We’ve all been there. That round where everything goes just right. The perfect drive followed by that pitching wedge that settles 10 feet from the flag. You mark your ball as everyone that is outside of you takes their first putts. You take your time and get a good read on the break, you visualize the line and line up the putter head and stroke that perfect putt towards the hole. You watch it roll along the line, breaking perfectly towards the hole, only to have it stop breaking in the last few feet and roll 3 feet past. You confidently walk to the cup to tap in your par putt knowing you gave it a great run. You line up again, and tap in the 3 foot putt only to have it break below the hole and lip out again. You tap the ball in from the two inches away that it settled and walk off the green frustrated at a ‘horrible’ three putt. And so it begins.
There is nothing, and I mean nothing worse than holes like this for a golfer’s confidence. To cover 400 yards in two gorgeous shots only to take 3 to finish the last 10 feet will kill a game faster than you can believe. Overcoming the first 3 putt is always tough, but when a string starts going, it’s even harder. In my last round, I netted a monstrous 39 putts. That’s about 7 strokes worse than usual, and they weren’t even that hard of putts to start with. I had a long 40 footer on the 4th hole that should have been an easy par, but I tried to just “lag it close” and ended up leaving it about 10 feet short. I told myself to, “Be aggressive next time and that won’t happen again.” So I was. I pushed on through the next 6 holes before I did it again on the 11th. Long first putt, over 50 feet, which I again, left short by over 10 feet. “Gotta get the next one to the hole.” So on the 12th, I left myself a manageable 30 footer for birdie, which ended up going 10 feet past the hole, because I “had to get it there.” I then went into salvage mode and started aiming at a larger target to prevent another 3 putt and my chances of score well were done.
As I covered last week, putting is made up of three parts. You need to have all three parts working well to be successful. You need to read it, roll it and hole it. When you fail to do any of the three, your game is going to suffer. In my case, I had the read, I had the roll – most of the time, but I wasn’t able to hole it. By the end of that 4th hole, with 2 lip outs and that horrible three putt, I had all but given up on my putter for the day. Keep in mind, I had a solid 2 putt on 1, another on 2 and another on three. It wasn’t a bad putting round yet, it just wasn’t spectacular. That three putt on the 4th hole completely changed my mindset about my putter and it was all moving downhill from there. The question is, how do you stay positive about your putter when it starts costing you strokes.
First, go back to your routine, no matter what. Practice how you putt, and how you set up to putt. If you are a ball marker, ALWAYS mark your ball, even on practice putts. If you are a 2 practice stroke person, take two practice strokes. If you like to read the putt from both sides of the hole, do it quickly, but do it. You paid for the round, play your round. Never break your routine once you have it established. If you have a bad hole, your routine may snap you right back on track on the next one. It’s just like a bad drive or a chunked wedge – you don’t just stop practice swinging all your clubs when a full swing goes wrong – so don’t do that with your putter either.
Next, keep everything the same until you see a pattern in the results. Don’t let one bumpy green or misread on a putt destroy your game. We all misread or mishit something at some point, so there’s no point in killing yourself over it. If you leave one short, that’s ok, just go back to normal on the next putt. If you start to leave everything short, you’re probably on a slow set of greens and you need to pick up the pace a bit. Give yourself 3 or 4 greens to make up for that, especially if you are playing a morning round where they may still be damp. Also, never depend on someone else’s line for your putt. If your balls are right next to each other and there’s no break on their putt, but you see it, play the break as you read it, not as their putt that didn’t go in rolled. At least you can blame your read for the miss rather than it, “Not doing what their putt did.”
Lastly, one shot does not ruin a round. Everyone, even the tour professionals hit crappy shots during a round. Realistically, if we didn’t, we would shoot an 18 under par score and that’s never happened before. The issue with putting is that is seems so close, you we need to remember that the target gets so much smaller. For example, on a drive, we have a 100 foot target to hit at. On approach, we have about 65 feet to shoot at. Putting, we have about 3 inches. The margin for error is much smaller with putting, so even if we hit a great shot and miss it by an inch, it’s a tap in at that point. Don’t start going back to a lag putt mentality and make the target bigger because that will just lead to larger misses. If anything, tighten up your target to a half of the hole and push to make it. The smaller the target, the smaller the area you have to miss it.
Bad putting doesn’t have to ruin your game, but it certainly can if you let it get into your head. Some days it just doesn’t matter what you do, the ball just won’t find the bottom of the cup. Other days, you’ll find the opposite where you just can’t miss from inside 10 feet. That’s where golf is won and lost, inside 10 feet. So, put down the, “Need to buy a new putter talk,” and go work those 10 foot putts. Your confidence will be back in no time and so will those lower scores.
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