You are now prepared to “play” golf – take the club back and strike the ball with it. And you’re ready to hear what I have to say about the full swing. You’ll have to wait, although not too long.
Being well aware that one of the greatest pleasures people get out of playing golf is hitting the ball, especially hitting it with force. I suppose that for one thing it satisfies our aggressive tendencies. Putting, of course, is quite the opposite. And more frustrating in its way, because anyone can see that getting a ball into a hole from a few feet away should be easier than knocking it onto a green 160 yards distant.
Ben Hogan has said that putting was a different game altogether; that we play two games, golf and putting. I suppose there is something to that. But the two are nevertheless inextricable from each other, at least until golf follows baseball’s designated-hitter experiment and introduces the permanent pinch-putter. There are a few fellows on the tour who wouldn’t mind hiring Bob Rosburg or George Archer to handle their work on the greens.
Anyway, no one has yet won a tournament merely by hitting the most fairways or greens in regulation. Not even Ben Hogan, who hit an awful lot of fairways and greens in the prescribed number of strokes. On the other hand, a lot of tournaments have been won, and lost, with a three-foot putt. Beyond that obvious point, and despite what Ben Hogan has said about putting being a different game, I would have to say that stroking a putt is really a miniature rendition of the swing you take with a driver. True, you don’t turn your hips and shoulders in either direction with a putting stroke, and the club never gets back much farther than your right foot. And you don’t get a chance to make a pretty, formful follow through. But you do have to make solid contact with the ball, hinge your wrists to some extent, keep your eyes on the ball, judge distance, and achieve direction. So the basic aims are the same as in hitting the boomer drive, and so is the method by which you do it-a swinging of the club.
Nevertheless, the natural pattern of a game of golf begins with driving the ball and ends up with putting it, and since we innately like to follow the normal progression of things, our first attention is given to hitting the ball with force-driving, etc. Besides, that’s more fun.
But it is not particularly easy to be successful at hitting the long shots, and because it isn’t we decide that we will work on that phase of the game first until we get it under control. At the same time, even while in the early learning process, we want to improve our score. For all the personal satisfaction gotten out of the big tee ball on the fifth hole, the bigger kick always comes from telling about and showing around the numbers at the bottom of the scorecard. At least half of those numbers come on the putting greens.
But most golfers don’t practice putting very much, and any chance they may have had to save strokes from those still untamed drives and irons is lost. Oh well, they say, as soon as they quit slicing the tee shot they’ll get to work on the putting. They seldom do because, being human, they are never quite satisfied with the tee shots, even if they’re not slicing anymore. They beat the slice, and now they’ll work on getting more distance. They never get around to learning how to putt.
The solution, untempting as it may be for the beginner; is to learn how to putt before anything else. As for those who have been playing for a time, all I can say is, spend some time on the putting clock. You’ll never regret it.
I won’t say putting is easy, but it is simpler, because the action has fewer moving parts and so can be learned more quickly. Once you’ve caught on, it’s not unlike learning to ride a bike. You never really forget how. Then, while you are in the process of becoming a good driver and iron player, you will always have the putting to keep your score down. These are my rationales for learning to play golf backward, by starting on the putting green. That’s how I began to play.
I’ll admit right quick here that at the start I didn’t work out this plan with the kind of logic I have just expressed. In truth, I was a kind of lazy kid who didn’t care much for the effort involved in hitting hundreds of golf balls every day on the practice range. It was a lot more comfortable standing on a putting green and rapping rollers at the cups. But that doesn’t weaken the logic, even if it comes retrospectively.
I began caddying a lot when I was eleven years old. But I didn’t have a work permit and so would meet a lady at the second hole and carry her bag until we were through seventeen. I would get a half dollar or so for the sixteen holes of work. It was my first job. Afterward, I stood on the practice putting green rolling balls toward the holes, often into the night and under moonlight. Aside from everything else, I think that all that putting in dim light, very dim light, helped me develop a sense of feel. For one thing, I had to walk up to the hole just to see where it was, then, when returning to the ball, I had to keep the image of the hole and where it was in my mind. It was surprising how close I often came, and how many putts went in. And, because I couldn’t see all the bumps and spike marks in my line to the cup, they didn’t distract me from the main purpose, getting the ball on line with a firm, solid stroke. You may not have the opportunity, or desire to putt in the moonlight, but the principles I learned by doing something like that are valuable.
I have made a lot of money with my putter, and won three major championships plus a lot of good tournaments, and all that has been very satisfying. But one of the most thrilling justifications for my early devotion to putting came with my first meeting with Ben Hogan, who had always been, as he has been with so many golfers of my generation, a real idol. Ben Hogan was always the personification of our dreams of glory. So one day, during the week of the long-ago Wykagyl Round-Robin tournament, I got into a game with Ben. My partner was Fred Hawkins, a friend of Hogan’s. Ben’s partner was Dow Finsterwald. I was in my best scrambling form that day, and Fred was also missing a lot of greens but doing some super chipping and putting. Hogan, of course, was near perfect from tee to green, and Dow was just about as steady, as usual. But at the end of the round, I shot 68, Hawkins had 67, while Hogan and Finsterwald had 71 and 71, respectively.
In the locker room after the round, we were all talking about the day’s play and that’s when Ben said that if Fred and I couldn’t putt we’d be selling hot dogs at the outside stand instead of playing in the tournament. It was really spoken in jest and no one took the remark in a disparaging way. Hogan, who we called Mr. Hogan at the time, was not, an especially humorous man, but he was taking a stab at it that time.
I have to say, though, that all the young players were always a little frightened of Mr. Hogan. I know I was, and a year after that incident at the Wykagyl tournament I was playing in Colonial Invitational at Hogan’s course. I was walking down this very narrow corridor in the clubhouse and here comes Ben. I wanted to climb a wall to get out of his way, but there was no place to go. He stopped me, however, said that he was very glad to have me at the Colonial, told me I was a fine player, and then, believe it or not, started asking me about putting. Imagine, Ben Hogan asking some young rookie about how to play some phase of the game of golf! It made me even more idolatrous of him, and when I think about it now it proved he had even more class than I knew.
I think that by starting out in golf on the putting green I got a better and more lasting sense of club control and ball contact, both of which carried over into the hitting part of my game. I think it can work that way for everyone. In other words, before you become a good golfer you have to develop your sense of the most basic aspects of the game. Then you work on mechanics.
