Dear Friends,
Summer is in its last month, and the tour majors are over with some
surprising results. With the coolness of fall
not too far ahead, what can
you do to get ready to enjoy the best
days of the year for golf?
The subjects of this newsletter are all related to what we saw in the
majors and the time of year. 1) Set-up
routine - getting you through hard
times. 2) The perils of the forward
press and the woes of Tiger in 2003.
3) The most important shot in golf -
it depends!
1) Set-up routine - getting you through hard times
If you have had a good summer of play, stop reading here. Just skip to the
next point and keep doing what you are
doing. If you have had ups and
downs, then read on.
When most of us have a few bad swings or bad holes, we begin to change
things in our swings. Sometimes we make a
few better swings, but
inevitably things seem to get worse. Finally,
often quite strangely as a
kind of cruel joke, we give up on the
round, stop making any real effort,
and the ball starts flying long and
true again after it is too late.
What's going on?
If you have a swing that works on the practice tee and have a set-up
routine for all your swings, including
putting-especially putting-then you
should focus on the routine and forget
about the results. This is what
sometimes happens at the end of a bad round
by accident when we mentally
throw in the towel. We stop thinking and
trying to fix things. We take all
the pressure off ourselves. We go back
to the swing we have grooved on the
practice tee.
The lesson is easy to say but hard to do, especially under pressure, but
it works. Focus on going through your
normal routine step by step, not
swing gimmicks or results. Think in the
present tense just about the
routine, not about past swings or future
results, even the result of the
shot you are currently making! This will
get you through rough times. And
when things are going well, it will keep
the good things going.
The ups and downs and recoveries of Mike Weir this year in his great win
at
the same each time. The consistent
tempo throughout all four rounds was
remarkable. He had it going for three rounds
at the PGA, but then had 5
bogies in a row on the first five holes of
the last round, dropped from -1
to +4, and was out of it. But he stuck
with his routine, and at least
stopped the bleeding, playing the rest of
the round even par. It is not a
dramatic story of a great comeback and was
certainly very disappointing
for him, but it was not the total
disaster that seemed to be on the way,
like Vijay Singh's 79.
The point for us is this. If you have a routine and a swing or stroke that
works in practice, you can get back to it
if you simply stick to your
routine and think about nothing but that.
2) The perils of the forward press and the woes of Tiger in 2003
Four tour wins are a career that most would envy, and Tiger won four times
in 2003 (as of this writing). But no
majors and a very bad performance at
the PGA fell far short of Tiger
standards. Dr. Putt was able to watch all
of the coverage of the early rounds of
the PGA on TNT, which was pretty
much the Tiger show. Even though that
was not fair to other players who
were playing better, it was interesting
because it allowed us to study a
struggling Tiger, a Tiger who played early on
Sunday and who played all
four rounds over par.
Three observations. The first one has to do with his
putting technique,
and the second has to do with all the
talk of late about what is wrong
with Tiger. Dr. Putt will save the third
observation for the next section
of this newsletter.
Tiger has a set putting routine to which he is quite faithful.
See the letter on Tiger's routine at "Dear Dr. Putt" at
http://www.drputt.com/deardrputt/putting-routine2-Tiger.php
But if you have watched closely over the years, he sometimes adds a
forward press with his hands to trigger the
backswing. It is not
consistently the same, even for the same length
putts. When this press is
small and not noticeable, Tiger seems to
be at his best. When it is
biggest, he seems to be putting his worst.
The press seems to be opening
up his putter face a bit.
Consequently, his misses seem to be more often
to the right.
The lesson for us is that any independent action with the hands is a
dangerous thing in putting-even for Tiger. A
forward press can undo all
the careful alignment we have worked so
hard to create.
So find some other key to begin the stroke! For Dr. Putt it is rotating the
head and eyes back from the hole to the
point of focus on the green just
behind the ball and saying the word
"focus" in his mind. Then the
shoulders start tilting or rocking with the
hands doing nothing but going
along for the ride.
Second observation on Tiger--what's wrong? The answer
the commentators
give is that he is fighting his swing
and seems to have lost confidence in
it. Tiger says that he is having a
hard time getting the body to move in
sync with his arms and shoulders. Dr.
Putt will not add to the cacophony
of unsolicited advice for Tiger. He is
paying a lot of people a lot of
money for that already! Maybe he should
just relax, have a little more fun
while playing, and not try to force
things to happen on every swing,
adding correction to correction. Oops,
guess Dr. Putt did offer advice!
3) The most important shot in golf - it depends!
Back to Tiger to illustrate this point. Tiger scored
far better in the PGA
than he struck the ball. Missing
fairways, missing greens, uncontrollable
flying wedges, he somehow managed to keep
it no worse than 74. Tiger was
the personification of grinding it out.
All his stats were far worse than
the field except putting, where he was
twelfth. Even that was a little
misleading because he had so many one putts
after a chip, or rather a blast
from that wire-like eight inch rough.
Lesson? Putting can save you from disasters, but it is
not always the most
important shot in golf. It depends on the
course and it depends on the
ultimate goal. (Dr. Putt always tells his
students that the universal
answer to most questions is "it
depends.")
Most of the time on courses most of us play, chipping and putting are the
keys to good scores. Why? Because we
miss most fairways (like Tiger did in
the PGA) and most greens (like Tiger
did again). Most of us would be very
happy with scores between 72 and
74! For us, preventing disasters results
in a good round. Obviously, Tiger
wants more than that for what he would
consider a good round.
Nevertheless, on the PGA tour most weeks, chipping and putting are the
keys because missing a few extra
fairways are no big deal if the player
has a shot to the green. But when one
has a rough of 6 to 8 inches,
missing a fairway almost always costs a
stroke. So under those conditions,
hitting fairways is the most important
thing, assuming that one putts
reasonably well. To put it another way,
players on courses with brutal
roughs are far more likely to lose a
stroke by missing the fairway than by
three putting.
Remember to check the "Dear Dr. Putt web site" for all your putting
questions - a search feature allows you to
look up almost any subject you
like.
Go to http://www.drputt.com/deardrputt/deardrputt.php
Dr. Putt has now indexed past newsletters, so check back there if you
missed one. They will also come up using
the search feature. They are
linked at the bottom of the "Dear Dr.
Putt" Webpage. Or you can go to them
directly at
http://www.drputt.com/Newsletters/
This summer has brought a lot of great questions from many of you and some
really moving thank-you notes. Many are
discovering that knowing where you
are aiming your putts and then being
able to actually hit them in that
direction transforms putting into a much more
creative and satisfying
experience. As most of you know, the EOB
system really does work!
Go to http://www.drputt.com/overview.php
Dr. Putt wishes you great playing weather in the fall weeks to come.
Warmest regards,
Dr. Putt