Why pros use a towel when practicing putting (and you should, too)
If you spend time around tour players, you'll notice that they often put a towel underneath their feet when practicing putting in one spot on the green. Why? You may not practice as much as a tour pro, but for the times you might want to work on your putting, we asked a golf course superintendent to explain why this small detail is so important.
Below is a Q&A with Amanda Fontaine, superintendent at Ledges Golf Club in South Hadley, Mass. Fontaine is a three-year member of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America.
Golf Digest: First off, Amanda, how do you feel in general about people practicing putting in one spot on a green?
Fontaine: I do not enjoy it. What they're going to end up doing is wearing down that one spot of grass. It's putting all your wear traffic in one spot, so you're going to end up with two feet spots on the green.
You usually see it if the course is having a putting contest during a tournament. Usually, they do it on the 18th green. Afterwards, we just remove a couple inches of the top section and take it to a different part of the green or if you have a nursery, you can take it from there. It’s not usually a problem because they often let us know beforehand.
Golf Digest: What about on the practice green. How long does it take for someone standing in one spot to start destroying the green?
Fontaine: It depends if you’re standing or moving. If you’re just standing, you could probably stay on there for all day, it's not going to be a problem. But when you're lining up a putt, your feet are constantly doing moving back and forth, so that’s a lot of steps right there. Even if you go back and forth three times, that's three steps each time.
Golf Digest: What is the damage that could happen? Is the grass dying?
Fontaine: With the cell wall of a grass plant, it's rigid, and so if you put constant pressure on it, it's not like our cells, which are fluid, and they can move and bend. The cell wall of a grass plant will actually rupture. It will end up killing that grass plant. The whole grass plant won't die for the most part—I mean it could, I’m not going to say it won’t happen—but you’ll start to kill the plant and the older the grass gets, it will go brown.
Golf Digest: OK, let’s get to the solution. What should golfers do limit this damage on the green if they want to practice their putting?
Fontaine: Putting a towel down under the feet, especially a wet towel, is helpful. What the towel can do is hold the moisture in so that way you’re not trampling and peeling off the moisture from the grass. That said, if you’re using a wet towel that has a dark color, it will create too much heat. Moisture and heat will create a disease. Usually I use a lighter towel, even though it gets dirtier faster.
But that said, you should also move around to different spots to help minimize the wear on the green.
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