Putting is simple. It's rolling a small ball into a large, round hole. It always ends in success. A holed putt is the successful finish of every golf hole you play (although this success takes a little longer on some holes than on others). However, some golfers don't think putting is so simple. As the late, great Ben Hogan once said, "Putting is a different game." And he meant it! Ben thought putting was so different that it shouldn't count in one's score. He believed the person who hit the ball best with a full swing, the one who hit the most greens in regulation, or the golfer who consistently hit his shots closest to the pins should win.Hogan was not alone in this belief. My friend Peter Jacobsen, one of the best ball-strikers I've ever had the privilege of working with (and taking data on), once told me his father believed the same thing. So when Peter, his two brothers, and his father played, they picked up their balls as soon as they reached the green. In their foursome, there was no putting. Because if they didn't slow down to putt, they could get in more holes, strike more shots, and hit more greens when they played. And anyway, as they all knew, anyone can putt.
Erling Jacobsen was a good man, and he raised three fine sons who could all hit the golf ball incredibly well. But he was very wrong about putting. Because while putting is different from striking drives and irons, it does count. In fact, it counts almost a disproportionate amount. There is no recovery opportunity from bad putting. When you miss a short putt, you add a stroke to your score and you have to putt again (unless you really putted badly, in which case you might have to putt twice more, or chip). A two-foot putt counts the same as a 300-yard driveone stroke. The putt is only one of several types of swings golfers make, but it accounts for nearly half of all the swings made-43 percent (plus or minus about 2 percent)-and perhaps as much as 80 percent of the anguish derived from the game.
So putting does count, and is a vital part of golf. The question is, Where does putting fit into an overview of the game? If you examine golf under a microscope, as I have tried to do , you find that putting is much more than the most frequent shot golfers make. Based on my studies, putting is an entire game in itself, one of six different and distinct games that make up golf . In golf, the ball always reacts to the decisions and motions we make in the putting game, the short game, the power game, the management game, the mental game, and the physical fitness game, and our skills in these six games determine our abilities as golfers.
Putting is part of what I call the "scoring game"; the other element of the scoring game is the short game, those shots from 100 yards away to the edge of the green. While most golfers think that the drive from the tee and the next shot to the green comprise the game of golf, what they don't understand is that they will probably make two, three, or four more scoring shots before finishing the hole. If you look back through golf history, the best ball-strikers have never been the best putters. And the best putters (who have been relatively poor ball-strikers) havenever been the best short-game players. Which shows my list of the world's best power- and putting-game players, and you'll see that none of them cross over between lists. If you think about it, this is a perfect illustration of my point that the games are all really very different from one another.