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Pros don’t make that putt either…

You’ve got just 10 feet, a little over 3 paces, for your first real birdie of the round. You’ve been grinding all day. This is going to make up for that bad double you made on 5. Get you one step closer to breaking 80. You’re supposed to make this putt right? I mean it’s just a measly 3 paces.

You take the putter back, put a good stroke on it and watch as it just misses on the low side… catching a piece of the hole. You want to snap that putter over your knee. When are you going to have another chance that good?! You must be the worst putter on the planet!

Well… not exactly. Our expectations for putting have been distorted from years of watching professional golf. We turn on the TV any given Sunday and just watch pros fill up the cup with putt after putt after putt. They’d never miss that 10 footer… except they do. All the time. Give the best in the world any random 10 foot putt and they’ll miss it more than 60% of the time. They are going to miss way more often than they make.

How can that be? It’s hard to believe when our mind tells us pros make everything… but just like Instagram or social media… professional golf on tv tends to be a highlight reel. When they cut away to the guy in 30th place… thats because he / she is about to make a putt. They don’t show the guy in 12th miss the 10 footer. It’s not interesting, its not exciting, but it is… typical.

The hole is small. Too small if you ask me, but at just 4.25 inches the reality is without almost perfect read and speed…. the ball just isn’t going to go in very often.

Let’s take a quick look at what has to happen on that 10 foot putt mathematically.

If you have a straight 10 foot putt, that means you have to be within 2.125 inches or 1° to make the putt… And that is assuming perfect speed! Any less speed and it’s short, too much speed and the capture width of the putt shrinks below the 4.25 inches of the cup. In fact, it shrinks pretty rapidly based on how far past the hole your ball would have traveled. At just a foot past the hole, the relative width of the hole reduces to 2.6 inches. At that pace you would have to control your start direction within 0.6°!

Got it.

So we have to control our speed to be somewhere between right to the hole and 1 foot past and at the same time make sure our start direction is within 0.6° of the center.

That doesn’t sound too bad. I can line up on my 10 foot putting mat at home and make a bunch of these. It seems so easy when I’m testing new putters on the putting mat at the golf store!

Well… on the golf course we’ll throw a few more variables at you. The green on the golf course is not flat. It will have some slope. Uphill, downhill, sidehill, or a combination. So now, you can’t just aim at the center of the hole… You have to read the green. And that slope… its probably not consistent for the entire 10 feet. So how does the impact of the slope change the roll as the ball’s speed decelerates on its way to the cup?

By now, depending on how big of a golf sicko you are…. you’re either wishing you were a physics major or contemplating giving up the game.

Okay, so you have to read the green perfectly as well. Any error in your green reading reduces the margin of error for the putt. Miss the ‘correct’ start line for the pace of your putt by half an inch on your read… Well now you have more like 0.4° of tolerance for your start line. We haven’t even factored in the difference in speed from one putt to the next.

This 10 footer might be slow and into the grain, the next may be down grain and downhill.

This green may get more sun and water throughout the day and grow slightly faster than the last hole…

Any mistake in speed… well… that reduces the tolerance for your start line as well.

Not to beat a dead horse… but greens are by nature imperfect surfaces. Sometimes you’re going to hit the putt on the perfect line, at the perfect speed, and it’s still not going to go in. That old ball mark, the grain of sand, the ball’s center of gravity, or a gust of wind… Any of those could be just enough to make a good putt miss.

Okay… So we’re just never going to make 10 footers. This is impossible!

That is not the intent of this article. The intent is just to point out that GOLF IS HARD. Putting is particularly hard. What a cruel world that they relied on tools to make a hole at 4.25 inches… not 10 inches, not 20 inches… but 4.25 inches.

Think about how preposterous this sport sounds if you just explain it out loud.

It just sounds ridiculous. Because it is.

The point of this newsletter is to just point out how ridiculous it is. 10 footers are hard. 8 footers are hard. Give yourself a break when you miss. The pros miss too.

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How good a putter are you?

So hopefully I’ve established that putting is hard. It is. But that doesn’t mean you can’t improve. You absolutely can and the first step is to understand your current skill level and what to focus on to improve. This is where the TANGENT Golf app can help.

As you use the TANGENT app, it tracks your performance including putting. But we aren’t just talking number of putts. In fact, that stat is mostly useless and the raw number of putts does not correlate to better scores. That’s because the distance of the putts matters.

Here’s the simple example to drive home that point…

Golfer A takes two putts to get it in the hole from 50 feet.
Golfer B takes two putts to get it in the hole from 2 feet.

Both golfers took 2 putts to get it in the hole, but Golfer A had a TERRIFIC performance gaining 0.14 strokes on a Professional Golfer! Golfer B had a DISASTER and lost 0.99 shots to a tour pro. Not all putts are the same.

The beautiful thing… the TANGENT app does all this hard work for you and all you have to do is enter your scores to unlock the power of strokes gained putting.

Referencing the above graphic from the Player Report in the TANGENT Golf app, I lost 0.8 strokes putting to an Elite Amateur in my last 20 rounds. So putting is certainly not a strength towards my goal, but not a disaster either. I should definitely spend most of my time working on my biggest weakness of Approach shots, there’s some opportunity to improve putting.

Following the rabbit hole of my putting performance in the Player Report, my putting is broken down into bigger categories, short putts, medium putts, and long putts. Here it becomes more obvious that I’m actually a good short putter and long putter… I’m struggling with the putts in the middle. I’ll quickly define those buckets as:

• SHORT PUTTS: Putts you ‘should’ make or at least will make more often than miss (under 6 feet / 2 paces).

• MEDIUM PUTTS: These are putts that are ‘makeable’, but you should NOT 3 putt (under 20 feet / 7 paces). You should make these more often than you 3 putt them.

• LONG PUTTS: These are putts that you will rarely make and the goal is explicitly to two putt (over 20 feet / 7 paces).

Alright, so we’re getting closer. I struggle with those medium putts, but is it because I’m not making enough of them? Or is it because I’m three putting them?

TANGENT again has the answers just from using the simple score entry. I’ve had 0 three putts under 10 feet and very few from 10-20 feet. It’s not three putting thats the issue, I’m just not making enough of them at just 36%.

Now this is actionable. I know what to work on. Again, it’s not worth a ton of strokes referencing the first strokes gained plot, but when I practice putting, I should spend a little more time on those putts from 7-20 feet.

But now I have one more question… To make a putt you have to do three things:

1. Read the putt correctly

2. Hit it on the start line you chose

3. Hit it at the right speed

Which of these 3 things could I improve on to best impact my performance?

Well, there is an optional feature in TANGENT that can help me answer exactly that. It’s called Putt Details. If you enable Putt Details, then on your phone or watch you will be served an additional screen at score entry. With just a quick tap you can log how you missed your first putt.

The putt details data is logged after every hole and unlocks the Green Reading analysis in your Round and Player Reports.

Now I know I need to work on medium length putts and that my tendency is to miss overwhelmingly low and short! I tend to under read the break and not hit them hard enough. Thats something I can take directly to my practice doing the Circle Drill or other Drills in the TANGENT app.

NOTE: Some features listed require a subscription to unlock in TANGENT.

Putting Features

If you want to get the most out of your putting stats in TANGENT, you’ll want to adjust two features:

DISABLE SIMPLE PUTT - Simple putt allows you to track putts very quickly into large buckets instead of pacing off putts. The data is very good with simple putt, but if you want more granularity, disabling simple putt allows you to put in the distance of your first putt directly in feet or meters from your phone or watch.

Otherwise, we use simple buckets when you enter your scores:

• TAP IN: This is a putt under 3 feet (1 pace). You are going to make these (or pick them up) almost every single time.

• SHORT: These are putts under 6 feet (2 paces). You ‘should’ make most of these.

• MEDIUM: These are putts generally under 20 feet (7 paces). These are putts you are ‘trying’ to make, but definitely shouldn’t 3 putt.

• LONG: These are putts over 20 feet (7 paces) where you aren’t going to make them very often and the goal is to avoid 3 putting.

• VERY LONG: These are putts generally over 50 feet (16 paces). You are very rarely going to make them and 3 putt is a real threat. 2 putt is a great result.

ENABLE PUTT DETAILS: Enabling putt details provides you with one additional quick screen at score entry, but unlocks the green reading analysis and is absolutely vital if improving your putting is a priority.

Want to see it in action? Check out my on course tutorials where I talk in detail about how I putt and read greens:

If you’ve made it this far in this newsletter. Thank you. You are probably a golf sicko just like me. If you want to help us grow, the best thing you can do is share us with your friends and write a quick review on the Apple App store. Even one sentence is enough to help others find their way to this community. Let’s improve together.