What should I be concentrating on when I have a 20 foot or longer putt?

Question 2

Q: What should I be concentrating on when I have a 20 foot or longer putt?

A: With any putt that is more than ten feet, you should be concerned with distance. Do your alignment and your visualization from behind the ball. Once you set up to the ball, the putter face must be perpendicular to the line you selected. Pick a mark to line up on, like a different textured or colored blade of grass just in front of the ball on your selected line.

Once you have picked a point to allow the face to be set correctly, then all your focus is on distance, and you do this best with what I call club head blur. This involves creating pace and selecting end points. You look at the hole for a minimum of four seconds as you swing your putter back and forth above the ball, stopping at your end points. Then place the putter one to three inches behind the ball to abbreviate your backstroke, and duplicate the pace and length of stroke that you just executed. If you hit the pace and length exactly, then you have a feedback system for error correction and a solid foundation for learning and improvement.

When you do some simple mathematics, you find that the amount of club face error that will make a putt, is ten degrees from one foot, five degrees from two feet, and only 2.5 degrees from four feet. At just six feet from the golf hole, the club face error that will put the ball in the hole is less than two degrees, which is the reason the best putters only make 50 percent from that distance. So distance is the more critical factor on most putts.

Your goal is to get within three feet of the hole. Regard any long putt that ends three feet or less from the cup as a perfect putt. Most golfers spend too much time lining up these putts, and end up several feet short or long. This is all explained and demonstrated in my putting video.