When I was a kid, putting was the strongest part of my game. I didn’t have unlimited access to a driving range, but the putting green was still free. So after dinner most nights I would go to the course and hit putts until the sun went down.
Now, as a 30-something living in New York City, I face the opposite obstacle. can i head to the simulator every hour of the day to work on my swing, but I’m not putting many greens in my neighborhood. So naturally I am now a much better ball shooter than a putter.
Go figure.
In recent months, I have become increasingly frustrated with my lack of fitness on the greens. What was once a great asset to my game turned into an unmistakable liability. I saw 10-footers with joy, but that eventually turned into fear. Putting it on was no longer fun.
That’s when I decided to consult one of the world’s brightest minds, GOLF Top 100 Master Stephen Sweeneyteaching the likes of Collin Morikawa, Ludvig Aberg, Joaquin Niemann and more. Check out below to see a video of our “Putting Fundamentals Bootcamp,” in which Sweeney helped me fix my putting with two simple tweaks.
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2 tweaks that fixed my power
One thing I’ve learned in my time working with some of the best teachers in the game is that they typically always start lessons the same way: check your fundamentals. No matter what element of the game ails you, there is a good bet that the root cause of your problem comes from something before you pick up the club.
That’s why you practice yours takenposture, aim and alignment are so important. When they are off, it can cause all kinds of problems in the swing or stroke.
When I went to see Sweeney, our sessions started pretty much the same way. He made me find a straight and flat putt, and I rolled several putts. That’s how he discovered that I had two setup flaws that ruined my consistency of putting.
1. Poor eye alignment
After watching me hit a few putts, and taking video of my shot, Sweeney noticed that my eyes were misaligned when I was standing over the ball. Instead of having my eyes directly above the ball, they were instead inside (closer to me) where they needed to be.
“Where your eyes are now, you tend to see if the players’ eyes are on the line of the ball, they tend to look to the right,” Sweeney said. “As the putter comes back, the putter moves a little bit in — but pretty square to where you’re pointing it.”
Because of my misaligned eyes at the installation, I was always subconsciously aiming at the right of the hole. From there, I use an inside club path to try to “draw” the ball in line, much like what I would do during the full swing.
The problem with this is that the putting stroke hits shots that are so short that these full-swing compensations do no work in the putting stroke. Instead, they just end up with poor alignment and a shot that doesn’t start the ball in a straight line consistently.
To fix the eye alignment problem, Sweeney had me bend forward a touch more to get my eyes further out and over the ball. He alluded to feeling as if you were in a crouching table, very similar Michelle Wie West at the 2014 US Open Women.
A good way to check eye alignment after this adjustment is a trick Sweeney sees used by many older Tour pros. Once I got into my stance, he held a ball directly under my eyes and dropped it. With my old stance, the ball landed about two inches into my ball position, but with the new stance, the dropped ball landed right on top of my ball on the ground.
“As a general rule, I like to see a two-putter head (width) from the ball to the toe line,” Sweeney said. “Then we’re going to bend forward at the hip until we have our eyes on the golf ball.”
Once I got my eyes on the ball more, it became much easier to consistently hit the ball where I was aiming.
2. Incorrect face alignment
Having the face of the putter lined up where you want to hit your putt is another crucial element of good power. But because of my poor setup, I didn’t do this well. At address, Sweeney noted that my putter face was aimed a good ball or two right of the cup on every putt.
“We could see on every putt a little bit of face closure,” Sweeney said. “Then we try to get that ball in line.”
This aim problem was initially caused by the misalignment of my eyes, so even when I hit the putt “right”, it was starting to the right of the hole.
Once we had my eyes more on the ball, it became much easier to get the face of the putter aligned to the center of the hole. To verify this, Sweeney showed me a practical method that involves using your phone as a training aid.
“Just go ahead and set up and aim your putter face,” Sweeney said. “If you go ahead and put the back of my phone to your putter face, and turn around and look in that line, you can see the straight face on the right side. It’s a really simple way, if you put a scorecard or another square edge against your putter face, you can see where you’re aiming.”
Before I adjusted my setup position, I was still aiming the putter face to the right. But by making a couple of simple adjustments, I could easily point the face right at the center of the hole.
