My Articles
Non extensive list of article directories, blogs and other sites that published my articles. (Jul 2010)
A Few Secrets About Breaking Putts in Golf (free ebook by Marcel White)
> A New Golf Tip on Putting From Off the Green
Summary: Find the answer to the question golfers always ask: for the same distance, how much harder shall I hit the ball when putting from off the green?
Don’t expect this article to explain how, or recommend when, to putt from off the green. For me the rule is simple: use your putter always you feel that the putter is the golf club that will provide the best result. Let me just add a small piece of advice: don’t forget to make some experiments from time to time because our golf skills change and without testing no one knows if something, that was impossible a few months ago, didn’t become feasible now, or vice versa.
Before explaining this new golf putting tip let me tell a few things about the putting process. First, for the sake of simplicity, I will divide our body in two parts: the brain and the rest. Putting is the golf chapter that involves the most our brain and the least the rest of our body.
For a solid and reliable putter stroke our lower body shouldn’t move at all and our wrists are not allowed to bend. Usually, only a few muscles in the player’s back will receive a mild call to action. The brain will perform all the rest.
Let’s see: after you read the green and decide if it is slow or fast and if your next putt is uphill or downhill, against the grain or not, affected by the wind or not, breaks or is straight, all the rest depends on your brain capacity to process all the information you gathered. It will reveal the aim point to let the player align, address the ball accordingly and make the pre-putt routine. And after a last look to the hole to allow some final adjustments the command to your muscles comes, the putter strikes the ball and it will start moving with the speed and direction your brain considered convenient to roughly reach the hole.
And why is this detail worth to be mentioned here? Because when you putt from off the green your brain is submitted to what we can call a cognitive dissonance, that is, an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. You read the green carefully and provided all the information you gathered but when your brain starts processing it receives an alert: “there is a correction to be made and the ball must be hit harder than for the usual putts on the green”.
Poor brain! “Harder? What is this? How much harder?” These are the questions your brain will ask several times in a fraction of a second and that can ruin the decision process. Very often the results are not what you would like.
Here is my tip:
a) Make everything as if it was a normal putt on the green.
b) See what is the distance from your ball to the edge of the green and keep it in your memory.
c) Look for a spot behind the hole at roughly the same distance from it as the one you registered in memory. For instance, if your ball has to roll 2 yards to reach the green the spot you choose must be 2 yards behind the pin.
d) Address the ball and try not even looking at the hole. Just look at the spot you chose.
e) Keep telling yourself, that is, to your brain, that the ball must reach that spot.
f) Hit the ball as if you were on the green, control your curiosity and keep your head still. With some practice, talent and luck the ball will stop close to the hole or even in the hole.
This is the basic configuration of the tip but you can make some refinements. For instance, if you play very often the same course and you know that the fringes around the greens usually show a low cut and are very fast, you may try only one half of the distance mentioned in b). Or double that distance if you always have to deal with slow fringes (tall grass) around the greens.
Spend some time training this tip and perhaps in a near future you’ll decide to use your putter in situations you never considered before.
P. S. If you decide to try this tip, please give me feedback in my page Contacts & Links. I always like to know if it worked for you as it worked for me and my friends.
Marcel White (2010/12/23)
> What Is More Important in Golf Putting, Line or Distance?
Summary: Almost all golf players believe that controlling distance is the key factor to a solid golf putting performance. This is not 100% true. See why line or distance can be the most important factor, depending on the nature of the putt you have to make.
I believe you picked a wrong answer to a silly question in the title! Yes, whatever your choice, the answer is wrong and this makes my question a silly one. Keep reading and discover that line or distance can be the most important factor, depending on the nature of the putt you have to make.
In order to follow my theory you have to separate long putts from the short ones because the skills needed to master long and short putts are different.
> For long putts you need putting technique and feel
> For short putts you need putting technique and special knowledge
As putting technique is needed for both of them it won’t be treated here. It’s out of the scope of this article. I’ll focus on feel and knowledge and try to explain why they are important in different ways when you putt.
1- Let’s start with long putts
When you try to sink a long putt, if you are a talented lucky person, you may hole it but usually you don’t. So, what you desperately need is to let yourself a manageable short putt in order to avoid 3 putting. A tap-in would be great! To achieve this objective and assuming your technique is good enough, the other skill you need is feel. Yes, you have to feel the peculiar conditions of that green, that day, at the right time you are putting. Otherwise you risk letting the ball a few yards long or short and increase your chances of 3 putting. Good technique is worthless if you can’t predict how moisture, grain, grass length, grass consistency, green slope and wind are influencing green speed. Some of these factors change on a daily basis and others on an hourly basis or so. Only slope and grain remain constant. This means that you have to develop the capacity to let your brain process all the information you get. Then you’ll start feeling how to produce strokes adjusted to your needs.
To get that feel, necessary to prevent the long putt fiasco, you need lots of practice and attention to details. For instance:
> Moisture makes greens slower.
> As the temperature raises, grass becomes harder making the green slower.
> If the wind is against our putt the ball will move less and vice versa.
> The great majority of golf courses don’t mow the greens on weekends. So, if you play Saturdays and Sundays consider that, all other factors being the same, greens are slower on Sundays.
> And so on, and on and on.
2- And what about short putts?
Well, short putts are different in many ways. You still need putting technique but feel isn’t so overwhelming as in long putts. Now what you need above all is special knowledge to help you anticipate how the ball will behave after the putter stroke. Even for short putts, straight lines are not the rule but the exception. There are so many factors influencing the ball trajectory on the green that it is almost impossible to make it follow a straight line. The most important are: slope, wind, grain and imperfections.
Imperfections matter but their effects are often unpredictable and the only solution against them is to pray (and even that one usually doesn’t work). Grain is less important than slope and wind and can be overlooked when they are present. Wind and slope have the same nature: forces that work to change the way the ball is moving on the green. Under normal conditions wind effect is negligible. If it is strong, the best solution for the golf player is to consider that it slightly increases the effect of slope if it is blowing downwards or slightly reduces it if the opposite is true.
This means that slope is above all when it comes to short putts. It causes your ball to move along a parabola shaped line and you MUST know how to anticipate the ball trajectory (putting line) in order to hole putts. That is why I keep telling that knowledge is a key factor here. Of course practice is important but if you don’t have the right tools to understand what is going on you risk to practice not to improve but to “perfect” your mistakes. Only when you learn how to deal with parabolas you will get a clearer picture of your putting lines BEFORE you putt, not after.
I know that some of my readers consider this is not worth the effort it takes. I disagree and can explain why. See, if you make 3 putts for a long putt you think it was one stroke too much. And what if you make two putts for a short putt, isn’t it one stroke too much? Where is the difference? Keep track of your putts and you’ll discover that you lose more strokes making two when only one was needed than making three when only two were needed.
> To finish this article, let’s draw some conclusions and guidelines:
a) Distance is the most important factor for long putts.
b) Line is the most important factor for short putts.
c) During a round of golf all of us have more short putts to do than long ones.
d) The solution to increase the putting performance is to get rid of three putts (for long putts) and to increase the conversion rate (for short putts).
e) Collecting real data is the only way a player has to identify their weaknesses.
f) Discard myths even if everybody seems to believe they are true.
There is still one point missing that is not as easy as it seams: how to define long and short putts? If you are interested, please go to "Contacts & links" and contact me. I'll send that page to you by email. It's part of my ebook Golf Putting Lines and I don't want to let that one online.
Marcel White (2010/9/03)
> A New Golf Putting Tip on Effective Green Reading
Summary: In this article you can find an explanation of “Marcel White’s technique for green reading” more detailed than the one delivered in a previous article.
In my last article I wrote about several gadgets and procedures that may (or may not) help in golf putting. In that article, among those procedures considered useful and in total accordance with the rules, I introduced “Marcel White’s technique for green reading”. I mentioned then that it had never been revealed before.
After the article went on line I received some comments and had some discussions about that technique and discovered that it had not been a good idea to introduce it in the middle of the article together with other subjects. Some readers suggested that I should write a more detailed article focused exclusively on that point. Here it is!
Situation NR 1. Let’s start with the easiest feature this technique can provide. When considering your next putt, discover if the hole’s level is below or above the ball’s level.
Perhaps you think this is a piece of cake but it isn’t. If you are on a sloping green evaluating your next putt, as you move from one point to another, your perspective changes giving you misleading perceptions and you find yourself not sure about it being uphill or downhill. Consequences can be devastating if you consider downhill a putt that actually is uphill, or vice-versa.
This is the approach I recommend to solve the problem.
a) Look for a spot that is roughly at the same distance from the hole and the ball and not very close to the ball-hole line and don’t care if you are on the higher or lower part of the green in relation to that line. Stand on that point. I always try that my distance to the ball-hole line beats the ball-hole distance. Standing on that point, you, the ball and the hole are forming a triangle, an isosceles triangle because two sides of it are equal. Remember that the spot was chosen to be at the same distance from the hole and the ball.
b) Align yourself in order to let your shoulders parallel to the ball-hole line. Use both your forefingers to handle your putter and raise your arms, keeping them straight, till the putter’s shaft is horizontal in front of you and parallel to your shoulders. Now, your eyes and the club shaft define a plane in which any straight line parallel to the club shaft is horizontal. So, just move slowly both arms, keeping the putter horizontal, till you see it touching the hole. Now, the image of the club shaft you see on the ground is a horizontal line that will tell you if the ball is above or bellow the hole and how much.
I agree this is not as accurate as an electronic meter but, so far, the choice is between this technique and nothing allowed by golf rules. Besides, we can take some steps to improve it.
First, do it while the pin is in the cup. It’s vertical and will help to see if the shaft is horizontal because both lines are perpendicular.
Second, you can train your eyes as much as you want because horizontal lines are everywhere to help you confirm your guesses. For instance, any house or building has horizontals on the top of doors, windows, walls, etc. Put yourself with your shoulders parallel to a wall, holding your putter the way mentioned before and move both arms at the same time in order to adjust the shaft image to the top of a door or window and calibrate your horizontals. You’ll discover that this technique is pretty accurate.
A final note on situation NR 1: It doesn’t matter if a putt starts, or finishes, uphill or downhill. If ball’s level at start is below hole’s level you face a uphill putt. If ball’s level at start is above hole’s level you face a downhill putt even if the ball starts uphill.
See image 2 for downhill example.
Situation NR 2. Now, an interesting question is perhaps crossing your minds: if you line up with the ball and the hole, will this technique work to reveal the lateral break? Yes, it will, but it is not that simple!
So, get down, in line with the ball and the hole, and find two spots you can remember, on the grass, at each side of the ball-hole line and at similar distances from it. The two spots must define a second line that is perpendicular to the ball-hole line. You and those two points are now forming the isosceles triangle needed to use this technique. As before, the next step will be to raise the horizontal putter to discover which one of the spots is at a lower or higher level and how much. That is the lateral break. If you suspect of a double break repeat the entire process close to the hole. Just take care to avoid slowing the game.
I recommend that you start using this technique in situations NR 2, only after you are in full control of it in situations NR 1. To practice, you can go to a sloping putting green and start using 2 tees and fixing them on the ground instead of looking for the two spots needed to define the triangle. After some practice you’ll find that you can do without the tees.
As far as I know, this is the best and most reliable technique to improve your green reading without breaking the golf rules. With it you get a clearer picture of your putting zone in every situation. But don’t forget that your objective is to sink the next putt, not to get a topographic image of the green. Provided you know how to use all the information you gathered, a nice putt is on the way. Otherwise, it will have been a waste of time. If this is the case, in this site you can find more suggestions that can help.
Marcel White (2010/4/15)
> Gadgets and procedures that may (or may not) help, in golf putting
Marcel White (2009/11/23)
> Beware of a Common Pitfall in Golf Putting
Marcel White (2009/8/11)
> A Black Hole in Golf Putting
Marcel White (2009/6/14)
A Few Secrets About Breaking Putts in Golf (free ebook by Marcel White)