For members only. Golf Smarter number three hundred and eighty three, published on May seven, twenty thirteen.
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You can make every put if your definition of making a putt is getting it started just the way you want it, and if you do, that's all you can control. After that, all you can do to root for it. It's like a relay race. Fred. In a relay race, what is your job? You have a two person race, and you go first. Your first job is to run your leg of the race the best you can. That's your stroke in putting. Once the putter head gets to the ball, that's the same thing as your hand off
of the baton. After you've handed off the baton, that's your transfer of energy from the potter head to the ball. All you want to focus on is making a good handoff. What happens if you're looking at the finish line. While you're trying to hand off the baton, it's gonna be a bad handoff. Maybe you'll drop it. And what if you don't trust the person and you don't let go after you hand off the baton, you keep running along with them and hold the baton. That's not gonna help them.
If you hand off the baton but you don't trust them and you give them a shove towards the finish line, that's not going to help them either. The off that's exactly your partner in this relay races the ball. All you want to do is make a good handoff and get it started. After that, it's the ball's job to find the hole.
That's the secret to it in Golf's game within the game. Part two with Doctor Joseph Parent.
This is Golf Smarter.
Welcome back to Golf Smarter for members only, Doctor Joe.
Hi, Fred, great to be with you again and again.
I really appreciate the additional time that you're providing for us, all because you have an Eastern wisdom about you that we like to bring with us to the golf course every time. Thank you, that was not patronizing. I really believe that.
Well, we've been doing this for a long time and I appreciate it.
Yeah, we have as do. I all right, this new book really really good. You know, if I can just do a podcast on putting every single week, I would because I find it to be so important. I mean, it's got to be right because even on the scorecard they give you two strokes, you know, for.
True, that's true when you think of what the you know what par is, it's how many shots.
It's thirty six shots on the course and thirty six on the putting green.
How many shots it would typically take to get to the green plus two for putting right, So that's half year round, right exactly.
So you know, but because of my attention issues, I couldn't do a podcast on putting every week. I got to vary the topics or I'd go out of my mind.
Absolutely. Well, there's a lot, there's you know, there's a lot more to golf to it than than just putting. But but it really is where the mental game comes in the most. And that's what I end up working with students the most on is short gaming putting.
Yeah. Well, I mean we've had people from U and I've I've always wanted to get You mentioned doctor Craig's Craig Farnsworth because I just recently we did a show on Lakina the JD the general manager there, he was on the show. I played around down there, and I would love to get doctor Craig on. And we have We've talked about aim point, We've we have Jeff Mangum.
So we talk a lot about putting because it is so critically important and I think one of the things that more I see more people struggling with than anything is reading the greens. Do you hold the putter in front of your and try to make it, you know, a plumb bob line, or do you you crawl around on the ground and you know, do these bizarre positions and reading the greens is is probably harder than stroking the ball.
Well, you know, I have a particular approach to reading greens that I think is very very helpful. And then then I have something in the in my routine that lets people get better at reading greens as they play. I think that's the really special thing that I offer. Yeah, but the starting perspective is I like to quote Jack Nicholas who said, I start reading the green from fifty yards away, and that is looking at the overall lay of the land. I start even sooner than that. I
start before I go out for the round. If it's a new course, I go to the pro shop and I ask somebody there is there any Is there any direction that almost all the greens in the course tend to break towards. For example, out in you were talking about Lakinta out in the Coachelli Valley with palm desert
and palm springs, everything breaks towards the east. They say towards India, which is the farthest east town in the valley, but it's actually breaking towards the salt and sea, this very low body of water out east of the valley. When you go to Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades where they have the Los Angeles Open, everything breaks towards the sixth green and the seventh tee, that corner of the golf course away from the clubhouse, which is way
up on a hill. So you want to know the overall lay of the land and any particular major direction that the course. We just were at the Masters. Every putt breaks towards Ray's Creek at the Masters. And if you know that it helps. It makes a difference in how you read the putts. So you start before you even get on the course. So what's the overall landscape? Are there mountains in one direction? Is the ocean in
one direction? Then you come in closer, and then you say, okay, for this particular green, where is the high point around the green? Is there? You know? Is there a creek nearby? Is there a pond to one side? And look around the edge of the green where there are bunkers. Golf course designers don't They don't want the water to run through a bunker when it's draining off the green, So the drain place will be a place away from the bunkers.
And not only that, wherever you have a bunker, people have been hitting sand out onto the green, so they've essentially been top dressing it every day. And the level of the green near the bunkers gets a little bit higher, So know that balls are going to break a little bit away from the bunkers. So this way you go from outside to end and then you get and then you start looking at the area around your putt. But you take all these other factors into account.
First, how often when you have gone into the pro shop and asked them about the general direction of where balls will will break towards. Have they ever said the
sprinkler drain the drainage? I mean because when I've I've talked to golf course architects and asked him about that kind of thing, and they said, it's always gonna there's no such thing as a flat green because it's gotta it's got a drain and it's gonna drain too, you know, I mean, do they do they make the drainage in that same direction?
Is oh? Not necessarily not. It doesn't necessarily match the overall Yeah, slope of the of the golf course. Every holes, every hole is different in that way. So so the way that it's designed, it doesn't necessarily match. But you have to take all these factors. It's almost like vectors or arrows that you say, well, i've got some of it going in that direction, and then there's this counter force going in this direction. Oh, you know, I think they even out and it's really going to be straight.
So you can work with that. But the most important thing is once you've read the green, and once you've read your putt, you make a commitment to get it started on the line that you saw. And if you roll it on the line and it doesn't do what you thought, this is where learning can come in. And this is what I teach in the book How to
Make Every Putt. I talk about the post shot routine, which is if after your putt, you made your putt, it got started and going okay, this should turn out really well, and then it turns either in the opposite direction, or it doesn't move the way you thought it would, or it goes way past where you thought or way short of where you thought. Then you say, huh, okay, I hit the putt that I thought was going to get to the hole, but it went a different direction.
Didn't I see about the slope or the grain or the direction of the break or what did I see that wasn't there? And I have what's called I have you be what's called the objective detective. So you drop your emotion about having missed the putt and you say, okay, I'm over that. Now what can I learn from this? Okay? I thought it was going to keep breaking and it straightened out. Okay, I see, So that means the fall
line was kind of in this direction. I need to remember that, so that I just put to the fall line. I don't think it's going to break across the fall line. And I talk about that in a chapter called Rivers and Fountains that talks about the pattern of how putts break uphill and downhill.
Excellent is that one of the chapters that has a QR code that we can see a video as well.
That is in how to make every put in the section on reading Green is a chapter called Rivers and Fountains, and there is a QR square or code that you can scan in to your device or smartphone and it'll take you to a video that I demonstrate, and you'll see a downhill putt that is cur curving, curving and then straightens out and doesn't keep curving, which is what downhillputs tend to do. Once they like a river, once it finds its fall line straight down towards the ocean,
it just goes straight. And then uphill putts they might go straight, but like a fountain, the water in a fountain wants to turn around and go back to the earth any direction it can. Uphill puts straight, straight, straight, and just before they get to the hole, they break across and curve away in front, so you need to be able to recognize that pattern and read the green for that.
Well, let's stay on that. Section two. Those are the bread from the new book How to Make Every put by Doctor Joseph Parrot, and it starts with the secret to reading greens, the lay of the land, take the high road. You talk about putting a scorecard over half the hole.
That's right now.
That that intrigued me. I've never heard of that before. Give me the details on that one, because I thought that was really fascinating.
Okay, well, you know, if you're looking at the whole golf hole, you don't get to focus on the high side quite so much. So let's say you have a right to left breaking putt and you're gonna put it up the hill and it's going to come back down and go in the right side of the hole. That's the place you want to be looking at for your read. So you cover the bottom half of the hole with a scorecard.
You say, I need to define bottom here are you talking.
About edge of the lower the edge of the scorecard. I'll try to describe it as I do in the book. The edge of the scorecard points straight across the center of the hole and points straight at your ball. Okay, so if it was a dead straight putt, you would hit right. The ball would hit right at the place where the scorecard is at the front edge of the hole. But you're looking at breaking putts, so the high side will be open, the low side closed by the scorecard.
And the advantage of this.
The advantage of it is you see yourself trying to put it in the high side, the effective center of the hole shifts up to the high side of the hole, and you say, that's where I want the ball, crossing the edge up there, and that gives you more room. And you know, Bobby Jones talked about this nearly one hundred years ago. He says, you know, a ball turning towards the hole is much more likely to go in, and that means coming from the high side, then a
ball turning away from the hole. And once it turns away from the hole and rolls down the low side, every inch it rolls it takes it farther from the hole. So if you roll a couple of puts at the same pace, and one curls around the hole above it on the high side, and one misses the hole below it. The putt that misses the hole below the hole is going to roll a whole lot farther away. I mean, that's why they call the high side the pro side and the low side of the hole the amateur side. Sure,
there's a reason for it. It's better try to play as much break as you possibly can and still have the ball trickle in just into the top side of the hole, the high side of the hole.
How do we amateurs misread it in the sense of not giving it enough break?
Well, almost always that's the most common thing. And I think that the way they describe putts on TV actually is misguiding. And they say, I think it's just going to you know, it's one cup out or two balls out to the right. It's really usually much much more
than that, but that's how they describe it. I was once at the Masters coaching VJ and we were standing on the green and he was putting this on the practice screen on a very severely sloping part, and I said to his caddy, you need to tell him to aim at this spot because that's really how much break is going to happen here. And he says, there is no way that I'm going to tell VJ that there's two and a half feet of break on a four
foot putt, But there was. It was really true. Wow, I said, then just tell him to play enough break for it to fall in the absolute top of the hole. And that worked for him.
Interesting.
So what happens for amateurs is they aim, you know, one or two balls to the right of the hole, but then when they make their stroke, they push the putt out towards the break or pull it across and give it more break, and then they think they did it right, and that's just going to be very inconsistent. What I would like you to do is read plenty of break and hit a straight putt right at the point where you know that you're aiming for that amount of break. Then if you've played too much break, it's
easier to gear down than it is to aim higher. Yes, so that's one of the exercises I give. I say, aim way up high, aim for tons of break, and see that it only gets within a foot of the hole. Then gear it down a couple of inches. See where that ends up. And that'll help you see how much break you can play and still get to the hole and that's the ideal amount that you one.
I don't know if this is just a personal preference thing or it's something that should be taught this way. It's just an individual When I when I'm looking at the line, uh unputting and someone says, yeah, it's just like one one cup to the right, you know, I don't. I don't aim it for that spot.
You know.
At the whole what I try to visualize is the entire line. And we talked about this earlier, the entire line that the ball will roll on, and I look for the apex. I look for the point where I think it's gonna be the highest spot and then it's gonna, you know, then start going back towards the hole. So I kind of putt to that way, to that direction.
I think that that's good. Uh. One of the dangers of that is if you if the apex is near you, you may not hit it hard enough. So again, you do want to see the whole thing. You don't need to see you see, you don't need to see the apex particularly. You can see that, but that's part of the whole path that the putt's going to take, the whole line that it's going to roll on And the most important thing you want to say is well, for it to get up to that apex where what direction
does it need to start in? You might not be aiming straight at that apex point because it may break a little bit before it gets to that high point.
Oh yeah, I mean if it's going to round off, it's definitely not exact. I can't go right to it a right angle turn.
It is not so. And you may be actually aiming further out than that apex point. But you want to see the whole path and then see what the first foot of the role is and set your putter face perpendicularly to that first foot, and then you roll a straight putt in that direction. The only question is how big a stroke you make. But you make the same stroke every time, and you roll it where the putterface is pointing every single time, no pushing, no pulling ever.
In your eyes directly you will? What about your eyes? Let let me let you answer the question instead of trying to lead you with it. Your eyes.
Tell where you can tell where your eyes are just by you know, take your putter stance and then then use two fingers to hold the tip of your putter and look down the shaft and see where it's pointing. Is it pointing straight at your at at the ball or are you most most putters, most golfers are way inside. In other words, their eyes aren't directly over the ball. They're they're away from the ball. Uh, and they're reaching out with the putter. Now, what I found is it
creates an optical illusion. You have less angles if your eyes are right over the ball, So it creates an optical illusion. And players tend to aim farther away from If you're a right handed golfer, they tend to aim to the right the further away they are from the ball. So you need to you need to have your eyes at least near the ball or hang or straight over
it in your position. And then the other aspect is if your eyes are slightly behind the ball, in other words, away from the hole, it's easier to look down the line. If your head gets ahead of the ball and your head is between the ball and the hole, you're kind of looking back down towards the ball and then over towards the hole, then back down towards the ball. Get in there behind it a little bit and you'll be looking down the line and see the ball as well a little bit.
Better and your eyes during the stroke. I know that I tend to have a tendency to like as soon as the ball. As soon as I make contact with the ball, my head starts to turn towards the hole, and that kind of strews me up.
Well, I'm going to take I'm going to go out on a limb, hear Fred, and I'm going to guess that it starts to move even before you hit the ball.
That's quite possible, I don't know.
And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it tends to move slightly before you hit the ball. And that's because we have a human tendency to anticipate. We anticipate what's going to happen, and we want to see what's going to happen, so we tend to move ahead of time. What I'd like you to do is I don't like to say keep your head still. That's a little too frozen. I want to say, keep your head steady and keep your whole posture until you
hold your finish. And then one of the chapters I have that's the end of the routine is then turn your head to track rather than lifting your head up and lifting your whole body up to turn and look. So if you leave your body where it is and just swivel your head on your neck, then it doesn't move you out of position. But if you lift your whole body up, and it's what's called coming up out of the pot, that's going to affect your stroke. So keep your body steady, keep your head steady until you
hold the finish of your stroke. Then turn your head to look.
What about looking at and looking at the ball versus looking at the hole while you're putting.
While you're putting, some people have done that. They try They tried putting looking at the hole, because it's the same principle that I talked about in the previous podcast. When you're throwing, when you're playing catch with somebody, you don't look at the ground. You look at you look at their hand or the glove.
Right when you're shooting free When you're shooting a basketball, you're looking at the rim. You're not looking at the ball.
Yeah, can you imagine a basketball player takes a good long look at the rim, bounces the ball twice, then looks down at the ground. And then shoots while they're looking at the ground. Pretty ridiculous, huh, right, that, but that's what we do when we're putting. So what I found is that we can look at the hole and ball at the same time. And here's how you do it. There are two kinds of visual inputs to your brain. One is the visual input from your eyes what you're
looking at right now. So for example, you're sitting in the studio looking at your computer right correct, Okay, Now I want you to picture yourself on the green the last time you were playing getting ready to roll the put You have yourself pictured. Yes, okay, you didn't have to close your eyes to do that. But what was in the forefront of your mind? Was it the computer anymore?
No?
No, but you didn't. You didn't lose track of where you were. See, it's like daydreaming. You you had. Your memory was the other source of input, visual input into your brain. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to use that so that we can look at the hole and the ball at the same time after you take your address. This is part of in the section called the best putting Routine Ever. Excuse my modesty,
but I believe that that it's true. The best putting routine ever, that part of that routine is, after you've taken your address, you take a good long look and imprint the picture of the of your putt, the distance to the hole, how uphill or downhill it is. You look at the whole thing for two or three seconds. I like to have a ton of players to look for three seconds at that and imprint that image in
your mind. When you look back down to the ball, take half a second to bring that image to mind, to switch foreground and background so that you're using your memory as and you put into your memory of that image of that picture, and you roll it into the picture. So you're looking toward the ball, but you're seeing the hole at the same time, in the same way that you were just looking toward your computer, but you were seeing the green that you were putting on. I like it. It works.
Oh yeah, I like this a lot. I like that.
I can. I can.
I was visualizing doing it while you were saying it.
I like that. And that chapter has a QR code at the end. You can scan and it'll show you. It'll show you the exercise of me standing with a ball in my hand looking down at a ball on the ground, I look over at the hole for a few seconds, I look back down to the ball of the ground, and then I throw the ball while I'm
imagining and remembering the distance to the hole. Of course, we used the cut where it went in and then and then I look back down to the ball and I do the same thing with the putter and it does go in. That that's that's one cut. So that worked pretty well.
And how many times did you have to do that shoot until when the ball went in?
Well, I had to do a few throws. But after I hold it, then I only did one putt and it went in.
It works, So yeah, you opened the Let's talk about the best putting routine ever. We've built it up quite a while. Let's get into it.
Okay. The first step is reading the green and once you've done that, making a commitment to your read. You take your practice strokes and you make a commitment to making the same stroke that you would And I've talked about this before, as if you were putting to nowhere. When you warm up on the green, you just roll the ball till you feel like it's coming off with an end over end, roll right off the sweet spot of the putter. That's your stroke. Use that same stroke
every single time. So you commit to your stroke. Make a few practice strokes if you want. You set the putter on your line, the putterface perpendicular to your line behind the ball, and you make a commitment. You say, I'm done with direction. That's the direction. I am rolling this ball in with my best stroke. So now you've taken care of stroke and direction once. Once you've done that in your setup, now you take your good long look.
This is the really important part. You take a good long look at the distance of your put You look back down to the ball. You take a third to a half a second to bring that image to mind, and then immediately you roll the ball into the picture using that stroke. What this does is it gets you thinking out of thinking about your stroke. You're just reacting to a target in the same way that a free throw shooter doesn't want to be thinking about their emotion.
They want to be reacting to the distance to the basket. So you're done with stroke, you're done with direction. You roll it into the picture for your distance. You hold the finish that keeps your body steady so you don't come up out of the putt, and if you want to look, you turn your head to track. It's called turn the track, and you turn your head to track without lifting your shoulders up and coming out of your posture. That's the ideal routine. And then the last part of
the best putting routine is learn from it. If it went in, congratulate yourself on doing your routine so well if it didn't do what you thought it was going to do, be the objective detective. Don't get upset, Say what did I miss about how I read that putt? Because I made the putt, the ball just didn't go in the hole, So what did I miss about the read? And then you look around and you'll get better at reading every time.
Awesome, And that kind of it brings us back to separating outcome from process, which is total doctor Joe.
Separating outcome from process, that's the whole thing that golfers most difficulties come from worrying about how the SHOT's going to turn out, and that affects everything that they do. When your job is actually just to get the ball started. It doesn't matter whether it's putting or driving or anything in between. You can't determine exactly how the ball is going to come out. Your job is there at the ball. It's to get it started. Once you get it started,
that's all you can do. After that, all you can do is root for it. So, in the same way in putting, how to make every put You can make every put if your definition of making a putt is getting it started just the way you want it, and if you do, that's all you can control. After that, all you can do to root for it. It's like a relay race, Fred. In a relay race, what is your job? Your job? If you have a two person race and you go first, your first job is to run the race of the race the best you can,
and that's that's your stroke. In putting, Okay, once the putter head gets to the ball, that's the same thing as your hand off of the baton. After you've handed off the baton, that's your transfer of energy from the putter head to the ball. All you want to focus on is making a good handoff. What happens if you're looking at the finish line while you're trying to hand off the baton, what's gonna happen?
You're gonna miss the person you're handing it off to.
Problem, it's gonna be a bad handoff. Maybe you'll drop it, okay, And what if you don't trust the person and you don't let go after you hand off the baton, you keep running along with them and hold the baton. That's not gonna help them. No, if you hand off the baton but you don't trust them and you give them a shove towards the finish line, that's not gonna help them either. That's exactly so you don't want to treat your your partner in this relay race is the ball.
All you want to do is make a good hand off and get it started. After that, it's the ball's job to find the hole.
Go find a hole.
Jo describe that when you roll a good putt, people describe it. They say that putt made it look like the ball was hunting for the hole. Yeah, don't that's that's a common expression in golf.
Oh yeah, I mean how many times the ball went and I'm like, I knew that was going in from the time I set up. I mean, just I felt it, I saw the line, I lived the line. It just I had no doubt this putt was going in.
We have those moments and they're they're great. And and you'll notice that when you have those moments, you don't think about mechanics. Nope, you don't think about your technique. All you do is you see it and you respond to it and you get it started, and you go, my job's done. Yeah.
But then you then you force yourself to try to recreate that. That's when you when problems begin.
Yes, trying to recreate that. The only way you can recreate that is to get better at visualizing, because what you just described was you saw it going in before it ever did. And I have a chapter in how to make every put called already in the hole. That's what you want to see. You want to see the ball already in the hole. And then you're just going up and doing a replay.
And hear the happy sound.
You know what, the happy sound doesn't always show up. The happy sound I want to hear is wow, I love the way I got that putt started. And if you say that every time you putt, you're going to be a great cutter, because if you're not holding a lot of them, it's just about reading. And you'll get better at that as long as you keep making the putt you intend to make, you know.
Wrapping this up in section seven, it's the title of it. Sounded familiar.
Yes, getting better all the time? M h. That's right. That's what you want to be doing when you're playing. And that's what the post shot routine that I teach really does. It helps you get better all the time because if you didn't make the putt, if you feel like you know something got in the way, you need to be able to identify that and make your routine better.
If you did make your putt but the ball didn't do what you thought it was going to do, then you have to work on your read and your judgment of speed and that can get better. And what I talk about, what I really like, is a chapter called skills practice versus performance practice. If you want to improve your putting, there are two aspects to it. One is skills practice, and that is doing little drills that make
you better at each part of putting. For example, if you want to get better at hitting the ball off the sweet spot, then you need to put You could even put contact paper on the face that shows where the was, but you can you want to roll putts until they all feel the same. You don't need to do your full routine for that, you just want to You can line up putts and roll one after another after another. Same thing with using the line on the ball to see if you're rolling an end over end
and not hitting a glancing blow. These are all skills practice. But when it comes to performance practice, you want to practice the way you're going to be playing, which means one ball and putting to a hole and going through your full routine each time. Don't get careless, don't shortcut it. Do performance practice and give yourself target. So can I put from from different distances to ten different holes on the practice screen or from ten different places to one
hole on the practice screen and not three putt? That's my goal, and I'm going to do my full performance, my full routine, just the way I would on the golf course. To do that, that's that's performance practice. Those are the that's the difference between the two.
And it all really leads to whatever book you know you're going to write, whatever book we're going to read, it's all going to lead back to confidence.
Confidence. That's what my teacher said, had a favorite expression. Confidence what every golfer needs and and really putting boils down so much more to confidence than just about any other stroke, because it's not that complicated a stroke. And if you're not confident, then you're going to second guess your read. That's not going to help you because you're gonna have doubt about it. Once you have doubt about your read, you're going to you're doomed maybe push or
pull or be hesitant on your stroke. If you're not sure about your stroke, you're going to get very If you're not confident in your stroke, you're going to get very mechanical, and that's going to take you away. There's going to be no flow to your stroke. You want. I have a lot of flow to your putting stroke.
And and if you're not confident about your feel then you're going to go numb, and you're going to hit putts with different at different paces, and you're always going to be guessing and and the sense of well, I'm not sure what's going on, and the feeling of confidence is a completely different thing. The other thing is if you're not confident, then some fear can come in. And if fear comes in, then you're going to end up
with the word that I don't like to use. So it starts with a Y, it ends with an S, and it has four letters. And I have a bonus chapter at the end of the book in case you have yes the yips don't. If you get the book, please do not read that last chapter if you don't already have them. You don't want to be thinking about it.
You know, it's funny because you have.
Them, that last chapter is for you and it will cure them.
Well, that is so funny because I was going to say. The last thing I was going to say to you was Okay, So is it worth me asking about the yips? Or is that just a whole nother podcast episode.
I don't We're not even going to put it on the podcast, Okay, I don't want everybody listening to it.
Okay, fine, No, then we're not going to do it.
Special special special code to unlock that podcast unless you unless you swear that you already have them, you're not allowed to listen to it because because you don't want to be thinking about that kind of thing. You don't want to be thinking about what could go wrong on the green in any part of your golf game. You want to be thinking about what you do want to
happen having a positive attitude towards it. So, whether it happens or not, if you have a positive attitude toward it, you're going to have a better chance of producing what you're picturing because, as in one of my chapters in Zen Golf, you produce what you feel.
Right right well again, the book is called How to Make Every Putt, The Secret to winning Golf's game within the game. Doctor Joseph Parent once again the author of the amazing Zen Golf and now How to Make Every Putt. Thanks so much for your time. It's great to talk to you again, and as always I wish you continued success.
Thanks Fred, great to be with you. We'll do it again soon.