anderson helps PGA Tour pros Billy Horschel and Brandt Snedeker in parallel with weekend players from his base at the PGA Tour Performance Centre at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. One of the first things he does is help his clients establish a connection between what they perceive in a read and what the ball actually does. “The thing about green-reading is that you have to combine three skills,” Anderson says. “One, you have to be able to see the break. Two, you have to accurately perceive where your putter is aimed. Three, you have to make the ball go on your intended line. I’ll have a player read a putt and go put a coin down at what they think is the apex of the break or by the hole where they think they need to aim. Then I ask them to aim to their chosen spot. Some players are more than a foot off from where they should be aiming.”
Anderson estimates that the average 15-handicapper putts at less than 50 percent of his or her capability because of poor green-reading and inconsistency inside of six feet. The worse your green-reading is, the longer your second putts become. But solving the first issue also corrects the second. “And anything you do with putting comes right off the bottom line, too,” Anderson says. “If you can take two fewer putts per round, your score will be two shots lower. If you get 20 more yards off the tee or hit your irons 10 feet closer, you still have to make the putt to realise those gains.”
By spending entire practice sessions placing that coin on perceived breaks and then evaluating how you’re rolling the ball relative to what you predicted, you’ll be doing the unavoidable basic computing work that goes into better green-reading – and connecting that read to your stroke.
“I’m shocked at how many players don’t bother to look at a putt from the side, halfway between the ball and the hole,” Stockton says. “If you just look at a putt from behind the ball towards the hole, you’re not in a vantage point where you can really see anything.”
By going to the side opposite the highest point of the break, you’re looking at the putt as if you were looking at a book propped in front of you, where you can see the whole spread. Looking from the high side, Stockton says, is like trying to read a book tilted away from you. “You might be able to see something, but it’s hard and could be distorted.”
Prioritise visualisation over mechanics
Danny McCarthy has led the PGA Tour in the strokes gained/putting statistic the past two years – at age 26 and 27. He’s the first person to lead it in consecutive years since Luke Donald did it from 2009 to 2011. Track McCarthy down on the practice green early in a tournament week, and you won’t see him with a bunch of training aids, alignment sticks or electronic devices attached to the butt of his Scotty Cameron GOLO mid-mallet putter. “I think of putting as an artform, not a science,” he says. “I like to see the lines and the arcs in my head and putt to that image. See the picture, see the line and putt to it.”
To emphasise roll over mechanics, McCarthy draws a line on his ball, finds a straight putt on the practice green and marks the path from his ball to the hole with a chalk line. He then aligns the line on the ball with the chalk line and strokes putt after putt. “The other drill I do is one Tiger uses, where he sets up two tees just wider than his putter’s face and hits putts one-handed,” says McCarthy, a two-time All-American at the University of Virginia who joined the PGA Tour in 2017. “I want to feel the roll, like hitting a topspin forehand in tennis.”
McCarthy’s approach could have been taken directly from Stockton, minus the line on the ball. “That’s
always been my original premise – see the line and the ball travelling on that line into the hole,” Stockton says. “There’s a camp that says you should use the line to carefully set up your body, but most people don’t line up correctly. I always like to watch the players who are free, they see the line and roll the ball- – guys like Lee Trevino and Ben Crenshaw. The players who understand that putting is visualisation – not mechanics – are the ones who last.”
Randomise practice
As tempting and convenient as it might be to groove your stroke on the practice green at your home course or on the mat you’ve unrolled in your study, the secret to better putting is learning to deal with variability, Stockton says. “You get better at visualisation and speed control by playing greens that are different speeds and learning to adjust. Everything isn’t straight and precise,” he says.
The rescheduled 2020 Masters last November offered a glimpse of what it might have been like to play Augusta National in the 1960s and 1970s, when the conditions weren’t as majestically perfect as they have been in recent decades. Stockton was leading by one over Gary Player after three rounds in the ’74 Masters and intended to load his Ray Cook putter with lead tape before the final round to help account for the unexpected slowness of the greens. But after a late-evening media session on Saturday night, he didn’t get to it. “I realised on the front nine that I forgot.
I hit the first nine greens and still shot one-over,” Stockton says. “On 13, I hit my second shot to 15 feet. Gary hit it near one of the left bunkers. I left my eagle putt short, and he got up and down for birdie and won by two. That’s
a mental whiff. I didn’t adjust when I needed to. But it’s a good reminder to evaluate every putt as unique.”
Don’t be afraid to change something
Bernhard Langer has been one of the most enduring competitors in golf, winning tournaments every decade from the 1980s to the 2020s. He has won 41 times in 13 seasons as a senior player, including 11 Majors. And he has done it while overcoming the yips four different times in his career.
“I was a tremendous putter as a caddie and an assistant pro, but I developed the yips almost immediately after I went out on tour,” Langer says. “I had gone from putting on greens that were eight or nine in Stimpmeter speed in Germany to playing really fast ones that were 12 or 13 in Portugal and southern Spain, and I had the pressure of needing to make money because I didn’t have any.”
Langer persevered and was one of the first players to go to a cross-handed grip in competition. In 1980, he won his first European Tour event, and in 1985, his first Masters. But when the yips returned, he had to rebuild his putting stroke again. “By the time I won the ’93 Masters, I was putting cross-handed, leaning the shaft against my forearm,” he says. “I made everything from five feet and in, but four years later the yips returned once more, and I had to change it up again, going to the long putter. It was about surviving and staying on tour. There are so many different ways to putt. You have to find the way to be a decent putter no matter what it looks like. It’s not about looking good. It’s about producing scores.”
Ask Stockton what the ideal putting setup looks like, and he’ll offer a range of choices based on a player’s build, tendencies and comfort zone.
“I had tournaments where I set up open to the target because I felt like I needed to see the line better, and
I had tournaments where I set up more closed because it just felt better,” he says. “It’s more about getting into a position where you can be stable and let the putter swing.” Hearing two players with a combined 100 years of competitive experience say you can freelance your fundamentals might seem like an oversimplification if you struggle to hit putts in the centre of the face, but research backs it up.
Debbie Crews has spent 30 years studying how players get into their most productive mental state for good putting. Her research fills volumes, but here’s one nugget that should give hope to anybody looking to putt better:
“A 3-year-old can roll the ball in the hole. A lot of what adults do to try to control the putter just gets in the way of getting the ball to fall into the cup,” says Crews, who is an LPGA master professional and a researcher and performance consultant at Arizona State University. “The important thing is to build an image that you can use no matter what method of putting you choose. You can imagine a clockface on top of the hole, and try to roll the ball in over the numbers on the face or even more precisely. Or you can choose to make the ball go in at a slow, medium or fast speed. Once that goal takes over your mindset, the particulars of how you stand over the ball, grip the putter, stroke the putt or what’s happening around you start to fade away. You’re getting rid of the middleman between your skill set and the outcome.”
Understand your tendencies
Your predominant ball flight is probably obvious. You slice it or hook it, draw it or fade it. You have putting tendencies, too – they’re just sometimes harder to identify. “I sometimes aim a little left and shove the ball towards the hole,” Langer says. “So I have my caddie constantly check to see if I’m aimed correctly, or if I’m pushing it. If you know your tendencies, you can account for them instead of experimenting randomly to correct them. Having
that knowledge can dramatically improve your results without any other adjustments.”
Adds Anderson, “That process I described earlier with the coin? If you did that regularly and saw that you tend to over-aim to the high side of the hole, that would be very important information to have about your tendency. If you don’t know what you usually do, you can’t adjust.”
Another important reason to understand your tendencies is that it helps prevent you from overreacting to
a problem, Utley says. “I know that when I putt bad, it’s because I’m dragging the handle back,” he says. “So I go back to all the same things I worked on when I was 20 to correct it. When you can get yourself back to that neutral place with your address, you make putting easy again, where you aren’t making a bunch of compensations.”
Emphasise process, not results
When you play for a score, missing a putt that really matters can trigger long-term effects. “If the average player starts missing putts, he or she usually gets slower and shorter with the stroke,” Anderson says. “Or a player who putts poorly starts trying to take the hands out of it, losing feel. When you putt trying not to do something instead of letting the putter flow, you lose control. You’ll start doing something like pulling putts, and then you start thinking about holding the face open to stop pulling it, but that makes things worse. The fear of missing hurts you more than the actual misses do.”
A life-and-death moment in an emergency room is different stakes than a four-footer to win $10 from your friend, but Lardon says the training medical personnel go through is designed to do exactly what a player should be striving for on the green – provide a thorough process to focus on and follow instead of getting distracted by the magnitude of the moment. “When I was doing a rotation in the emergency room, we’d get a patient who needed advanced cardiac life support,” Lardon says. “A nurse would hand me the defibrillator paddles, and if you messed it up, somebody died. The nurses handled those situations so often that they were able to operate without getting caught up in [what was a life-or-death situation]. The best putters are able to create a routine that lets them do something complicated by rote so it relieves them of responsibility for it. They’re a detached observer. They do their thing, observe the result and move on.”
Part of that is developing a pre-putt routine that is always the same, no matter the stakes. The putt leaving the face at impact is just the last step in a repeating process, Anderson says.
“You’re putting on an imperfect surface – you can do everything right and still miss, or do something wrong and it goes in. So don’t worry about it. Make your read, roll it on your intended line. Control the things you can control and leave the rest to fate. Like [sport psychologist] Dick Coop said, you can’t make a putt. You can only make a stroke.”
Back to Stockton and his recent battles against club golfers, the part that strikes him the most is how angry his opponents get at missing a putt, and how that anger can torpedo a potentially good score. “The bad putters? There’s always a reason they missed a putt, and they’ll tell you all about it,” he says. “You gotta move on to the next one. Of all those tournaments I played, I won 24 of them. That makes me aloserlike 950 times. That ’74 Masters I could have won if I putted better? By nightfall, I was done thinking about it.”
Feature image: Getty Images: Putting Green
