Saturday, June 23, 2018

Putting is hard – but you already knew that, right?

I am a mechanical engineer with 37 years of experience in mechanical design, analysis, and test. I am also a born skeptic – and I bring both my skepticism and my engineering experience to bear when I review and evaluate golf equipment.
One of the prime targets of my skepticism is putters. I believe that there is more hype, misinformation, wishful thinking, and utter nonsense attendant upon the design and use of the last club in the bag than the other 13 clubs put together. You know why? Because putting is hard, and as it is the end of the process of getting the ball from the tee to the hole, errors made with the putter are unrecoverable.
Think about it. Hit an errant drive, and as long as you can find the ball, and play it, you have a chance of recovering with a good second shot. Dump your approach shot into a greenside bunker, and if you are handy with a wedge you still have a chance at getting up and down for par. But blow a putt, or two, and your score on the hole is heading into “plus” numbers – no quarter asked, none given. There is no recovery from bad putting – it’s do-or-die, make it or go home.
“The devoted golfer is an anguished soul who has learned a lot about putting, just as an avalanche victim has learned a lot about snow.”
   – Dan Jenkins
And putting demands a level of precision that is not required from tee-to-green shots. Sure, you want good placement in the fairway off the tee, and you’d like to be able to do better than just get it somewhere on the green with your approach – but your target with the putter is 4-1/4 inches in diameter – just over 2-1/2 times the size of the ball. Which means that the level of accuracy that is required when putting is orders of magnitude greater than with any other shot on the course.
Consider this: When facing a 10-foot putt on a dead flat, level surface, a deviation of only 1° in the face angle of the putter at impact introduces an aiming error equal to half the diameter of the hole – the difference, all other things being equal, between missing and making the putt. 
A successful putt requires the golfer to match ball speed with the proper line, and then deliver the ball properly on that line. Given the “speed” of the putting surface – that is, the level of resistance it offers the rolling golf ball – there is a minimum ball speed that will get the ball to the hole, and a range beyond the minimum within which the ball will go into the hole and not bounce or lip out.
To further complicate matters, this speed varies depending upon how close to center the ball is when it gets to the hole. A ball traveling at a speed which allows it to fall into the hole on a dead-center hit may lip out if it arrives at the hole off-center. The more off-center, the slower the ball must be moving when it encounters the edge of the hole.
And then there’s slope. Greens are rarely flat, so the ball must be started on a tangential vector which will allow it to follow the curving path that ends at the hole. The faster the ball is going, the less it responds to the curvature of the putting surface, so when determining the aiming line for a putt, the golfer must decide what combination of ball speed and path will deliver the ball to the hole within the range of speed which will allow it to fall into the hole.
Add to the equation the fact that to get the ball into the hole you have to roll it across a living, and highly variable, surface. It’s not flat, and the amount of resistance which it offers the ball can differ from green to green, even from yard to yard on the green, and throughout the day as weather conditions change.
Suffice it to say that the difficulty, variability, and unforgiving nature of putting drives golfers a little crazy. The average golfer owns from one to five putters (and not a few own ten or more), and there are probably more different kinds of gadgets designed to improve your putting stroke and your ability to read line and speed than there are for any other part of the game.
Manufacturers sense the desperation that golfers feel when it comes to putting, and regularly introduce new innovations that are ballyhooed as game-changers, accompanied by testimonials, plaudits, and masses of quasi-technical lingo that is often just marketing bumf. Different face materials are touted to “improve feel” or “increase responsiveness”. Tweaks to the placement of the alignment mark promise to help you zero in on your preferred line better, or grooves on the face are claimed to put correcting spin on the ball and actually curve it back toward the hole.
The bottom line on putters, as far as I am concerned, is that it all comes down to what feels good to you. Try before you buy. Try every putter in the store, then go to another store and try some more. Get fitted by one or another of the high-end custom putter makers if that suits you, but in the end, figure out what putter feels best in your hand, and works best with your natural stoke. That’s the putter that will work best for you.
And then all you have to do is master the art – and it is an art – of reading line and speed, and you will start making more putts. Simple, right?

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