On average, putts can make up 40% of our stroke count per round. The putting stroke is the simplest motion in golf, and arguably the hardest golf skill to do consistently under pressure. The reason for that isn’t mechanical—it’s mental. Your stroke doesn’t change much from putt to putt, but hills, tiers, elevation changes, and the fact that you’re putting on live grass means there are more demands on your mental skills than mechanical ones.
In Stop Thinking. Start Putting, I covered two types of memory. Procedural memory (intuitive), which records how your body feels when putting. Declarative memory (analytical), which lets you process data and remember mechanics. Both matter. How and when you use them can make a vast difference in how many putts you hole.
There are dozens of books and hundreds of videos promising shortcuts—do this and you’ll never miss a three-footer again. I’m skeptical. There are a handful of distinct systems pros use—AimPoint, plumb-bobbing, green maps—and they’re all precision and calculation approaches. Useful for figuring out where to aim if you take the time to learn them. Not much help with pace.
Thinking gets you to the ball. Feel gets the ball in the hole.
Here’s my process.
When I’m close enough to see the ball on the green, I start reading. First, with open awareness—I widen my field of view and take in the entire complex. Where are the highest points, the lowest? I notice tiers, hills, valleys.
Then I narrow to focused attention, zooming in on the cup and the ball, noting where they sit within that complex. I spend extra time looking beyond the hole, reading the topography there as well. I ask questions. Will it break left, right, or run dead straight? Uphill, downhill, or level? What happens if it goes past the hole? By now I have a complete picture of what the ball needs to do to go in.
Next, I position myself halfway between the ball and the hole, on the low side, about four paces off the line. This position allows my mind to process both pace and line. From there I can read the degree of break and the severity of elevation change. My mind now has quality data, and it’s already at work calculating line. To understand pace my mind needs to know how far the putt has to travel, which it also gets from this vantage point—something that can’t be reliably seen behind the ball or behind the cup.
Next, I stand behind the ball and pick a target—a spot on the green where I want the ball to cross. I incorporate what I learned in the analytical phase, and in my mind I paint a wide, bright yellow line working backwards from the hole to the ball. That solidifies the line: the path the ball needs to take to go in the hole.
Important safety tip. The human brain prefers curves to straight lines, so when reading putts we are constantly looking for slopes. Sometimes they’re not there.
I step in, set up, and ask myself: can I make this putt? My answer is always yes. Calculations are complete. My analytical mind has processed hundreds of bits of data in service of one job: start the ball on a straight line toward my target. All putts are straight. Yes, I said it. We don’t hit curved putts. The contours of the green, the grain of the grass, the wind, gravity—those control what happens after contact. Not the stroke. From there I take one last look at the target and imagine the ball dying into the cup on the proper side to help me feel the pace.
The only job that remains is to make the switch. The switch from analytical mind (declarative memory), which collected the data, to intuitive mind (procedural memory), which knows how to use it and produce the smooth motion and solid contact I’ve made tens of thousands of times.
How do I make that switch? For me—and it’s different for everyone—it’s that final look and imagining the ball entering the hole, which is the whole point of putting. I let go of any mechanical thoughts and hand control to my intuitive mind. With full trust, I begin the motion.
Leave a Reply