Why putting is the biggest of golf’s three-headed monster

By Martin Johnson

The thing about golf is that it’s actually two sports in one. Firstly, there’s golf itself, which most people appear to agree was invented by the Scots, and then there is putting, which was invented by the Marquis de Sade. Or at the very least a close relative.

Ask a non-golfer to name the three biggest causes of stress and they will come out with the usual suspects of divorce, money and moving house.

Ask a golfer the same question and they will nominate water, sand and  putting. Especially, in the case of the latter, when it’s one of those short range knee-knockers. Just like the one I saw again on one of those Sky archive programmes last week, when Scott Hoch missed a downhill tiddler in the 1989 Masters play-off with Nick Faldo.

Even if you’ve never played the game, you can tell that putting is stressful just by looking at the various techniques – claw, reverse overlap, cross handed – and the bewildering array of implements employed for the job. Broomhandles, bellies (still in circulation despite the anchoring ban), blades, peripheral weights, mallets, and one I once saw at a trade fair boasting an insert made from “over 23,000 miniature brass balls”. Balls being the operative word.

The stress factors involved in the apparently innocuous business of using a stick to propel a small ball into a hole first became apparent to me at a seniors tournament, when some Italian, whose name escapes me, would beat himself over the head with his putter every time he missed with it.

Then there was the pro golfer who tied his putter to his car bumper and dragged it, in a hail of sparks, to his next tournament, and another one who held it out of his car window swearing at it for several minutes before hurling it into a Florida swamp. Why didn’t he just throw the thing into the swamp straightaway? he was asked. “Because I wanted it to suffer before I killed it,” he replied.

I’ve often wondered why it’s okay to use the word ‘yips’ but not that other word – the one that dare not speak its name – when the ball goes flying at right angles off the socket. The yips are every bit as destructive, and for those of us who have had them, every twitched short putt pushes you that much closer to spending your remaining days in a home for the bewildered, imagining you’re Napoleon Bonaparte, or two poached eggs on toast.

The two words you most long to hear from an opponent on a golf course are not: “great drive”, or “nice shot”, but, when your ball has just pulled up in that no-man’s land two and a half feet from the hole, “that’s good”. What’s not so good in that instance is a deafening silence,at which point there are a variety of techniques available to prevent you having to putt it.

A couple of years ago, I was involved in a better ball fourball match in which one of our opponents had round about a two footer for a half, and his first gambit was to reach down to hover his hand over his ball and look up at me and my partner with what might be described as a hopeful glance.

My partner, though, has a technique for this kind of thing, honed by years of successfully avoiding eye contact with people selling the Big Issue, or holding collection buckets outside supermarket exits. At which point our opponent realised that further pressure needed to be applied.

He marked his ball, picked it up, polished it, replaced it, and then set off on a 360 degree circuit of the hole, squinting with the left eye closed, squinting with the right eye closed, squatting down, standing up, squatting down again, plumb bobbing, and picking up tiny bits of barely visible detritus on his line. All of which was calculated to make his opponents feel bad enough to give in and concede the putt.

However, the actual effect was to demonstrate that if the putt was that easy, he would not have gone from clean shaven to a full beard in the time required to finally draw back the putter head and make the stroke. It was not a thing of beauty, and the howl of anguish and the putter head making contact with the ball were more or less simultaneous.

It was more of a nuclear explosion than a putt, the ball flying so far past the hole that the poor chap had time to reel off half a dozen expletives before it finally came to a halt. I gave him a sympathetic “hard luck” (although he’d probably have preferred it if I’d given him the putt) largely because I knew what it felt like for your inner circuitry to fuse whilst standing over a putt you ought to be able to make with your eyes closed. Although sometimes, at the moment of impact, your eyes snap shut whether you want them to or not.

However, I can now reveal that I have arrived at that holy state of grace which is granted only to those who know that they will never again miss a tiddler. A more selfish soul would keep the secret secret so to speak, but as a former yipper I’m all too aware of the suffering involved, and feel duty bound to share the knowledge. Beside which they give out gongs for do-gooding, I hear, and I quite fancy an OBE.

All you have to do is go to the website “nevermissshortputts.com”, where your putting woes will be consigned to history by inspirational words of wisdom from someone called D. Shen. It takes a bit of getting into, but once you’ve negotiated “hypnosis, will it work for you?” and “install a powerful, joyful, and certainty filled emotion with your putting”, you won’t be able to put it down.

“Get a feel for how hard to hit your putt, then you won’t need to think of how hard to hit it” is one of those little gems I’d never thought of, along with “you must never putt with doubt. You must never putt without confidence. Yes, you heard correctly”.

There are umpteen pages and several thousand words of this kind of stuff, but, believe me, it works.

Just print out the entire collection of D Shen’s pearls, place them on the green beside your ball, and say to yourself: “If I don’t knock this in, I’m going to punish myself by reading the whole lot.”

And I guarantee you’ll never miss a three-footer again.