What’s true—and what’s not—about what alignment stripes do for your putting

Under the dual headings of “Marketing People Just Want To Sell You Stuff” and “Golf Equipment Writers Who Recycle Manufacturers’ Marketing BUMF”, a recent article by an experienced and well-respected golf writer (whose BA in English Lit probably doesn’t qualify him to evaluate the dynamics and physical attributes of golf equipment) is promulgating more marketing nonsense from people who sell golf balls:

https://golfweek.usatoday.com/2023/04/12/callaway-chrome-soft-360-triple-track-golf-balls/

Callaway’s update to their Triple Track alignment aid system,

Triple Track 360, features blue stripes that now go all the way around the ball.

The article at the link above, about the new and improved Callaway 360 Triple-Track system—which now features blue lines that go all the way around the ball (that is, 360º – get it?)—states the following:

“(T)he two blue lines […] wrap completely around the ball, making it easier for golfers to aim the ball […] and to see if a putt is struck with a square face. If the lines stay smooth as the putt rolls, a player knows [they] hit the putt correctly with the face square to the target line. If the lines wobble as the ball rolls, the face of the putter was either open or closed to the line when it struck the ball*.”

This kind of stuff makes me weep.

The Triple-Track system, with a single rather heavy red stripe flanked by a pair of thinner blue stripes, was originally presented as a revolutionary upgrade over a single line as a static alignment aid, a quality that is supposed to be due to an effect called Visual Hyper Acuity (see: How Triple Track Technology Can Change Your Game). The effectiveness of “VHA” is said to have been certified by Dr. Carl Bassi, the Director of Research at the University of Missouri – St Louis College of Optometry, and also by Ray Barrett, an “entrepreneur and avid golfer” (whoever he is, and for what that’s worth).

I can’t speak to the effectiveness of Triple Track markings in helping golfers achieve micrometer-level alignment accuracy—vision science is not one of my specialties—but I can speak to its effectiveness in helping golfers assess the quality of their strike: it has none.

It’s very simple, and readily apparent to anyone who is familiar with the dynamics of impact and rolling objects: striking the ball with an open or closed face does not make the ball wobble, but the stripes may appear to wobble —which may appear to the uninitiated that the ball itself is wobbling—unless they are perfectly aligned with both the face and the path.

Face angle relative to path determines the direction that the ball heads immediately upon coming off of the face; “wobble”, as shown by the stripes on the ball, indicates only that the stripes were not aligned with the path that the ball started rolling on. If the ball starts to wobble later in the roll, that’s an indication that it hit some inconsistency in the putting surface and was thrown off line—but neither of these things means that the ball is rolling inconsistently—“wobbling”—due to having been struck with an open or closed face.

To help you visualize how this works, imagine slicing a section through the ball along the stripe to make a disc. That disc is like a coin standing on edge—if you roll it and it rolls true you will only see the edge of the disc-shape as it rolls away, like the illustration on the left, below. However, if the stripe is tilted to the path of the ball, the disc-shape described by the stripe will sweep a wider path as the ball rolls, like the illustration on the right, below, presenting a visual “wobble” even though the ball is rolling true to the path.

The only way to know whether the ball was struck with a face that was square to the intended path is to observe the ball’s roll relative to the intended line. Because the ball always leaves the club face on a path that is perpendicular to the face, observing the roll to note whether or not the ball starts on the intended path will tell you if face and path were square.

Watching a stripe on the ball as it rolls will only tell you if the stripe was aligned to the path when the ball started rolling, and that is pretty useless information.

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* (italics mine)