It should be obvious to any golfer that to quickly shave strokes off your game, putting is the first place to look. Hence the saying “drive for show, putt for dough”. Yet I see amateur golfers spending all day every day on the driving range, totally neglecting their short game. This is a fact I will never understand.
Look at the math, in any given round about half of your strokes are placed on the greens. Why not do everything you can here first to improve your game? While amateurs might be hesitant to put forth effort to really improve their fundamentals on the greens, I’ll share with you a quick fix I learned a few years ago that will immediately lower your rounds.
The two biggest challenges in putting for amateur golfers is correctly lining up their putts and not breaking their wrists during a stroke. Having been a scratch golfer in my younger years, these issues were never a problem for me. However, once golf wasn’t my primary focus in life and I began to play less my handicap immediately went up. Guess which area eroded the quickest? You got it, and the aforementioned reasons were exactly why. I tried out a long putter, disregarding the initial heavy abuse from my friends, and was extremely delighted with the results. I chose an Odyssey two ball putter because it provided a heavy weight that made the “pendulum” motion of my stroke easy to achieve. I also took a sharpie to my club and drew a line down the middle of the two white circles to give me an obvious and clear way to line up my putts.
Check out the image and link of what my putter looks like.
Soon after my friends’ behavior turned to anger as I returned the putting of my former years and relinquished them of all their money! One of them has even made the transition now, using the exact same club as me and seeing the same results. I strongly urge any golfer out there to give long putters a shot because, despite their bad rep, the benefits are way too hard to pass up.
Happy putting,
