The golf world learned the sad news this week that Dave Pelz, the legendary short game instructor, passed away at the age of 85.
Pelz thought about the game like nobody else. At a time when putting technique was thought of as something akin to witchcraft, Pelz, a former scientist at NASA, sought to quantify every piece of it. He used data and physics to challenge conventional wisdom, then devised evidence-based methods around those findings.
Scott Halleran
Pelz's fingerprints are on multiple major champions—including two green jacket winners in Phil Mickelson and Patrick Reed—and maybe even on your game, too.
In his honor, let's run through some of his research-based methods that have seeped into the mainstream. You may even use a few of them yourself.
1. Clock backswings to control distance
The margins get thin the closer to the green you get. There's not much room for error with a wedge in your hands. It's called the scoring zone for a reason.
It's what makes distance control on wedge shots so important. From an awkward yardage, how do golfers make sure they're not just hitting shots on the green?
Instead of vague "make a half backswing" or "hit a three-quarter shot" advice, Pelz would measure backswing length using the hands of a clock as reference. A 9 o'clock backswing, for instance, would be your left arm parallel. Then, he'd measure the distance it produced, then use different clubs to match with the distance you need. The clock system has since been adopted in some form by a swath of tour players, and now there's even technology some players use to measure it.
2. Add more wedges for better gapping
Speaking of wedges, Pelz was light-years ahead of the curve in suggesting players should carry more of them. Most players used to carry a pitching wedge and a sand wedge—maybe one more wedge, at most—then a host of clubs at the top of their bag.
Pelz flipped this on its head, showing that golfers had too many long clubs for too few shots. By replacing 2-irons and 3-irons with gap wedges and lob wedges, you could narrow the distance gap between your clubs where you need it most. Fast-forward 20 years, and that's the norm.
3. Triple the amount of break you read
Envision a right-to-left breaking putt. You think it's going to break about one foot, so you envision a straight line going straight from the ball to a spot one foot outside the hole.
That's a normal thing to do, but the problem is, you've just underread this putt.
In his research, Pelz showed that the ball doesn't travel along a straight line, and then start turning. It gradually starts turning the moment it leaves the putterface. Instead of under-reading the putt then compensating, Pelz found that most recreational golfers should triple the amount of break they read. So that putt you think is going to break a foot? You've probably got a better chance of making it if you play three feet of break.
4. Beware wonky golf balls
Nowadays, golf balls are manufactured within incredibly impressive tolerances. But when Pelz burst on the scene in the early '90s, this wasn't entirely true. Pelz identified how seams on ball covers, wonky dimples, and imbalanced golf balls all affect a putt's ability to roll true. He suggested testing the golf balls you use by floating them in salt water to see which ones are accurate—a method Bryson DeChambeau still uses today.
5. Add extra speed to beat the 'lumpy donut'
The green is a big area, but the hole is only in one tiny portion of it. It means that at some point, every golfer who played that day will congregate around that small area around the hole.
Pelz called this the "lumpy donut" effect, an area between about one and six feet all around the hole (because nobody ever steps directly on the hole—that would be psychotic). The high amount of foot traffic depresses the ground, and makes the green extra bumpy in that area. The ball will wobble through it if it's moving too slowly. So Pelz says that golfers should negate the lumpy donut by hitting putts with a little more speed.
The goal should be to hit their ball so it ends 17 inches past the hole—enough speed to keep the ball pushing through the lumpy donut, without so much speed that it makes the effective size of the hole too small. A foot-and-a-half—the measure that many still think of as the gold standard today.