We’re now on Episode 3 of The Lab with PGA Tour Putting Performance Advisor Stephen Sweeney, and I’ve not been shy about how this experience changed my game. In Episode 1 we talked all about setup, and Sweeney basically changed every single part of how my body sets up to the ball. In Episode 2 he walked me through the idea of capture speed, and how staying consistent with your intended speed can help make more putts, and now for Episode 3 we’re tackling green reading. I wasn’t shy about green reading being the worst part of my putting performance, but one simple sentence ended up turning it all around.
As we know from previous episodes there’s basically three reasons a player will miss a putt. There are technical reasons, which include a small portion of the actual equipment in your hands, there’s speed control, and there’s the read you decided on in the first place. As Sweeney explains in the video, the majority of the time the problem starts with the read the player thought they had in their head.
“Any putt within 1º of the intended start line is not a technical reason for missing a putt,” Sweeney says.
To get started working on my green reading skills he had me mark a point on the Platform Golf putting green in his Jupiter, Florida studio. This point was meant to be where I thought the putt was going to break. I accidentally failed to follow directions and I ended up signaling the spot where I was trying to start my putt.
Sweeny fired up his Quintic Overhead technology and marked that spot on the green so we could keep track of where I thought the line was, as well as the several putts I would end up hitting before we figured it out. (Spoiler: I was very, very far off.) I just couldn’t seem to match the speed and line that was needed for this seemingly simple indoor putt. By the fourth try I was hitting the ball way too hard for my own comfort level, so clearly something was wrong in the intention for the line that I created.
While I continued to miss putts, Sweeney expressed his frustration with how frequently amateurs under-read their putts.
“I go out and play and I’ll hear caddies from this distance say something is a ball right or a ball left. It’s never a ball outside left. Not from this distance.”
After several missed putts, Sweeney dropped a stat on me that completely changed the way I think about reading a green:
When you miss a putt on the high side, the miss will only be affected by about 50% of the read. If you read a putt one foot out to the right of a hole and you miss on the high side, the miss is only going to be about 6″ assuming you got the speed even remotely correct. When you miss on the low side though, the miss is multiplied by a factor of three. If you read a putt one foot out to the right and you end up missing low, you could end up three feet gone on the low side.
Read that again! That statement changed everything for me.
Essentially when you miss on the high side, you’re able to be more aggressive with the putt itself. Mostly because you’re hitting the putt uphill for a longer duration of time, the effect of gravity towards the end of the putt is decreased. If you miss on the low side, you’re letting gravity impact the ball much sooner in the duration of the putt and it will only continue to pull on the ball worse.
Sweeney finished off with a funny story mentioning that he does teach Aim Point but he knows it’s not for everyone.
“When it comes to the amateur game one of the best tips I got was actually from an 8-handicap dentist. He said that whatever he thinks the read is, he just plays double. Now it’s probably the easiest piece of advice I can give to an amateur golfer.”
