I've Got 99 Swing Thoughts but Hit the Ball Ain't One

one "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone" But Could He Putt? "Rolling the stone (rock)," or as the less hip among us call it, "putting," is arguably the most important part of the game, and the putter is the most crucial scoring club in your bag. If you don't believe me, count the number of shots you hit with each club during your last round. Go ahead. I'll wait. Depending on what you shot and the difficulty of your golf course, you probably hit your driver ten to fourteen times. If you're a fairway wood sort of person, you might have hit your 3-, 4-, 5-, or 7- wood a couple of times each. Then you probably hit 6- or 7-irons once or twice each, a few more with your wedges. You most likely left a couple of clubs in your bag, never swinging them a single time. But, if you honestly counted your shots, about thirty or more of the strokes you took in your last round were struck with the putter. If you had a phenomenal putting day, the number might have been twenty- five or twenty-six. If you gacked a few, you could have had thirty- six, thirty-seven, or even forty putts, far and away the most strokes taken with any club in your bag. Granted, a few of those putts may have been kick-ins, but nonetheless, the short club with the least amount of loft gets a huge amount of use. This should be good news. The putting stroke is the smallest motion in golf, the shot with the fewest moving parts that requires the least amount of physical exertion. All you have to do is roll the ball from point A to point B. No long, full shoulder turns; no delayed releases, full extensions, or weight shifts: you just roll the ball into the hole. What could be easier? Unfortunately, golfers tend to complicate even the simplest of motions. If you hand a child a putter and tell him to roll the ball in the hole in the fewest number of strokes, he will, with a little practice, become a pretty good putter. But if you tell the child to hold the putter with an inverse overlap grip, stand with his feet shoulder-width apart so that an imaginary vector bisecting both his big toes will run parallel to the intended path of his putt, flex his knees, bow at the hips, keeping his spine angle straight, position the ball so that his dominant eye is "behind" the ball, use a pendulum stroke initiated between the shoulder blades, keep the hands, wrists, knees, and head "quiet," accelerate the clubhead through the ball while maintaining the angle of the left wrist throughout the stroke, and don't look up until the ball is five feet away, you might as well ask the poor kid to create a cold fusion reactor. If he tries half of those things, he'll be so tied up in knots he will be lucky to make contact. And these aren't all the putting thoughts that are taught, not by a long shot. Said 2006 U.S. Open champion Geoff Ogilvy about Sergio Garcia's recent putting woes, "It looks to me like there is too much 'thinking' and not enough 'doing' going on." But if you give the kid an iPod with some rhythmic music, hand him ten balls, and tell him to roll as many as he can into the hole from fifteen feet away, he'll make three or four while he sings the chorus of the latest Pussycat Dolls tune. Give him an hour and no instruction and he'll make 50 percent of the putts from fifteen feet. In addition to the rhythmic benefits, the music is occupying the kid's conscious mind, the part that likes to tell us "how to" do things. Putting fits our music analogy better than any other part of the game, beSmith, Christopher E. is the author of 'I've Got 99 Swing Thoughts but Hit the Ball Ain't One ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307381149 and ISBN 0307381145.