The Art of Putting Read online

  was averaging right around par on southern Missouri’s country-club courses.

  When it came time to think about college, I was considering places that were consistent with my

  Christian faith—like Harding College in Arkansas and David Lipscombe in Nashville. I wasn’t really

  thinking about Division I golf, but Rich Poe at the University of Missouri recruited me and offered me

  a little scholarship. It was a chance to save my parents some money, so I drove 200 miles north to

  Columbia to go to school at Mizzou.

  The best part about Missouri was that the team wasn’t that good and Coach Poe had a great

  relationship with a lot of the other golf coaches. The lineup wasn’t so strong that a freshman like me

  couldn’t make the traveling team, and we got to bump heads with teams like Oklahoma State, Texas

  and Houston on a regular basis. In fact, I tell high school golfers all the time that it’s not a bad idea to

  go to a college where you can play a lot, because it’s the only way to find out if you can really

  compete at the top level.

  I got to find out right away, because our conference was loaded. Steve Jones was at Colorado,

  and Oklahoma had Andrew Magee and Greg Turner. Willie Wood was playing at Oklahoma State, and

  Scott Verplank would get there my senior year. Houston had a whole bunch of guys who eventually

  went pro—Billy Ray Brown and Steve Elkington—and Brandel Chamblee and Mark Brooks were at

  Texas. We didn’t play any of the good West Coast teams, but we played in some competitive, top-

  flight tournaments.

  In my sophomore year, I finished in the top ten at the conference tournament, which was both a

  good and bad thing. It was great to know that I could compete with some of the best college players in

  the world, but I could definitely see that there were guys who could do things with a golf ball that I

  couldn’t do. Ever since high school, my goal was to be a tour player. For the first time, I realized it

  wasn’t going to be so easy.

  Before my junior year, Mr. Lanning sat me down and told me that I was a good putter, but that I

  really needed to learn the mechanics of the putting stroke both to improve my stroke and be able to

  understand what to do when my stroke was off. I spent that whole summer going over Mr. Lanning’s

  complete checklist of basics—stance, setup, grip—the things I’m going to show you in the pages of

  this book. You could compare pictures of my putting stroke after that summer of work with the way I

  putt now and they’d be identical. The method is simple and solid, and I’ve never had any reason to

  change it. I’m lucky and grateful to have gotten such an in-depth education in the art of putting at such

  an early age. It’s the same stuff I’m now teaching every day to players of all levels.

  My game took a big step forward in my junior year. I was named second-team All-America, and

  seeing my name on that plaque, with a lot of guys who are still earning their living playing golf today,

  was a proud moment in my life. I was also starting to shoot some of the low scores you need to

  compete at the top level of the game. I finished second in the conference tournament in my junior year,

  to Andrew Magee, and second again in my senior year, to Scott Verplank. The guys who were beating

  me were serious, talented, tour-ready guys, so I felt like I had a chance to make a living at the game.

  We won the conference tournament as a team my senior year—the first time Missouri had ever won it,

  and the first time in forever Oklahoma State hadn’t won it. I knew I wanted to try pro golf, but we

  didn’t have the money as a family for me to get some kind of bankroll for a year on the road. So I hung

  out in Missouri that summer, playing in some local tournaments, and traveled to the U.S. Amateur at

  Oak Tree, in Edmond, Oklahoma. I lost in the quarterfinals there, then turned professional just in time

  to go back to school in the fall to finish my degree. I would have to try to make it in pro golf in my

  free time.

  A couple of my buddies were going over to Jackson, Mississippi, to play in a little pro event, so

  I went along, too. I paid my entry fee, teed it up and won the darn thing. I collected my $750 check

  and drove back home. The next week, my college coach was playing in a big PGA sectional club pro

  event, the Southern Illinois Open. I’m sure they weren’t so happy to see a college kid tagging along,

  but I went out and won that one, too. I can remember driving back with $2,000 in my pocket, thinking

  to myself, “Hey, this is the life. It doesn’t get any easier than this.” Of course, I’d find out pretty quick

  that that wasn’t exactly true.

  Once I graduated in December, I figured it was time to go out and give it a try for real. My dad

  went down to the bank and signed for a line of credit, and I signed a note with him. He gave me an old

  Oldsmobile Toronado to drive, and I shook his hand and went out to try to make my way. I started

  knocking around the mini-tours in Arizona and Texas, playing terrible and losing money every week. I

  was lucky enough to get a sponsor—a doctor from Houston who was a friend of one of my dad’s

  friends—and that took a tremendous amount of pressure off me. I could concentrate on my golf game

  instead of wondering how I was going to pay my bills at the end of the month. With a little financial

  breathing room, my wife Elayna and I were able to get married in 1987. It was just the two of us, our

  $300-a-month apartment in Columbia and my old car.

  The money supply wasn’t endless, so I fell into a routine of playing mini-tour events that were

  reasonable drives from home, along with a circuit of state opens in Missouri and the surrounding

  states. I was treading water, making a little money here and there, but nothing much was happening for

  me. I have to give Elayna all the credit in the world, because at the end of the 1988 season, she laid

  down the law. She told me I had a bad attitude and wasn’t getting good results, so I had to try

  something different if I was going to keep going out there and spending the money to travel and enter

  these tournaments.

  So I went back to see Coach Poe at Missouri, and I asked him if he knew of any sports

  psychologists who could help me with the mental side of my game. Not only did he know somebody,

  he knew somebody who was right there on campus. It turned out that Rick McGuire, the Missouri

  track coach, was one of the most prominent sports psychologists in the world. He worked in the

  psychology department and coached Olympic track athletes. Dr. McGuire introduced me to one of his

  colleagues, Dr. David Cook, who was into golf, and David and I hit it off right away. We started

  working together in 1989, and I soon began to see some improvement, at least in the consistency of

  my mental routine.

  Rick, David and I got together for a “mental summit meeting” the week of the Kansas Open that

  summer, and David gave me a complete routine to use to focus my concentration on the course—

  which basically involved visualizing my shots, feeling what was necessary to hit them and then

  trusting it and letting it go. I decided to pitch all of my mechanical swing thoughts and just go with the

  mental process David designed and see where it got me. I plugged it in and finished in the top five in

  Kansas. The next week, David played with me in the pro-am at the Missouri Open and got me locked

  in. I shot 17-under and won the
tournament. The first-place check was $10,000—which allowed me

  to pay back a loan from a friend and clear all my other debt. I was even with the world, and I had a

  sponsor’s exemption into the PGA Tour event the next week in Chattanooga. My life was about to

  change forever.

  The tournament organizers in Chattanooga had given me an exemption into the event because I

  had qualified the year before and shot the low round of the day on Sunday. I was obviously feeling

  pretty good about my game coming off a win at the Missouri Open, and I was looking forward to

  trying Dave Cook’s focusing techniques on a bigger stage.

  We finished up our third round Sunday morning, and I ended up shooting 6-under to get into the

  last group with John Daly, who was also playing on a sponsor’s exemption. John was four or five

  shots ahead of me at the start of the round, but he struggled a little bit and I made some birdies to get

  back into it. The only thing I’m thinking about is Dave Cook’s mental checklist—see it, feel it, trust it

  —and all of a sudden, I’m in the lead on the tenth hole.

  We got to seventeen, a short par-5, and I knew that Ray Stewart had just finished and was a shot

  ahead of me. I missed my tee shot in what was the standard place for me at the time, the left trees, and

  was looking at some sort of 7-iron layup shot. As I pulled the club, my caddie, Hawk, got in front of

  me and told me that you don’t win golf tournaments by laying up on reachable par-5. For some reason,

  I listened to him and sliced a 3-wood over the trees and onto the middle of the green. I had a fifty-or

  sixty-footer for eagle and eased it up to a foot for a tap-in birdie.

  The eighteenth hole was a big dogleg, and I can remember being so into my process—see it, feel

  it, trust it—that I didn’t even notice what anybody else was doing. I hit my 3-wood right down the

  middle, hit a 5-iron to fifteen feet and pured that putt right in the center of the cup. All of a sudden, I

  was a winner on the PGA Tour, and I had a two-year exemption. I would be in the field in Milwaukee

  on Thursday and I didn’t even know where Milwaukee was. Elayna and I drove back to Missouri,

  trying to get our arms around what had just happened, then caught a flight to Milwaukee just in time to

  play on Thursday morning.

  I almost didn’t have time to catch my breath the rest of the 1989 season. I think it really hit me

  that I was on tour when I got to La Costa for the Tournament of Champions the next January. I was

  paired with Greg Norman in the first round. That’ll certainly make you feel like you’re playing in a

  different league.

  Looking back on that time, I really believe that if I had just gone out and played my game—

  relying on my scrappiness and ability to get the ball in the hole with my short game—I’d have stayed

  out on tour all these years. I don’t think I would have been a big star or anything, but I’d have been

  able to make a good living. But being in the middle of all those big, strong guys like Greg Norman,

  guys who could just pound it out there, made me think that I had to go out there and find a newer,

  better swing.

  Man, was that a mistake. I’ve been in search of a golf swing my whole career now. That started

  a stretch of ten years where I bounced around between the Nationwide Tour and the PGA Tour,

  playing just well enough to keep food on my family’s table, but not well enough to put some money in

  the bank. During that entire time, I gave a lot of informal putting and short-game lessons to tour-player

  buddies of mine during practice rounds. Those work sessions were taking up more and more of the

  practice time I was supposed to be using to try to get myself back on the big tour. In the fall of 2000,

  Elayna told me that if I was going to spend my time on the practice green helping guys with their

  putting instead of coming home and spending time with her and the kids, then I was going to have to

  start charging for the time. Since I wasn’t making many cuts at the time, it was hard to argue with her.

  So, when guys would ask me to help them, I’d give them the standard speech I had worked up:

  “I’m going to get in trouble with my wife if I don’t charge you, so you can pay me $100 or not, but I at

  least have to ask….” All very confident-sounding, I know, but once I started charging for lessons,

  guys who didn’t know me felt comfortable walking up to me and asking for a lesson. My short-game

  instruction “business” blossomed from there, mostly because guys I helped started to play pretty well.

  I was known as a good putter and short-game player, so I already had the players’ respect. Word-of-

  mouth took care of the rest.

  I really started to get some exposure as a teacher instead of a player in 2001, when I helped Pat

  Bates. He and I were buddies from the Nationwide Tour, and he was going through a terrible time

  with his putter. He visited Scotty Cameron’s putting studio and learned the facts about how the putter

  should swing—things I’ll tell you about in Chapter 4. Pat came back to the Nationwide Tour and told

  me he was ready to listen. Scotty had given him the “why” of how the putter works, and I simply gave

  him the feel to get the job done. Things finally clicked. Pat went out and putted great, won three

  Nationwide events that year and got his PGA Tour card back. That gave me some publicity, but more

  importantly, it gave me confidence that the stuff I was telling people was working.

  I’m really sensitive to how what I teach can impact a guy’s game, because I know firsthand how

  easy it is to screw a player up. I was that guy, listening to things that hurt my game instead of helping

  it, and I don’t ever want to be the one doing that kind of damage. Golf at the professional level is a

  fragile mix of mechanics and confidence, and I feel like my job is to carefully improve the mechanics

  so that the confidence can grow as a result. The stakes aren’t quite as high for the average amateur

  player, but I’m not interested in taking the fun out of the game for somebody who used to putt okay and

  now can’t find the hole with a map.

  Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate enough to have some of the best players in the

  world trust me to help them with their putting. I loved seeing Jay Haas have his best season on tour

  after incorporating some of the things I teach. Peter Jacobsen came out to see me the week after

  missing the cut at San Diego, when he was paired with Jay for thirty-six holes. We made some

  changes to his short game and putting stroke, and he has been kind enough to give me credit for

  helping him win on the PGA Tour as a fifty-year-old in Hartford in 2003, and collect his first major

  on the Champions Tour at the Senior Open in 2004. Craig Stadler asked me to look at his stroke. We

  made some dramatic changes to it, and he hasn’t stopped winning money on the Champions Tour yet.

  Darren Clarke went out the day after one of our lessons and led the PGA Championship.

  I don’t think I’m any smarter than the next guy—that’s not why I can stand in front of you and see

  what you’re doing wrong and make you better. Mr. Lanning kept telling me over and over again that

  there aren’t any secrets, and he’s absolutely right. The mechanics of a good putting stroke are right

  there, waiting to be used if you just get out of your own way. My knack seems to be the ability to tell

  the story of what the basics should look and feel
like, and to get people to free themselves up to try

  them. I’ve also been able to watch my friend Rob Akins teach golf and to learn from the way he

  focuses so completely on each player he sees; he doesn’t go by what the clock says when he’s

  teaching somebody. Rob, who works with David Toms on the PGA Tour, knows what he wants to get

  accomplished in a certain lesson, and the lesson will take as long as necessary to get that done—

  whether that’s fifteen minutes or two hours. That means the next player on the schedule is sometimes

  waiting for his lesson, but that player knows he’ll get the same undivided attention. I try to take the

  same approach with my teaching.

  I’ve reached the point where I could fill up my appointment book every week with lessons if I

  wanted to, and that’s certainly enticing for a guy like me, who struggled for a lot of years trying to find

  some stability for his family. I still get a tremendous charge out of playing tournament golf, and that’s

  not something I’m going to give up doing—especially with the Champions Tour on the horizon.

  How will it all shake out? I think you should get your lessons in the next few years if you want

  them. I’m working with Jim Hardy on my swing, and I’m hitting the ball better than I ever have. When

  it comes time for the Champions Tour in 2012, I’ll be ready. Then you’ll have to play in a pro-am to

  get your lesson.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE BASICS

  You bought this book because you want to make more putts. I can help you do that, but before we get

  to work on your putting stroke, we need to make sure your setup fundamentals look good. If you can

  put yourself in good position before you make your stroke, and keep that good setup position

  consistent over time, you’re going to have a great chance to roll the ball well.

  Guys that do roll the ball really well—like Brad Faxon, Tiger Woods or Dave Stockton—get

  complimented all the time about how smooth their strokes look. And it is true that they have a nice

  flow. But I know from years of work on my own game and hundreds of hours of watching players with

  all kinds of strokes on the practice green that the “flow” in a beautiful putting stroke starts with