For years putting has been considered to be the game within the game, a skill that seperates the great from the legendary, but becomming a great putter doesn´t require much more than great feel and an ability to read the line, line reading like most skills in golf can be taught, honed and improved, but feel and touch are much harder to teach and instill in a student. Finding your touch requires a great deal of patience, but even more so a desire to enjoy putting.
Teaching a Swedish lady last week, reminded me of something that I was taught when I first took up the sport. Your grip needs to reflect you as a person, it needs to allow you to feel the contact with the ball, and looking at todays modern thought process, this jewel of information has been superseeded with the need to quieten the hands, through the use of large grips and unorthodox grips that are referred to as the pencil grip or the claw.
Now this lady was struggling with her putting, she had recently fitted a well-known thick grip to her oversized large headed putter and she kept commenting on how she didn´t feel comfortable, and was unable to control the line or length of her putts. This hadn´t started with the change of grip, she changed because of this, but to no avail.
Having played for almost two decades, I asked the lady if she would try to recreate the grip that she used when she first began playing, she couldn´t, which was a sign to me that she had never actually found a grip that she was comfortable with. So taking a look at her overall posture and position I decided that we needed to try a number of different grips, but we would use my putter as it has a standard pistol putter grip.
We tried holding the right hand cupping the left, all ten fingers on the grip and a host of other methods of holding the putter. None felt right, with each she fiddled to try and get comfortable. I was down to my favoured method of holding the putter; cack-handed or left hand below right (for a right hander). We tried resting the right index finger over the finger of the left hand, she didn´t like that, so we placed all 8 fingers on the grip, with the little finger of the left and the index finger of the right hand touching.
EUREKA! She felt great, it reminded her of how she had held the hockey stick when she first started playing hockey in her early teens. She immediately felt the weight and balance of the putter. Her eyes lit up and she started rolling putt after putt to the hole.
Putting is a personal thing and because of that I teach very little technique, until the client and I have found a grip that suits the client and feels correct. Successful putting starts from a comfortable grip.
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