Learning to read Practice greens gives you a HUGE advantage with Geoff Mangum

Golf Smarter number three hundred and forty nine, published on September nineteen, twenty twelve.

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The faster the green, the less slope you can have before that point is reached. The slower the green, or you got a tilted then you reach the point with a greater tilt.

But it's always the.

Combination of the grit speed and the slope steepness. And so if you say everybody mows their grants today to about.

Stemp nine, that limit is reached.

Around a six percent slope. And the all golf course architects.

Know this one too.

If they make seven percent slow, the golf course is going to stamp.

Tea and you're not going to have holes there.

He's just luxuriating and spending somebody else's money by design that sort of green. Because the person that owns the golf course is not really going to be able to use seven percent slope unless they get really slow grass, and that members don't like.

Slow grass, so they're always step nize or whatever.

If you inform yourself about golf course architecture, you will know that the range of steepness of slope kind of maxes out around six percent.

Learning to read the practice greens gives you a huge advantage With Jeff Mangam.

This is Golf Smarter, sharing tips and insights from golfers and golf professionals to help lower your score. It's worked for your host, Fred Green.

Welcome back to the Golf Smarter podcast. Jeff, Hey Fred, how are you, Budy?

I'm doing good.

I'm in western North Carolina outside of Klowe.

The where in Western Carolina? And what's an.

Ncwe It's it's near the Cherokee Indian Reservation on the west side of Asheville.

Noway to Tennessee.

And did you stop and teach there today or where did you teach?

Well?

I taught in Winston's that set the country Club, and now I'm headed to Atlanta to teach some friends. Down in outside Atlanta in a place called Canton, there's a golf course down there called Bridge Mill that's run by Tom Lessinger and George Killenhaufer.

My good buddy's down there.

George Killenhoffer is a long term legend in golf teaching.

He taught a lot of the people.

Oh, can we get him on the show?

Yeah, he left you.

He's the inventor. He invents suff about two or three times a week.

Wow. All right, So you are obviously not in a hotel with a direct connection here, because it's kind of breaking up. Where are you sitting right now?

Oh, I'm right outside of McDonald's. That caesar salad.

In the coffee, and it's beautiful weather.

It's a Bomby sun SETI nice clouds. But I didn't I couldn't get my Motel six to set up for you today because I'm still traveling after after we do this, we'll talk.

I gotta keep rolling.

Okay, So your signal just got a little better, and we'll keep our fingers crossed, and if this signal gets bad, we'll we'll stop recording and pick it right up and no one will ever know the difference. But let's I reached out to you a because you are so much fun to have on this show. Because in your eye because you poke sticks in my eye.

Man.

The level of detail that you go into is just a golf junkies dream, all right, you. I mean, I've never heard a short answer, and that's why I want to have you back, because the level of detail is un unrivaled, unrivaled on what you do.

We'll call it baroque. Why lots of ornamentation?

Okay, all right, we'll call it baroque. That's not the name of the show. We're not going we're going for baroque today.

We're going.

I'm sorry, that was really bad. But and if nobody has ever heard you on Golf Smarter before, why, I mean, Jeff's been on a lot. He was also a regular contributor to Golf Smarter Tips. And there's still all there, a year's worth of amazing content. And it's putting, putting, and more putting. I don't know if there's anybody in the world, Jeff, who has the encyclopedic baroque knowledge of putting that you have on putting or on Native Americans.

That's because I'm mainly disturbed.

And that's why we get along so well.

Obsessive, compulsive to the square.

And exponentially multiplied against itself several more times.

Yep, that's why we're such good friends. So the latest piece that I got from you fascinating and I think it just hits right into the heart of it on reading the pot on the practice green, right right, So do I need to have you order another cup of coffee or and and just let you go, or do you want me to ask you a specific question about where we should get started when we're on the practice putting green and how to read and well, okay, my first question is when we're on the practice putting green,

Pretty much today's green's agronomy and managed practices. There's not that big of a difference between the practice green and the golf course. They're mode the same, they're built the same, there's subject to the same chemical treatments, the same irrigations. They're in the same weather climate, sunshine and everything. It's all the same Satame grass, highly engineered grass.

So hopefully that's gonna give you a good sense of touch and pace when you're practicing, too that you can confidently take it out onto your round with you.

Well, you're just yeah, pretty much.

Don't worry about it.

People are overly concerned about the difference between the practice green to hear little stuff in golf culture, and it.

Worries them for thirty forty years.

They need to use their own eyeballs and look at things. There's no big difference between practice greens and the greens on.

The golf course.

Hadn't been for twenty years.

And so it's gonna break, it's gonna roll, it's gonna speeds. We're just fine. And so that means that once we leave the the practice green and get ready for our round, we should have confidence on on our touch and our pace when we go out and play, as you know, from what we just experienced on the practice green.

Yeah, that's what you're doing.

You're brushing up on your touch, you're brushing up on your mechanics a little bit for a straight stroke, and then maybe you mess around with getting a little confidence or something.

You know.

Obviously you've moved out of the front porch of McDonald's, yeah, and you're something's moving in there, something's playing with your wires or your headphone. But something's scraping around.

So I'll try not to touch it.

Okay, don't touch it. Okay, just put your get your hands off of that.

Okay, I actually have my car on powered up. Do you want me to turn my car off?

No?

Why is your car making No? You got to probably have the air conditioning on if you're sitting in North Carolina and your car with the windows up.

Well, I've got some piece and quiet in my little Rudyard Kipling house on my back.

Sort of a deal here, all right.

So let's talk about being on that practice green and what we can learn from it.

Sure, let's talk about reading putts.

Yes, I created a thing recently about how you do two putts on a practice green that will allow you to get a real good sense of what breaks you.

Will be facing for the rest of the day. Okay, let me say that one more time. Two little putts.

You know, five feet ten feet? Or does it ten?

I like ten feet.

The math works out better from ten feet, which I'll explain to you in a second.

But ten divide my ten is easy. Just move the decimal. Okay, to the left.

Now there's something beeping that's try I'm so distracted by these little extra noises. I apologize. I'm just a reporting guy.

I stopped it.

What were you doing?

That was the That was my little in car power unit where I take the plug into the battery the cigarette lighter and then convert.

It into a beeping noise. All right, So I.

Don't know why, baby, it's part of the river lit's find it made it.

Be ten foot putts move the decimal point.

Go okay, here you teach me. All right, here's the deal.

Most of the putts that you can actually sink are within fifteen feet, and for most people they're within ten. Everything else is basically a lag putt's going to be a two putt.

Do you have the skill for lag? Yes? Okay, now we're moved beyond that.

We want to make a lot of one putts out of fifteen footers. Yes, and now really for amateur golfers, you're really talking about ten feeting in then I didn't good from fifteen feet right now.

The second one thing you want to know is that.

Greens have.

A certain topography where for reasonable areas of size and diameter around the hole, the same flatness or plane or shape of the surface persists. Oh usually for at least three good steps away from the hall in any direction, maybe as many as five or ten paces. And the pace that we're talking about is a standard military parade pace of thirty inches, which is two and a half feet, and every four of those parade steps is ten feet.

For most putts, I mean eighty five.

Percent of them, if you're within ten feet, there's no aney contour other than a flat surface from ball the hole lots lots of times, and that's very beneficial because that means that the break is quote simple unquote You don't know how much it is, and that's what we're focusing on now.

But a.

Flat surface of a tilted slope of the green from ball all the way to the hole, without enter any funny wrinkling of the surface by hills and valleys and all that.

That presents a simple break.

And for most makeable puts in the seventy five to eighty percent of what you actually fast when you go to the golf, that happens to be the case.

And that's because the nature of.

Designing and maintaining and mowing greens. They can't chain shape all that radically, or else you have problems.

Maintain them and mowing them.

You know that old Urilco commercial that wintertime where Burl lives is riding a razor across the snowdrifts and rain.

Buzz or yeah, he was dressed as Santa Claus ears.

Of singing arel coo as there's all that. Well, that's the nature of a mowing deck of a Touro triplex more. And you can't change the the radiacing of the green surface too radically, or else you'll scout the green every time you moull it. And that can't happen because you've got a mold once a day. So the rate of change of the surface of the green is conditioned and limited by the technology, and so you happily. You face a lot of situations in machable putts where there's no

To get you so.

You understand all the breaks on the tilts that you'll be facing from all the distance inside about fifteen feet. The only assumption is that the green is actually unwrinkled between the ball and the hole.

To find unwrinkled, well.

If you take a piece of paper and you let it down on a kitchen counter and flatten it out real good, that's unwrinkled. If you lift it up in the air and stretch it tight, that's unwrinkled. If you lay it down over top of your and bend a little bit, that's wrinkled.

That's concord contoured, Okay, contract.

The word contourd means not flat and plain the way I'm using it.

Yeah, I mean I'm thinking of I'm thinking of like those mornings that the groundskeepers didn't drink enough coffee or they had a bad morning with their wife or something, and they they put the flag right at the crest of a hill. No matter what angle you're coming from, you're going up and over.

Well there there there are guidelines published by the US Golf Association about pen placements.

Is there really?

Oh yeah, and I've been I'm a greenskeeper. I've done this for you know, more than one year US that pens. So I'm not just a lawyer and a golf coach and a physicist and neuroscientists.

I'm also a greenskeeper.

Well, don't forget you're an Indian expert, and no, I'm the top Indian expert.

Sorry, look at my little puddingtone dot com, forward slash indians dot A stm L and then just drool it what I've got?

All right, it's there, it'll see it, all right.

So anyway, the the.

The guidelines of the U s g A.

Basically don't want greenskeepers to do what you just described. They don't want sudden changes of contour. They want golfers to have the opportunity, from anywhere on the green in relations to.

The whole, to send the ball to the hole.

And be able to stop it there within about two feet.

Really, that's one of the guidelines.

Oh, I wonder if these guys read that because they don't.

They don't because they're just educated, clod headed, rude individuals also called cretns.

I am c r e t I in this Okay, whatever that word is.

Yeah, And I want every golf smarter listener ever to just whenever they see the ball roll, you know, they get it to the hall and then it just keeps rolling by another five or six feet it that's against the rules.

That's right now.

There there's a physical issue the combination of green slope.

That means steepness. How steep is the tilt of the surface. The surface is flat, let's say that, but you tilted. That means it's not level.

Now, golf people on TV, they are frequently also prettons or cretence how you said, They don't know the difference between flat and level those words in the English language that we all are supposed to speak by about age three four, Flat does not mean level in gravity, it means uncontoured and plain R. Hate the word planar because of the way you stretch out the same syllable.

R are plain r.

Okay, So, but flat does not mean level.

Oh okay, now you take a CD rom it's flat, right, if you bend it, it's not flat.

Right, it's contoured.

Yeah, but if you slap it down on the kitchen counter, it's both flat and level.

So flat could be on an angle.

Right, it's tilted, but it's tilted.

All greens are. You don't make greens level. The water comes down, the water won't go anywhere. That'll drown the grass. It's called root rot. It's most common cause of problems on greens. All architects in the world not to create root rot, so they don't. They don't build flat green. It's level, Mom'm sorry, excuse me, level greens. They don't build level greens. That kills the grass.

To wait a minute, all this stuff people going, yeah, it always breaks to the mountain, it always breaks to the water.

It is.

That's not necessarily true, right, because it's about.

The golf course.

Architect must design the subsurface of the green so that it's tilted. And if it's not tilted a certain steepness, the water will just pool under the under the surface and sit there and fester, and it messes up the ecology.

Of the green system.

The ancient Athens, where I have been in ancient Athens, I'm I'm I'm working on my twenty first incarnation right now. There is a there's a there's a subway in Syntagma Square in downtown Athens, and you go down into the subway and they have a little display case, a museum case where in five hundred BC the engineers of Athens built terra cotta sewage pipe.

And the sewage pipes. There's a little placard at little fold over cardboard.

Placard in there in the case, you know, like you did the dinner party that sit here, kind of a fall over thing, and it explains that unless you tilt the terra cotta piping at least two degrees of grade or two percent of grade I'm sorry, not degrees percent of grade, the water will not build up enough velocity and momentum to clear the sludge out of the pipes, and the pipes will fill up and stop up.

All right.

So the modern golf course architects, if they don't know that going in when they start building these five million dollar golf.

Courses, they will never work again. Wow.

Okay, So they learn by hard experience that they better tilt thems under surface of the green.

They fill.

French drains in the herringbud pattern, and they collect the water.

Fourteen or fifteen inches beneath the.

Surface of the grass into a pattern and then redirect it back into the general terrain pattern of the erosion of the local train, which is typically away from the mountains.

Store it's the ponds, that's true.

Golf Course architects will play with that because they're crafty little devils, and sometimes they will tilt it contrariwise to the natural flow of the landscape in order to mess.

With the golfers and challenge them to pick up on what they've done.

They're primary function mess with.

Us, that's right, And there's a limit on how much they can do before the tree reveals itself and the gig is up. So they're subtle when they do it, but they do it on purpose. All greens complexes, they are basically structured by hand by the golf course architectures and architects, and so they pretty much decide what they want to do.

This is a question of whether.

They're skillful and and concealing their art. If you, I don't know, if you won't go into all that stuff. But you remember a couple of years ago they played well.

Wait, a minute.

You know what, I'm sorry, I don't hold that thought. Please remember, because I know I will forget, But I've also forgotten that I'm supposed to say that. This episode of the Golf Smarter Podcast is brought to you by all Right, Jeff, let's get back to your stuff, because sure, not like we're running out of time. But we don't have a lot of time left.

But we are going to do a part We're gonna do a part two.

We're going to do a members only episode. So let's take this to our limit here and then we'll come back and do a member's only episode.

Well, let me give you the diamond bullet and the forehead shot on two butts.

Okay, two putts.

You go, you find a flat area of the green that allows you to make a ten foot without running over any funny contour, and then you find a flat tilt that is about percent.

That would be a very how many because of the I was telling you that there is a physical limit on how much you.

Can tilt the green before the ball will not stay on that surface. It will always roll downhill no matter what you do. That limit is really a combination of green speed and slope the faster the green, the less slope you can have before that point is reached. The slower the green where you got to tilt it. Then you reach the point with a greater tilt. But it's always the combination of the green speed and.

The slope steepness.

And so if you say everybody mows their greens today to about stemp nine, maybe stamp ten on occasion that limit is reached around a six percent slope, And the all golf course architects know this one too. It makes if they make seven percent slope, the golf course is gonna stamp ten that he's just wasted pendable positions.

You're not gonna have holes there.

He's just luxuriating and spending somebody else's money by design that sort of green. Because the person that owns the golf course is not really going to be able to use seven percent slope unless they get really slow grass, and.

They don't like that.

Their members don't like slow grass, so they're always stimp and izes or whatever. And so the reality of today's golf course architecture of greens, which should inform every skillful golfer's mind, which I doubt that it does. But if you inform yourself about golf course architecture, you will know that the range of steepness of slope kind of maxes

The fives are rare.

Two and four percent slopes are pretty calm, and three percent is the wheelhouse core of the whole deal. Two and three and four percent are the slopes that you run into most frequently. And that's what we're about, learning the ones you run into most frequently. We're not trying to learn mathematics and physics formulas like these, ya who's from Yale teaching how to calculate with lang Lagrangians formulas in four dimensions what exactly the ball will do to

So what we want to do is to.

Bushwhack the most common putts that we actually can sink and actually run into.

And that means we really want.

To know inside of fifteen feet and specifically ten footers on two percent slope, three percent slope, four percent slope, and that sort of thing.

So here are the two putts. Will tell you that find a two.

Percent flat area of the green that you can make a ten foot put on without running across a funny contract. How do you know it's two percent slope?

That's funny? That was my next question. How do you understand? How do you say that's a x percent?

Right? To say to a two percent slope? The word percent means one hundred per one hundred.

So if you walk one hundred inches straight down the fall line, straight uphill downhill line through the hole away down the steepest direction from the hull down that fall line one hundred inches, and then compare the elevation of the grass where your foot is with the elevation higher back up that one hundred inches where the hole is. If the drop in elevation from the hull to the foot is two inches, it's two percent slow.

Well, I guess that's pretty easy.

And now how do you know it's one hundred inches that you walk downhill? Military paces are thirty inches? Three of those plus ten more inches three steps plus the one grip of a putter.

All grips of pudders on conventional putters are ten inches long. Also, your foot is about ten inches long, so three.

Inches three military paces straight downhill from the hull plus ten more inches that's one hundred inches.

The second way to.

Know one hundred inches is that most conventional putters are around thirty four to thirty five inches. If you flip three putters, you're there good enough for going to work. Now, if you're standing below the hole one hundred inches away, how do you sort of assess how different it is in elevation.

You have to imagine a string.

At the hole that you draw out kind of like a razor stripe or whatever. You draw a string level away from the hole, over top of that line that you walk down so that the string is level in gravity, and you pull it out, and then the string is poised in the air a certain elevation above the ground. And if it's two inches above the ground, that would basically sit on the top of your shoe at the toe area. That's about how the toe area of your

All right, So here's what I want to do. We need to continue this because I need to know more about the percentage and what it is. So, okay, I figured out it's two percent. What am I supposed to do with that information? I also want to know, well, no, don't even answer me, because I know that's gonna be another site and we still have we have to bring

Oh?

Absolutely, all right, then we'll record that in just a moment. But thank you very much. Is there anything you'd like to tell our general audience about getting this paper that you've uh oh yeah.

Sure, please free well send me an email and uh and say hello and ask for the papers. You can ask for the green Reading paper or PDF, a meta pdf. It's forty forty five pages long.

It's got pictures, diagrams, videos too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it does I've got my I got a little YouTube video show I did that string thing I just told you about. And you send me an email to Jeff at putting Zone and the Jeff is spelled funny. Geo starts out like George, ends up like Jeff g e oh f f at putting Zone dot com and you send me an emailop, I'll send it right back to you at three am in the morning.

And also there are there are Putting Zone certified Putting Zone instructors everywhere nowadays, aren't there.

That's right, there's one hundred and forty eight coaches and twenty countries around the world.

So if you're as enamored with Jeff's content as I am, and you want really to work with somebody one on one, you can find them and they're all listed on your putting zone dot Com website.

Correct, I have a Google map that shows exactly where they are.

And you're traveling around the country all the time doing clinics.

I swear I'm going right now.

I'm going to Kentucky to work with the University Kentucky coaches and also my friend Matt Jordan there in Lexington, Kentucky, and before Sunday, I have three more catches.

Amazing. All right, so uh, we're gonna for all the Golf Smarter members who want to continue this listening to this conversation, stay tuned because it'll be coming up next week. Jeff, we will speak with you on our next episode. Thank you so much, buddy, and go take a swig of that at McDonald's coffee.

Okay, thank you very much, And now it's.

Time for scre Zone Short Game Academy with Terry Taylor. If you have a question about your short game, click on the score Zone Academy button at golfsmarter dot com and let the experts at score Golf put a new money club in your bag. If Terry answers your question on the show, you'll receive a free score forty one.

Sixty one wedge. Better yet, click on their ad at golfsmarter dot com and you'll get ten percent off your order. And here's another reason to join golf Smarter for members, only fifteen percent off your order from score Golf. At additional five percent that could easily pay for your membership for the next few years. Terry, welcome back to our Short Game Academy. The reaction from our audience to your

That's what we're here for.

We're here to help people score better and learn more about their scoring clubs. And the only thing I have to tell you is if they're looking for a free wage, they can't get one from score Golf because we don't make wedges.

We make precisions scoring clubs.

Ooh, got me?

Okay, gotcha?

You got me? Yeah, And so we would love to give away some scoring clubs because that's what you're gonna do. You're gonna score better when you play with your score golf scoring club. And if I can be a testimony on that one, I'm loving mine. But because of my insanity of moving, I haven't gotten a chance to play. So I'm watching other people play a lot. But I want to get to these questions. And we're going to concentrate today on one question that came in from Randy Starbuck,

Well, that very question is what led me to develop the patented vesol about twenty years ago. But instead of getting into a commercial, let's talk about Randy's dilemma, because everybody has that same dilemma. And what I'm going to start with is make sure everybody really understands what bounce is. Because I get hundreds and hundreds of questions through my

So that's how confusing bounds is. Let me try to.

Clarify for this you got for all your listeners out there. If you hold up your wedge or any golf club and look at the bottom of the golf club, look right down that what I call the worm's eye view, you will see that a wedge has a downward angle from the leading edge where the soul meets the face backwards to the rear trailer edge of the soul. This

Of attack completely by accident.

That's why you're a fifteen to twenty handicapper, because you're not grooveed into the exact same angle of attack.

Be nice, I'm trying to be nice.

But the problem is is that how do you fit something that constantly changes. And I was talking to a fitter one day, and I'll divulge off into this little parable. I'm talking to this club fitter and he says, well, I like to fit Bounce. And I said, well, let me ask you this. If a guy came in for a driver fitting and his first swing he hit a highest slice. His second swing he hit a smother hook. His third swing he hit one right down the middle. His fourth swing he topped the ball, fifth swing he

And I can't fit that guy.

I can't fit him.

Yeah.

I said, well, then how do you fit Bounce when every wedshot the lie is going to be different than the one before that? And he said, wow, I never thought of it that way. So, Mandy, I'm going to tell you that the easiest solution what you're doing is to go buy a score forty one sixty one with our patented vesol which has a high bounce and a low bounce in every wedge and every soul rather and you know every one of them is designed for that particular loft.

Short of that, you know what a lot of people will.

Do is carry, you know, a low bounce club in maybe a fifty eight or sixty degree and a higher bounce club in a fifty four or fifty six. And that way, if you have a high bounced situation, you use that club. If you have a low bounce situation, you use the other one. It's not ideal, but even the big manufacturers that make these conventional old style bounces, they will tell you that's what to do. I never like turning this show into a commercial for Score Golfer

What we're trying to do.

But Randy, and like I say, back to your question, you know, my recommendation is I'd love you to try our stuff. We got one coming frequently answered your question. You can fill out the rest of the set. But you know, for the rest of you all, if you're not ready to replace your scoring clubs, and we'd love a shot at your business if you do. But if you're not ready to replace that, try to have, you know, clubs in your bag that have a variety, have a high bounce and a low bounce golf club in there.

And why would you separate them that way? And I'm sorry if this is being redundant, because it's still I don't know if even with this explanation, if I can explain to somebody simply, here's what bounces. Is there a simple answer of which is best, you know, on the higher loft and the lower loft. Well, sorry to do.

That to you, No, I mean it's not because it's a very complex topic.

It really is.

If the turf is soft, you need a higher bounce to help keep the keep the club from digging, whether it's a bunker or whether it's a chip shot or a pit shot. If and if the surf turf is soft, you're you're going to still be able to lay the club open a little bit, so you can add a little.

Loft to that fifty four fifty six by.

Laying it open and get you know, get the ball flight that you're after on that little short range shot. On full swing shots, it's not that critical, you know, because you've got a lot of club.

EDGs beat to get the ball out of the turf.

Anyway.

Uh, the only only time becomes real critical and a full swing shot is when you're playing off of a very tight, hard pan type line. A high bounce club is going to skip right in. If you hit a little a little a little behind the ball, that high

Interesting.

All right, buddy, Well listen, we will talk to you again, and we'll cover another question in a couple episodes for the next Golf Smarter episode. Thank you very much for your time and for your knowledgeable answer.

Always a pleasure. Can't wait for the next show.