NAILING THE BASICS

Dr Paul Hurrion
Golf International May/June 2014  p120-125
Photography by Mark Newcombe

I have just returned from a three-day training camp with the German National team, a highly talented and motivated squad of players featuring several of the world’s top amateurs. The quality of their ball striking was as good as I’ve seen in a long time, and yet when it came to the analysis of their putting strokes, I found myself amazed at the number of basic errors being made in what ought to be routine disciplines of set-up and alignment. The fact is that unless you take care of what are ‘non-negotiable’ rules at address, the stroke itself is nothing more than a series of compensations, which will never be consistent. Of course, a player can misread a putt, pull it a fraction, and watch the ball disappear into the hole! That doesn’t make that player a good putter. You can get lucky, but two wrongs don’t make a right. There’s only one route to making and repeating a solid, online putting stroke, and that is to work on the basic principles of set up posture and alignment that enable you to reproduce the pendulum-style technique that returns the putter-face squarely to the ball, time after time after time.

With the season now upon us, why not make a commitment to really working on these basics in order to give yourself the best possible chance – assuming, of course, that you want to hole more putts and shoot lower scores…