There's always
a fad, isn't there? This year it's the belly putter. As in Paul Azinger,
Vijay Singh, and now Gary McCord and others. Typical shaft length
- 38 to 42 inches, split two-piece grip.
Where did
the belly putter come from? According to my understanding,
Paul Runyan and Phil Rodgers created the belly putter a few decades
ago. Runyan had always been one of the top putters in his day and
had a long distinguished career teaching golf, and especially putting,
in Southern California. Runyan created a split-hand grip (right hand
low) and stood fairly tall, so he had a longish putter. Rodgers stuck
it in his belly. Voila! Al Barkow co-authored Phil's book on
golf instruction, Play Lower Handicap Golf, in 1986, so as
usual Al Barkow will have to be the final arbiter on this matter of
golf history.
What recommends
it? In a word - steadiness. The point of the belly putter
is that by resting the butt of the putter against your belly, you
stabilize the pivot in the stroke. (Some people erroneously call it
the "fulcrum.") The pivot is the point above which nothing
matters. In this case, that means the elbows, shoulders, and head.
So long as your belly doesn't move about during the stroke, your pivot
will be stabilized. So, watch those hips and keep them still if you
want to be a great belly putter. How do you keep your hips still?
Don't jerk the putter but go nice and smooth and slow, and also keep
your upper torso calm. It's quick or unsteady motion upstairs that
yanks on the hips. So helping keep the hips unperturbed goes a long
way in effective use of the belly putter. There would appear to be
two separate ways to putt with a belly putter -- 1) upper torso still,
shoulderframe still, with arms and hands moving the putterhead back,
and 2) upper torso turning back and through with the putterhead so
that shoulderframe orientation moves with the putterhead's arcing.
The second appears the more difficult to manage consistently because
it has a greater tendency for head and eye movement, as the shoulderframe
motion while standing somewhat tall at address carries the head and
eyes in a curling arc unless the motion is countered in the neck (not
a sure bet at all). And the second way also involves more perturbation
on the hips, and so risks destabilizing the pivot point in the belly.
What are
the limitations? You still have to make a smooth stroke, and
you still have to aim, and there might be a distance control / touch
problem. When the belly putter yields a smooth stroke, the fixed pivot
is only partially responsible for the good fundamentals of even tempo,
effective management of putterface orientation during the stroke,
solid on-line impact, and force calibration. The belly putter probably
helps people who have problems from inconsistencies in their regular
technique on these fundamentals, when the difficulties stem from pivot
instability. There are PLENTY of golfers, pro and amateur alike, whose
main problems in putting stem from pivot management, so the belly
putter will attract many fans and always will. It seems that the belly
putter style has nothing at all to do with aiming, as in green reading,
setup, body alignment, and putterface alignment. That part of putting
is still the same old problem. Also, if you use the arms for the stroke
rather than the shoulderframe as in a pendulum stroke, the connection
between targeting and stroke movement amplitude is not as clear and
strong, whcih ought to translate into slightly less effective distance
control in general. Some golfers might not notice a difference, but
I bet in general many golfers will not have as good control with a
belly putter as they could have with a good pendulum technique and
an associated targeting routine for that stroke.
What can
we learn for other styles? In a word - steadiness. The benefits
of a belly putter show that in a conventional style, such as a pendulum
stroke with a 35-inch putter, the stability of the pivot is a VERY
IMPORTANT fundamental for consistency and accuracy. The management
of face orientation at impact depends upon it, and this feature at
impact accounts for about 75-90% of all errors in executing the stroke.
The same benefit follows in a similar manner from the true broomstick
putter, but there are problems with stroke force management for distance
control.
Where can
you get more info? On the web, I have posted a resource guide
on the PZ forum. There are some putter makers who specialize in belly
putters, like Thomas Golf, and a number of mainline putter makers
are adding belly putters to their catalogs. You can also have a clubmaker
craft you one, with appropriate fitting, or you can convert your existing
conventional putter with a longer shaft and a two-piece grip. If you
just want to surf, a Google.com search for "belly putter"
is probably your best entranceway.
LINKS ON BELLY
PUTTERS:
Here are five
new tips hot off the griddle:
1.
Make a Beautiful Stroke
2.
Putt the Sleeve Box
3.
Foto-Finish Impact
4.
Hickory Dickory
5.
The Big Gap
1.
Make a Beautiful Stroke 
Jack Nicklaus
and others have long recommended making a "commitment" to
the line. What does that mean? I think I have a fresh approach that
clears this up a little.
Targeting occurs
in reading the green, reading the putt, picking spots, seeing the
break, seeing the break point, calculating the distance, picking the
speed, aligning the body at setup for the stroke, and so on. But in
the FINAL analysis, it all comes down to the way your putterface is
pointing. That is, of course, so long as your stroke goes the same
way. If your putter impacts the ball in the stroke with the same orientation
at address and while moving squarely along the line the putter is
facing, then everything in your targeting comes down to the putterface
orientation behind the ball at address. Commit to the stroke that
is compelled by the putterface orientation, when you pull the trigger.
That's what you're watching at the start of the stroke, so make use
of it.
To do that, you
look down at the putterface behind the ball and take stock of whether
the sweetspot is directly behind the dimple you intend to hit, and
whether the flat surface of the face is square or perpendicular to
the line that connects up the sweetspot of the putter, the back dimple,
the ball's center or sweetspot, and the opposite front dimple. Your
targeting has resulted in a startline that will go this way as long
as you can make a straight, no-compensations stroke. So do it! Before
you pull the trigger, look at the relationship of the putterface and
the ball and "see" the line of the stroke you need to make.
Use the brain like a flight simulator to envision a mental practice
stroke to make sure you are visually and physically familiar with
what needs to happen. Then make a beautiful stroke.
When I say "make
a beautiful stroke," I really mean don't think, just do.
One of the biggest problems in putting is worrying about various things
as the time to pull the trigger draws near. Was the targeting done
well? Does the setup feel funny? Do I have a third-eye picture of
the hole? Did I line the logo of the ball up properly? Wasn't there
something in the technique I wanted to remind myself about? Shouldn't
I pull the trigger within just a couple of seconds of my last look
at the hole? Etc etc etc ad naseum. Forget all that. Thinking is stinking!
Relax. The putterface
orientation is the best you're going to get, so.... just "make
a beautiful stroke" and that's the best you can do. If you make
a straight stroke and it misses, then either the green got you (tough
- that's just "the rub of the green") or your read was bad.
If the read was bad, you SHOULD miss, and that is the quickest way
to learn to concentrate on getting the read better and the putterface
orientation right BEFORE pulling the trigger.
Well, you say,
it could also be a miss because I got the distance control wrong.
That may be, but don't blame a nice blank mind and the notion of just
making a beautiful stroke for bad distance control. Bad distance control
comes from poor tempo or poor targeting or failure to assess the green
condition accurately. So long as your pulling the trigger follows
smoothly onto your completion of your targeting, then just make a
beautiful stroke from your putterface orientation and let distance
control take care of itself. A beautiful stroke has nice smooth tempo,
and the steady consistent tempo combines with targeting and green-speed
appreciation to give you excellent distance control. So once your
targeting is complete, you've got the distance control staged on the
launch pad ready to go. What's to think about at ths point?
In fact, there
ought to be a fairly clear boundary in your mind between the targeting
/ stroke planning, on one hand, and the execution of the stroke, on
the other. There comes a point when targeting must stop, and you switch
out of "Target Mode" into "Stroke Mode." The notion
of "Stroke Mode" precludes second guessing and brands mid-stroke
compensations as the "juvenile delinquents of too-late planning"
they really are. In Stroke Mode, just make a beautiful stroke.
So, once you have
the putterface orientation at the end of your targeting, putting is
wonderfully mindless. Just make a beautiful stroke. Anything more
complicated than that is less likely to work as well.
2.
Putt the Sleeve Box
At address, a
tip to help orient the putterface and to return the putterface square
for impact is to imagine that the ball lies at the bottom of an otherwise
empty sleeve box, so the putterface is placed behind the flat square
of the bottom of the box, and the long dimension of the box is pointed
at the target. You task is to putt the ball squarely out of the opening
of the imaginary box.This tip is especially helpful for short putts.
3.
Foto-Finish Impact
Returning the
putterface square for impact is one of the most important fundamentals
in putting. This requires pivot management, which usually means a
still head-neck area in the stroke, but there's a lot more to it as
well. A little tip that helps is to be sure you take stock of the
orientation of the putterface just before you pull the trigger so
that you can successfully return it to square. Try taking a mental
"snap shot" of the orientation. If you take a mental snap
shot of the putterface behind the ball, you can "leave the snap
shot behind on the ground" in place of the putterhead once the
stroke begins on the backstroke's takeaway. Then you have a perfect
template of the putterface orientation to assist your hand-eye coordination
in making it happen. Once the putterhead return to impact, envision
the real putterface assuming the position of the "snap shot"
an instant before contact is made with the ball. If the putterface
doesn't "snap" back into its original orientation, you goofed
and the putt won't go where you intended for it to go without some
very timely luck.
An alternative
to this is to watch for an "after-image" of the putterhead
right as the backstroke begins, and use this to guide the return stroke
into square impact.
4.
Hickory Dickory
If you need a
reminder of a good smooth tempo in putting, well, hey -- you have
one right at your fingertips on every green: your putter! Tests
of top PGA Tour putters show they have a very consistent tempo for
all strokes of around 1.8 to 1.9 seconds from start to finish. That's
pretty close to one full second from top of backstroke to top of follow-through.
This is the only section of the total putt motion that corresponds
to pendulum-like motion (the putting takeaway starts from a dead stop
at address, while a pendulum motion starts from the top of a backstroke).
Did you know that
the definition of one second (before atomic clocks) was the amount
of time it took for a rod one meter in length to swing from side to
side as a pendulum? This is the "meter stick" that was formerly
stored in a vault by French physicists as a standard of time. A meter
is 39.37 inches in the English measurement system.
As it happens,
a "standard" 35-inch putter acts very much like a meter
stick when pinched lightly at the top of the grip with thumb and forefinger
and allowed to swing like a pendulum. Try it and count out "hickory"
as it swings from one side to the other, and then "dickory"
as it swings back. The putter swings at about one full cycle every
two seconds or from side to side in about one second. That's a metronome
setting of 60 beats per minute or 1 beat per second. Nick Price's
stroke has been timed at 65 beats per minute -- pretty close to a
nice calm heartbeat rate.
A related tempo
thought is "one potato, two potato" starting from address.
Used with a 2-second total stroke, the takeaway to the top of the
backstroke corresponds to "one potato" with most of "potato"
being the putter's coasting to a stop at the top. The pause before
"two" is the silent falling back of the putter in a gradually
accelerating freefall and "two" is the moment of impact
right at the bottom of the arc. The second "potato" is the
follow-through coasting to a stop, but I just leave that part out
and go with "one potato, two" as the tempo thought.
If your putting
stroke is one where you allow the putterhead to do the work and use
a "hitless" stroke without voluntary muscle action to accelerate
the downstroke, then your stroke should conform very closely to the
motion pattern of a free-falling pendulum. That's what your putter
shows you -- a hitless pendulum tempo. You should also notice that
the total time of the pendulum swing does not change even though you
make the length of the backstroke shorter or longer -- the longer
free fall just gets going faster since it falls further, and so all
sizes of strokes take exactly the same time. There is really only
ONE hitless tempo, though, because gravity is always exactly the same.
Any time you feel like taking a look at a near-perfect putting tempo,
just remember that one of the 14 clubs in your bag is a metronome
set just right!
5.
The Big Gap
Traditionally,
golfers place the putterhead directly behind the ball at address,
with just a tiny gap between the putterface and the back of the ball.
But that conflicts with the sound advice to play the ball forward
in your putting stance so that the stroke gets back to the bottom
of its arc before making contact. The bottom of the arc is in the
middle of the stance, but the ball is forward -- usually about two
inches, or opposite the heart or lung and not the sternum. Placing
the putterhead also forward of the bottom of the arc creates a problem
-- either the putter's sole has to be a little higher off the turf
than otherwise (because farther forward in the up-going part of the
arc of the stroke) or the backstroke will start into the turf. If
the latter, you will have to make some mid-stroke adjustments with
your body (probably the wrists and elbows) to get a smooth takeaway.
One common trick is the forward press, which reorients the stroke's
takeaway before it starts so it goes flat back and not downward back
from this forward starting position.
Since in my book
a forward press is not a good trade (rhythm by giving up putterface
orientation security), I'd just as soon forget the forward press,
but I want the ball forward. So, I just place the putterhead down
at the bottom of the arc in the center of my stance. This creates
a BIG gap (about two inches, or three fingers wide) between the putterface
and the back of the ball!
Not to worry though
-- make lemonade instead! The GAP shifts the emphasis from the moment
of impact at the back of the ball to a more spread-out focus on the
stroke-in-time as it moves through the ball on line. The Gap, in other
words, shows you the line of the stroke more than it does the point
of impact. And, as it happens, that's better!
Plus, by starting
the putterhead at the point where the stroke ought to return to vertical
at the bottom of the stroke arc, you have a better chance of having
your stroke actually return to vertical as planned. This is true for
a number of reasons.
