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 (Photo: Eddie Meeks) Picking your favorite is easy. Deciding on what’s most important requires more debate. For example, if you asked me to pick my favorite woman, I’d say Reese Witherspoon without flinching. She’s beautiful, appears to be smart, funny and, to the best of my knowledge, has never nagged at me to pick up after myself in the middle of a game. But the most important woman in my life is my wife Sarina. She’s the mother of my children, keeps our family organized and would harm me physically if I said otherwise. A favorite and most important club is another dilemma that I’ve narrowed down to the driver and putter. All other clubs, except for the sand wedge, aren’t used enough during a round to warrant serious consideration. The driver is incredibly important. There’s nothing worse than following up a birdie putt with a snap hook off the next tee. Your score can multiply rapidly with a series of crooked drives that fly off the course or into the water. On the other hand, I love the way my confidence soars after I pipe a couple of drives. It can send ripples of confidence throughout my bag except to my putter which, like my wife, isn’t impressed by much of anything. The putter is painfully fickle. It doesn’t care if you just drove the ball 300 yards and wedged it to five feet. If it isn’t feeling motivated, it will miss the cup all day long. While a putter can save a bad ball-striking day, there’s no hiding from a bad-putting day. Drive for show, putt for dough. Case closed. The defense rests. The question then becomes, how do you get on better terms with your putter? “I think putting is one of those things where you just have to believe in yourself,” said PGA Tour member and Long Beach resident John Mallinger, who made the monumental jump from 109th in putting average in 2007 to ninth in 2008. “I play on different greens every week. They are fast and they have big breaks. You focus on fundamentals and you have to believe in your ability. It’s not rocket science. Putting is so much confidence. You look at guys like Camilo [Villegas] or Anthony Kim and you see what confidence can do. I don’t think that their games have changed. They are just riding that wave of confidence.” Mallinger’s words are painfully frustrating and agonizingly accurate. Solid fundamentals? We all could probably use a putting lesson to clean those up. Wouldn’t a $60 golf lesson to assess your putting fundamentals more than pay for itself if you eliminated three-putts from your round and made the occasional 10-footer? Confidence? I’ve tasted the sweet nectar of putting success and it’s good. Nothing feels as good as putting a perfect roll on a putt and watching it hug the line before pouring into the hole like it was on a string. Imagine having entire rounds like that rather than once every fiscal quarter. The putter wields ultimate absolution over your game with the ability to wipe away the sins of ugly drives, wayward iron shots and weak chips. Amen. So what are the attributes of a great putter? “The best putters have great consistency of speed,” Mallinger said. “You rarely see someone like Tiger three-putt. He’s aggressive and he might run a few putts four feet by the hole, but he’s also making a lot of 25-footers. It’s posture, it’s setup, it’s stroke, and he’s probably better than anyone in all of those categories. He believes in what he’s doing and that’s all that matters.” |
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