There lies part of the question. Is putting about nerves and confidence, or mechanics and technique?
“Putting is going to be a combination of both,” Mickelson said.
There is, though, debate within the coaching community. Putting and short-game teaching long ago became a cottage industry in golf. Stan Utley, one noted putting coach whose books include “The Art of Putting,” breaks down mechanics to make them more simple, and likes to get his best players to come back to the same fundamentals, thus eliminating doubt and increasing confidence. Dave Stockton, one of the tour’s most prominent putting gurus who worked with Mickelson this offseason, said last week: “It’s all mental.”
Julie Elion, a Bethesda-based mental coach who works with roughly a dozen PGA Tour players, said putting struggles are a combination of mental and physical; she has seen measurements taken of players over putts that indicate a different level of stress.
“Even somebody whose blood pressure or heart rate is fine on the tee box, over a putt, it can get so much worse,” Elion said.
“Putting, it just haunts you,” Stockton said. “The two- or three-footers, the ones you’re expected to make, when you don’t, you’re just devastated. It’s hard.”
There is a theory that maintaining superior putting as players grow older is more difficult. Not only are there more misses to remember, but life experiences — marriage, kids, personal struggles, an endless list — more easily creep into the brain.
“It gets harder and harder and harder, the more you have going on,” Elion said. “It’s harder to block those things out standing over a putt.”
When Woods missed his putt against Watney and was bounced from that tournament, he said before he left the course that he could fix the problems “in a day.” That belief is based in Woods’s original putting lessons, those from his late father, Earl. “I think he was approaching it the right way,” Utley said. “He went after the physical issues.” Before the Honda Classic, Woods listed a slew of problems he had addressed — posture, release of the club, etc.
“It started coming back, the flow and the stroke,” he said, “and started feeling very good.”
But can you completely restore that feeling once it slips away?
“I think you can, because at least you have something to go on,” Stockton said. “What if somebody’s never putted well? Now they’re in deep trouble. But Tiger? He’s one win away from winning a whole bunch. If he could win at Doral, I would think he could make a run. Hopefully, it frees him up mentally more than physically, and he just goes with it.”
On Sunday, with that little eight-footer in front of him, Woods knelt for his read. It started a little right-to-left, then finished a little left-to-right. He rose, stood over the putt, and made his stroke. The ball rolled squarely in the cup, an eagle. If, in the coming month, Woods provides more results like that, then we could also see more of what immediately followed: an emphatic, old-school, meaningful fist pump, the kind that signifies a clutch putt converted — and maybe even a tournament won.
Loading...
Comments