Trust your feels
Are you bad at reading putts? Jordan Spieth's coach has some great advice
Kevin C. Cox
The image is one we've seen time and time and time again. A player, on the green, crouches down behind his ball and reads the putt. Once they settle on how they think the ball is going to break, they step into their putt.
But for most golfers, the story doesn't end there. Once they stand over the ball, suddenly the putt looks different than when they were sizing up the shot from behind the ball. Some doubt starts to creep in. Which read should you trust? It's not a great mindset to be when you're over the ball, about to hit a putt. And it's a problem I find myself wondering about often, and one that no doubt other golfers do, too.
Andy Lyons
But this week, Golf Digest Top 50 Teacher Cameron McCormick, longtime coach of Jordan Spieth, shared a thread about exactly this earlier this week.
I’ve noticed a pattern for me is that what I see standing over the putt almost always tells me to play more break. How about you? What do you do when this conflict arises? Here’s what I recommend…
— Cameron McCormick (@CMcCormickGolf) January 18, 2023
As for what he recommends, McCormick makes a really interesting point.
Trust what you see over the ball
McCormick says that even though standing behind the hole may give you a clear look at the line, he says that golfers have gotten so much feedback from all the putts they've hit over the course of their lifetime, that can help give them an instinctual sense for how the putt is going to break. Reading the putt from behind the ball is useful, of course, but when the chips are down, McCormick trusts what he feels while he's standing over the putt itself.
As such I’ve chosen to trust the reads I make as I’m addressing the ball vs the reads I make when crouched behind the ball. (I still read from behind as well as I get a lot of good info by doing this, so don’t abandon this process)
— Cameron McCormick (@CMcCormickGolf) January 18, 2023
As a result…
"I find myself missing very few putts on the low side of the hole," he writes in his final tweet of the thread. "Almost all of my putts are hit with softer pace which effectively gives me the entire hole width to use. I make more putts and my touch is great."