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321: Gary Nicol & Karl Morris [Revisited]: The Lost Art of Putting

The 18STRONG Podcast

CHAPTER

Mastering Green Reading for Better Putting Success

The chapter delves into the intricacies of reading greens in golf, emphasizing the importance of observing high and low points on the green before making a putt. It discusses the difference in perception when viewing a putt from the low side versus looking down the line, highlighting how visualizing the putt from the low side provides more clarity and aids in determining the entry point based on the line and pace. The chapter also touches on how going to the low side creates an optical illusion that helps in accurately assessing the green's features.

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Speaker 3
I think we've probably all done it from 150, 160 yards out a lot of the time. So if you've got a shot into the green and you see the flags on the back right and you think, OK, it's a bit of a sloping green. I don't want to leave myself a downhill path. You've actually started to read the green before you've ate your second shot. Do you want to leave yourself an uphill path? So as you walk on to green, if you look for high and low points, and more often than not, they're on diagonals. So if the high points back left, the low point would be front right, for example, that will then help you find where the low side is. And if you look at the any putt from the low side, whether it's three feet or 33 feet, you will get much more definition, much more information. You know, we talk about watching it, looking at a putt in widescreen HD 3D, whereas most players will look down the line at the putt. And by doing so, you just force short on it. You know, we've all hit a shot, 100 yards out, 150 yards out, and it's flying online with a flag. And you think, oh, that's close. Can't wait to get there and tap that one in. But that perception is so false that we get to the green. We're about 20 feet short. We can't believe how short it is because from a distance, it looks like the ball is resting against the flag almost. So when we look at the putt down the line, it just foreshortens everything. So if you're if your brain is seeing 10 feet of a 12 feet pat, how are you going to hit it? As far as you can get any harder than 10 feet. Well, exactly. Yeah, you're brain is saying, OK, I'm 10 feet away. And that is we crouch down behind the ball. What happens is when we know we're supposed to go looking at the ball from ball to whole, but our eyes kind of skim over the top of the ball and they're right. They actually make contact about two feet beyond where the ball is. So it's the first two feet of that partner, either uphill, downhill, left, right or right to left. And we've missed that. That's going to affect where we where we hit it, how we hit it, how hard we hit it. So we're just not gathering good enough information looking down the line. So if you go to the high side, it creates an optical illusion and just flattens everything out. So we find if you go to the low side, I mean, I learned this from working with good players years and years and years ago, that all the best putters seem to one thing they had in common, they were reading greens is they went to the low side because you can see all the changes in elevation. You can see if the first part of the putts downhill, then it goes uphill. You can see much more clearly where the high side is. So you can see it. Let's see your below the hole on the right to left part. You can then start to visualize where the entry point is as well, because the entry point isn't always buying on line with the middle of the hole from where your ball is that entry point is going to move according to the line, but that line is going to be highly influenced or heavily influenced by the pace. So it's just, you know, we've again, we've done this with hundreds of people and it's blown their minds. You know, one guy, Roger Chapman, who's won a couple of times in the champions tour, been playing professional golf for I think 35 or 36 years, right? And he said, I've never really understood that. That's probably why I've been leaving all my parts short. I mean, there's a guy who's been around the block, Gordon's high many times. And, you know, won major championships on the champions tour. So, you know, even guys who have been doing it all their lives haven't always picked up on that. But it is. It's a game changer for a lot of people. It really is what I find amazing about
Speaker 2
the book. And again, Carl and I were talking it's, it's not a long read. It's a very simple read, but there's, there's so many of these little things, like little aha's that, you know, and you're even saying like champion golfers haven't picked up just some of these little things that could make a huge, huge drastic, drastic difference in, you know, the way that they end up putting Carl, you guys go pretty deep into the visualization piece of a two. And again, a little piece that some of the golfers that you guys have talked to was that they wouldn't actually finish their visual visualization off. Yeah.
Speaker 3
So can kind
Speaker 2
of give us an idea of how we should go about visualizing when we're looking at a putt, how descriptive we need to be. What are the things that we should be focusing on and how we can get better this?
Speaker 1
I think I think it's just give yourself some license to be creative. Really. I mean, we, we've sort of said to people, you know, what does the ball have to do to go in the hole? And then we'll say to them, OK, how do you see that? How do you see the line? We'll say, does the line have a color? Now, the minute you say somebody does the line have a color, it may not have had a line, it may not have had a color before that question, but it certainly has one after the question. So, and then we'll say, you know, is that, is that line, is it solid? Or is it a liquid? And some people actually see the line as a flowing liquid, which seems to work really, really well for some people, a kind of flowing colored liquid into the hole.
Speaker 3
And mercury liquid, morning into the hole. Yeah. Or, you
Speaker 1
know, that phrase, it was pouring into the hole is a great descriptive. But I think that the number one thing that we found based on this idea of pace is that most people's imagery of the line and people, we asked people with it, with a flip chart, drawers the line, how big the line is. Now, the line for most people is as wide as the line that they draw on the golf ball. You know, the sharpie line that most golfers put on the golf ball, I think subconsciously, then that seems to be the size of the line that most people perceive. Now, as Gary often says, you know, that's like, that's like trying to send the ball down a little narrow tightrope. It's a tiny thin line. Whereas when we explain the concepts of pace and the three balls, suddenly with it, we elongate, we widen the channel. We have a we have a golfer that we both see a chap over in Ireland, Barry, who came to see us both a few years ago, wanted to play seniors golf. And I'm sure Barry by his own admission was a long way away from that few years ago. But he but he he got his green jacket last year. He represented Ireland for the first time. Maybe this is a record in international sport. It was 37 years between his two appearances in international. Now, that may be a record in any sport because he played he played he played as a junior international and didn't play again as a senior international. But Barry talks about he talks about seeing a cause a gutter, you know, the guttering that you have around your house. He sees that guttering just running into the hole so that he said, all I'm going to do is just send the ball down the gutter, that wider line. And again, you know, people on most golfers on putting greens would use alignment rods to actually check whether the putters on the right line or not. We don't use them for that. We actually use alignment rods either side of the hole and said, you think you could you think you could actually manage to get the ball in between those two lines and everybody goes, of course, I could. OK, let's give it a go. All you got to do now is get the pace. And it's amazing when people see that wider line that frees them up. You know, there's a concept in golf pick the smallest possible target. That works for some people, but for other people, that is hugely detrimental because when you're aiming at a tiny target, it can jam the system because it tends to tighten things up. When you see the target, the actual channel that you send in the ball down, being much wider, it tends to free up the system. So that would be another thing I would say to people to experiment with. If you've always been trying to aim at tiny targets and it's not worked for you, see if you can get some job by actually widening that channel into the hole.
Speaker 3
Yeah, we would say that the line is never any narrower or thinner than the width of the hole.
Speaker 2
Yeah, that tightrope analogy makes all the sense in the world. I mean, trying to put on the string. Just, I mean, it gives me the jitters right here, thinking about it, you know, trying to stay on that line, but using that gutter analogy and seeing the ball rolling down the hill, that makes a lot
Speaker 1
of sense. And it is the paradox, Jeff, is that when you get somebody trying to actually put the ball down a short line, you tend to see some, I tend to see some funny strokes because they're so involved trying to make perfect strokes. When you then get them putting down the gutter because it frees it up, you actually get better technical movement, not because they're trying to do that because they just have a freer action based on the images that they use in of the
Speaker 3
task. And again, what happens is by paying attention to the ball, putting down the wider channel, well, the attention is a bit massive attention or shift from stroke to ball. So when you're trying to keep on that chalk line, your attention is pretty much entirely solely on your stroke because you don't want to get it wrong. And people aren't trying to get it right. They're trying not to get it wrong. But as soon as we give them that freedom to put down the channel, their attention shifts to purely what the ball needs to do. And they're stuck. Their technique improves and the strike improves. Their pace improves. They're putting improves, basically.
Speaker 2
I love that concept of not having to have the perfect technique, perfect stroke. I mean, this is we're sitting here talking about putting. We've been talking for I don't know how many minutes and we haven't mentioned a single piece of technique that you guys work on. And I love that. I love the idea of you can be a great putter. Today, tomorrow, you know, every single putt is in itself in its own existence, which is fantastic. Gary, who would you say is one of the best putters, natural putters that you've seen, somebody that just kind of instinctively did all of this stuff when you started working with them?
Speaker 1
Oh, one
Speaker 3
example that sticks out in my mind is a guy called Paul Broadhurst, who's one, I think he's one, I don't know, four times, five times the senior in the last two or three years, including the senior British Open, I think he won the senior USPGA. And he was always a fantastic player on the European tour. And when I spoke to him about the, I mean, worked them on and off for years. And when I spoke to him about the book, he said, why are you asking me about putting? I said, well, because you're one of the best putters I've ever seen. And his story wasn't, it didn't match up with mine. He didn't see himself as a great putter. But then we showed him that statistically, I think it's for 10 years in a row, he was in the top 10 for putts per greener regulation and putts per right. So you can't do that pure bad putter. Now you may not have seen his stroke in a textbook or an instruction manual or instruction video, but he was an incredibly good putter. He found his way of doing it, which is what the book's all about. It's about finding your way. It's not about doing it to please us or to please a video camera or to please your coach or your friends, whatever it is. It's about finding your way of getting the ball into the hole. And we always say that the one thing that these guys have in common is they have found their way of doing it. So, I mean, Brody is a fantastic putter, always has been. But he didn't view himself as one. But then when he looked, when we showed him the stats and he actually thought about it, yeah, yeah, suppose it must have been pretty good. And he still is because he's still winning tournaments on the seniors tournament in the US and when he plays in Europe as well. Amazing.
Speaker 2
And it just goes to show we see these guys on Sundays and Saturdays. There's so many different putting strokes and so many great putters. You know, exactly. There's definitely not one one
Speaker 3
way to do it. Well, we made a conscious effort to not put any photography in the book. Because we knew as soon as we put a photograph of someone standing with a putter from whatever angle the perception would be, that's what they want me to do. Right. So we avoided that. We made a very, very conscious effort to take all that out of it. So we couldn't actually influence anyone through imagery, offstands, strokes, whatever.
Speaker 2
Carl, anyone that sticks out in your mind?
Speaker 1
Yeah, for me, Jeff, it would be savvy. You know, I sort of boiled here or that I grew up with and curiously, savvy, savvy said that he felt that he every put that he hit, he either, he either hooked it or he cut it into the hole. He actually felt like he shaped the puts into the hole. Now, the scientists would tell us that didn't actually probably happen, but that's what he felt. And it kind of confirms what we're talking about. If savvy was seeing the ball shaping into the hole, what was he tuned into? He was tuned into what the ball had to do. So I know and I just love that Paul McGinley, who I had on my podcast a few weeks ago. He talked about a put that he he held to win the Ryder Cup in Gary 2003. Was it some was it two thousand? No, it would have been 2006.
Speaker 3
Right.
Speaker 1
McGinley had this put on the 18th of the Belferi to win the Ryder Cup. And he talked about how he he he got down and he saw the slope and he saw the ball could easily just sort of track away against the slope. And he said he felt he hooked the ball into the into the slope. And that was to win the Ryder Cup. So again, how tuned him how tuned him was he to what the ball had to do. And he felt like he shaped the put into the hole.
Speaker 3
And again, that was suggested to us that he's trying to create a part rather trying to create the stroke.
Speaker 1
See, the whole idea of consistency, you know, is if you think you're going to be consistent, well, you're battling against the dynamics of a never changing environment and ever changing mind and ever changing body. Everything is in a dynamic system. And if you think you have to be consistent, if you feel you swing your stroke isn't consistent on any given day, then you're almost writing yourself off. If you believe that your system can organize movement to get the job done, it might feel slightly different today than it did yesterday, but you can still get the job done. And that is tremendously liberating.
Speaker 2
Yeah, I was going to say that that's a scary place to be when you feel like you're stuck and not able to recreate what what you're trying to do. And then it's like, Oh, crap, where do I go from here?
Speaker 3
So where you can feel the walls closing in on you. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's a dark place.
Speaker 2
Well, gentlemen, I could I could continue on this conversation all day. But I want to close up with a couple of following questions that we ask everybody that comes on the show. And I'll I'll kind of bounce back and forth between the two of you on these. Just some some fun questions we'd like to end up with. So Gary, first and foremost, are you more of a catty shack or a happy Gilmore fan?
Speaker 3
Oh, catty shack can be tight. Carl.
Speaker 1
Definitely catty shack. I
Speaker 3
love it.
Speaker 2
I love if you could pick a walk up song to the first T box and I'll give you any any T box. But what would your walk up song be, Gary?

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