Speaker 1: H right. This is Bob Anklin from Rosemont, Minnesota, and
I play at the Emerald Greens golf Course. This is
a Golf Smarter number nine hundred and sixty one. You
need a new golf organization called real Golf that dispenses
with the USGA. Solid, simple, stupid little rules plaid as
it lays, be goes out of bound, put it back
in bound, don't go back to the t. You can
grind your club and the hazard. Who cares? Those are
the rules so that amateurs will actually be able to
follow them. Got to have a lot of degrees and
a master in taxes to follow the USGA rules. They're stupid.
It's like only twelve rules. Originally, the USGA is all
over the map. They don't even know what skill is.
The yards books were originally illegal because they're not the
golfer's eye and senses telling him about the conditions of
the golf course and how to play the shot. Anything
that's other than that, like a book, a green map,
a yards book or illegal. The USGA's obligation is to
protect the game of skill from cheating. They don't want
fake scores, they want a real handicap. According to the
rules of skill. Then they made that goofy exception if
it's traditionally accepted. The first case that they considered was
the yards books, and they said traditionally accepted. We're sorry,
go ahead, you know what. The second one was plumb bobbing.
They considered the case of plumbbobbing. They said, so many
golfers cheat with it, accepted that wasn't even cheating because
plumbbobbing doesn't work.
Speaker 2: Everything you know is wrong. According to Jeff Mangum of
the Pudding Zone.
Speaker 1: This is Golf's Murder, sharing stories, tips and insights from
Greek golf minds to help you lower your score and
raise your golf IQ.
Speaker 2: There's your host, Fred Green. Welcome back to the Golf
Smarter podcast.
Speaker 1: Jeff, Hi, Fred, how you doing. Long time no see.
Speaker 2: Long time no see.
Speaker 3: You know, I was looking back on my spreadsheet here
to try to figure out how long it's been since
you were on the podcast. And so this is episode
nine sixty one. Last time I see it was an
episode number six hundred and two in twenty seventeen, in
like almost exactly a year, So seven years since we've
talked to each other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, but more importantly, the first episode you were
on was episode thirty seven in August of two thousand
and six.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: So it's uh, we've been talking to each other for
a long time, but we haven't talked to each other
in a long time. And it is great to have
you back on because the putting world has changed, and
probably from your perspective, it hasn't because people still suck
at putting.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to say anything like everybody sucks.
Speaker 2: Okay, how would you characterize it?
Speaker 1: But it could definitely be better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they can be better. They can be better.
Speaker 3: So you've been running the putting zone for probably longer
than I've been doing this podcast, and since two.
Speaker 1: Thousand, twenty four years.
Speaker 2: Wow. Congratulations, and you have certified teachers all over the
world to become putting zone instructors.
Speaker 1: I've trained seven hundred and fifty golf coaches, most of
which were sixteen hours two days training each.
Speaker 2: Wow. Wow.
Speaker 1: This got back from Korea where we did classes, two
day classes with thirty and then we did two classes sixty.
We did four days of training, and then we did
they're players and individuals.
Speaker 2: And do you have a language barrier?
Speaker 3: Do you have somebody who's there as a translator for
you or your host speak.
Speaker 1: English in Korea, English is very hard for Koreans. Yeah,
and they're pretty conscious, self conscious about not being able
to speak English. So I had the good fortune of
a Korean that was born on Saipan, which is now
part of America, and he grew up speaking English very fluently.
He's the one that was my host and he translated
and that worked.
Speaker 3: Great, awesome, awesome. And what about in Japan? Have you
done Japan as well?
Speaker 1: Japan? I have a friend that's working on that right now.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's amazing, but talk about you know, they definitely
if they can't speak English, you know perfectly, they're not
going to do it. And they're all trained as kids.
I mean the kids speak English, it's amazing, but adults
they don't use it as much. They don't feel comfortable,
so they just don't do it right.
Speaker 2: It's incredible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if if if a person has difficulty with English,
they laugh and then they go away. They do know,
and they don't enjoy the feelings of not being perfect.
They are perfect monsters in Korea. Boy, they love perfect,
still love perfect. They love perfect.
Speaker 3: And when they talk about golf, when do you learn
At what point do you accept the fact that there
is no perfect in golf.
Speaker 1: I don't never think there's perfect in anything human. And
they kind of have to admit that they're not perfect,
even though they've been working harder than anybody, it's probably
not in the cards. And so you have to be
You have to disconnect their their sense of themselves from
their Korean context of family and friends. They don't want
to admit around family and friends that they're not either
perfect or just about getting there. But if you did
much pressure and you just go, hey, let's go eat
some kimchi, you know you can. You can make good
emotional connections. In Korea, it's a little bit nearer. You've
got to get through, and I'm the clown that can
get through. I have a name in Korea. My name
in Korea is Godzilla?
Speaker 2: Really? Godzilla?
Speaker 1: Godzilla?
Speaker 2: Why is that?
Speaker 1: Detroyer of Tokyo. Actually Godzilla was kind of an earth
god protecting the earth, and it's a little bit of
a mystery on why he had it in for Japan.
That's not exactly clear. But the movie Godzilla was originally
written by North Korean. He later immigrated got to the South,
and I think he ended up in the United States somewhere.
But if you Wikipedia Godzilla, you can read that little story. Amazing. Yes,
it's fun.
Speaker 3: Well, I hope you don't mind if I don't call
you Godzilla.
Speaker 1: Oh well, please call me Godzilla. No, it was I
just told him. You know, you're not supposed to be
egotistical out loud in Korea unless you're like over forty
five year old male. And then they got kind of
very macho. Oh wow, young people. They're not supposed to
tell people I'm the great, right, but I'm the greatest
putting instructor in the history of the game. And I
say that to the Korean class of thirty and they
look at me for a second and I go, that's
because I'm Godzilla, and they bust out laughing. So we
get into a different mental mode for learning. We get
into the childlike mode for learning.
Speaker 2: It's amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we have fun, we have great time.
Speaker 2: I love that story. I love that story.
Speaker 3: Tell me about the process of what the putting zone
instruction is to become certified.
Speaker 1: Well, there are four skills and that was two words,
not one four or reading, aiming, stroke for line and
stroke for ball, pace or touch. The second word was skill. Okay,
the putting zone has a definition of skill that is
actually correct, but golf people don't know it. So let
me define what a skill is. A skill is not
you do it better than most. That's the definition of golf.
These guys are good, they're better than you. And then
they really like the phrase, these are the best golfers
in the world. No, they're not. Okay. So, for example,
Scottish Scheffler can't putt. He's terrible right now, He's barely average,
but he you know, he wins like crazy. Yeah, all right,
but for putting, he's not skillful. He's not even better
than half of the two players. So for him to
say he's the best putter in the world, that that's
not flying. And for him to say that there's nobody
on tour better than him, that doesn't fly. And so
the whole idea of tour players are better than country
club fat diabetic males. That's not a good definition of skill,
all right, So what is the definition of skill? You know,
how to operate the body to do the task of
the skill, whether it's reading the putt. How do you
use your body to read a putt, or if it's aiming,
how do you use your body to aim the putterface correctly?
Or if it's stroke for lyne, how do you use
your body to make it go where you aim? Or
for touch, how do you use your body to organize
the velocity of impact so that the physics of your
putt matches the physics required of the world. I have
thirty five years of that reading brain science to answer
those questions. And that's daily reading, every day, heavy duty neuroscience,
not blogny, not watered down psychology today versions the hot
off the griddle studies with all the complicated statistical analysis
of data, blah blah blah. And I know more about
the brain science of putting than anyone who's ever lived,
no question about it. I never even met somebody in
golf that thinks they know much about it, other than
one particular guy, and he doesn't know how to apply
brain science. To apply brain science, you have to have
the big picture of how the brain works. And don't
get lost in the mlution. You're not a science just
working at Harvard to cure Alzheimer's disease. You want to
know how you reach for a cup of coffee, how
you throw a pair of socks in a bucket, how
you put a basketball in the hoop, and how you
put a ball into a hawk. Okay, that's big picture stuff,
and I'm the guy, the only one ever, and it
probably won't be anybody else ever, because there's a lot
of work. Thirty five years. I have probably three hundred
brain books in my house. There are five hundred that
I've read, and then there's about two thousand neuroscience articles
that I've digested and stored in my computer and read
occasionally and write articles about it. I write two articles
a day for the past forty two months, every day
them every week forty two months is one thousand, two
hundred and so many days sixty one, two hundred and
sixty days in a row. Two articles a day, maybe
one out of eight of those of brain science articles.
Right now, the count of how many articles I've written
on that, on putting science is two thousand, five hundred
and sixty five articles in forty two months. That doesn't
count the book I wrote, the other formal articles I
hand out like candy, or the approximately fifty to one
hundred videos that I've made. This is daily article writing.
I wrote two articles today on on how vision works
when you imagine things and whether that's good or bad?
Stuff like that, How that applies to reading a putt?
Speaker 2: Why the obsession with the brain science and putting?
Speaker 1: When I started all this research back in nineteen ninety,
which was ten years of research before I even started teaching.
Who does that I do ten years? I don't know
anybody who's done or even up in their mouth in
charts fifty bucks. But anyway, I did ten years and
five of that was literary or literature research on what
has already been said and written in golf about pain.
And that's a five year project just to find it
and then go get it and read it. And what
you find out is that before you start reading all
that mass of information to fill your brain with what's
good and bad, you do a logger thing. You clarify
why you are reading anything, any book or art. And
to do that you have to invite a martian down
to watch a golfer putt on the green and then
ask him what are the skills? And the martian says,
he reads the putt, he aims the start line of
the read, he puts straight, and he puts a pace
control or else he doesn't do as good as he misses.
But those are four skills reading, aiming, stroking touch. Right now,
with that templating mind, then you sort all the literature
into big buckets, one big fifty five gallon barrel for reading, aiming,
stroking touch, and then you turn the lights on, get
your coffee, start reading one bucket at a time, and
then you get the shock, the big shock. The reading
bucket has one book down at the bottom, and that's it.
There's a guy in ha Templeton, the Air Force, Lieutenant
colonel road Book. He spent a year or two. He
commandeered the whole Air Force golf course and he stretched
strings across the top of every green, and then he
measured down and he made a topographic map with maybe
ten inch squares. Then he did scientific experiments, and then
he did engineering experiments, and then he did physics research
on how ball's curve on slope. And then he made
a set of charts. If you're standing here, there's a
fall line, or what he called the zero brake line.
And if you're standing if that imagined to be six twelve,
you're standing at seven o'clock. That's going to break left
to right, and he'll tell you how many inches above
the center of the cup to aim on the zero
break line. He wrote a whole series of charts about that.
That's the only book in the whole history of golf
ever written about how to read the putt. And it's
only Matt all right now. Doctor Gary Wyron wrote the
PGA Manual of Instruction nineteen eighty six, and he's an
educational psychologist, so he has a little academic background. He
restarts reading before he wrote the manual, and he said, whoop,
nothing here but this guy from Texas, and he admitted
that he didn't know anything about putting, so he quoted
the guy in the manual. And that's all he did
for reading putts in the manual. I've met tens of
thousands of PJ of America people that took the train,
and not a single one of them remembers the name Templeton. Wow, Okay,
Now I set up a guy teaching petting using Templeton's system.
His name is Michael Shy. He's from California and he
was the Chambeau's coach for a long time. All right,
So that's one bucket there ain't nothing in there. The
aiming bucket has a little bit about get behind the
ball and use your dominant eye and get behind the
ball and aim the line on the ball, and very
little else. Well, there's nothing about how to stand beside
the ball and look at a putterface and say, where
does that putterface? Ninety degree aim? Go and point at
a grass blade twenty three feet away. There was a
trick in the fifth and the sixties that nobody today remembers,
but it accidentally got it kind of right. But I'm
the originator of aiming beside the ball, and I'm the
only person that even teaches it. All right, So that's
the aim bucket.
Speaker 2: Wait wait, wait, wait, wait, aim beside the ball.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you look at a butterface. You got to know
whether you pointed it correctly at the target. Okay, I'm
another one does how to teach it. I checked nobody else.
I created that. Okay, Now for the stroke, everybody's got
an opinion, just like everybody's got a mouth or another anatomy.
Yeah right, right, another forty thousands on the stroke. All right,
So forget that bucket. There's a bunch of snakes crawling
out of the bucket, toutch bucket. Nothing, there's a sticky
way down to the bottom of the bucket. From twenty
and ten the ABC broadcast of the British Open from
Paul Aisinger watching Tiger Woods. The sticky says, look at
that tiger's touch. You can't teach that. You can't learn that,
you have to be born with that. That's the only
thing in the whole touch bucket history of golf I checked,
all right. Now, when you do that five years of
research and you organize all the literature and then you
read it one bucket at a time, you look at
golf teachers as kind of dumb. That was from eighteen
thirty to two thousand and eight, so that's like seventy
one hundred and seventy eight years of research nothing all
right now. At that point I sat about saying, I'm
still going to learn how to do it, and I'm
going to look in scientists scientifically. What would I need
to know to figure out how to read a putt,
how to aim a putter, how to stroke it where
you aim, and how to do pace control and everything
that I kept thinking about. The words were perception and movement,
And then I said Okay, well, let's study perception and
movement in the context of putty. So what you end
up with is there's an assortment of science that you
need to apply to the skills of putty or the
tasks of putting. One is brain science and one is physics.
Then you have to understand something about greens and grass,
and then you have to understand something about human anatomy, perception, brains, physics, movement,
all those and I got busy. I'm a busy little
obsession conupposed to be, and I've been studying those sciences.
I already had fifty years of Okay, now I've got
fifteen thousand books in my house. If you want to
challenge me on that, I got fifteen thousand books in
my house collecting death, and I got twenty this week. Yes,
all right, But when you apply these sciences, you end
up saying, man, God, people really need to learn something.
For example, how do you read a putt? If you
ask any professional player on the PGA tour, tell the
thirteen year old kid what to do when you read
a putt, they got nothing. Nothing. I just watched the
big video by Scottie Scheffler yesterday on Golf Digest where
he's he and his coach Rick Smith and Dallas are
talking about how to read it put and it basically
was stand here, stand there, feel something and steady green.
The USGA agronomists have been warning golfers that they got
reddy grain in almost everywhere except deepest, darkest South Florida.
Since nineteen eighty eighty one, there was a sea change
in golf for greens. Different way to build greens so
they have healthier grass, healthier root systems, different ways to
mow them and take care of them, birdy cutting, top
dressing and criss cross mowing and all that, and better
equipment for mowing the Toro triplex mowers, better care of greens,
and that system of lower mowing got it below the
height where grain actually matters. And the system of crisscross
cutting and verty cutting and top dressing got rid of
grain also, so grain just doesn't have a chance to
matter today. And the USGA agronomists have been worning golfers,
especially Johnny Miller on NBC, always yacking about the grain.
These turplo pros actually believe in the grain on the green.
Now it's possible to scrape it, but it's not big
enough to matter. Now. What confused them, I think is
that the fringes are sharply downhill and longer grass, and
they have fringe and if you chip into the grain
from the fringe, you killy it. And then they get
on the green and they confuse that fringe grain with
believing in the grain on the green, when it's really
just faster green speed downhill, slow green uphill. So I
watched Scottie Scheffler and Rick smith yacking about the grain,
and I'm going that ain't how you read to put.
Then you close, you see where the fall line is.
You appreciate the steepness of the slope, You appreciate the
green speed. And these words are appreciate. That's what brains do.
They don't look for numbers, and they appreciate that. And
then if you put the bass speed in your mind,
your brain actually predicts the curve, literally predicts the very
curve that matches the actual physics. Soanes predict physics. All right, now,
let me speed this up to you to put a
nail right in your forehead right there.
Speaker 2: Don't heard me?
Speaker 1: Why animals have brains to predict the world's physics because
animals move and plants don't move. Animals have a brain
and plants don't have a brain. And the main purpose
that animals have brains is moving is dangerous, and they
have to match the physics of their limb motions to
the actual requirements of the external physics of the world
or they're dead. Okay, now that's the sentence that nobody
at Harvard can actually say. They don't get that. The
top neuroscience guy for the brain sense of movement is
a French guy named Elaine Beethols. And I've read his books.
I'm upseessing compulsive, and I'm way out there. He does
not get what I just told you. It's not in
his book. I know what's in the brain, and I
know why, and I know how it got there, and
I know what it means for paying brains prevent you
from running your hogwart little face into the wall of
hogwart station. That's magical because nobody can actually do it,
because their brain will stop you. You can't do it.
And so for touch control, if you imagine putting past
the little hole down downhill on the green is running
your faces into a wall, and you imagine pain and injury.
Your brain will give you the tank of gas that
will not go past it, and then you can't. You
load the tanky gas with one tempo and you spend it,
and that vigor of the load is preloaded into the
muscle that makes your backswing so that it does not
go too big. No such thing as too big of
a backstroke when you're athletic.
Speaker 2: I don't you know. I've been told I overthink it.
Speaker 3: The only equipment you've talked about so far in putting.
Speaker 2: Is lawnmowers.
Speaker 3: You've not seen anything else about the equipment that we use.
Speaker 1: That's because golf people are really wacky nuts by the
marketing of putters. Putters don't matter if it's a flat
slab at the end of a stick. What's different from
this one to that one? Well, maybe he'll toe waiting,
maybe big MLI, but big boys. When you rip a
putter with sufficient firmness of your hand, all the little
physics is completely destroyed. Now it's up to you square
straight online swing and it takes a grip pressure of
three on scale of one to ten to completely erase
all the little magic of the tiny physics of Scottie
Cameron putters and lab putters and or whatever you want
to name. None of it matters.
Speaker 3: Okay, wait, wait, wait, you brought up lab the liight
angle balance putters. Now I've become a big fan. I'm
kind of a lab rat.
Speaker 2: Is that?
Speaker 3: Are you saying that? That's also marketing hype as well
as the heel balance, toe balanced all that.
Speaker 1: Yes, okay, There's two things you need to know about
lab marketing. One is the way they harness it and
make it swing is not real. You don't ever have
zero grip pressure on the putter, okay, so if you
actually grip it and swing it, it won't do with
that frame they use. Shows you. Second, if you align
the center of gravity of the putter head with the shaft,
then you have eliminated certain factors of torque and imbalance.
But that's not the only reason that putters do curves
and arcs and come out of the plane. There is
torque towards your feet, right, they are addressing head torque
where there's not a fat person sitting on the toe
and a skinny person sitting on the hill. That's torque
of the head. I'm talking about the whole torque because
the on the light angle when you get it off
the ground, it's going to fall to your feet into
vertical equilibrium in gravity. That torque, right when you stick
your arms out away from your body so that your
hands are not neutral in gravity, that torque is fifteen
times more powerful than the putter tork. All right, So
they don't know anything about that. I have tried to
tell them, but as soon as I say that their
statements are not perfect, they go stick their fingers in
there and hate you, hate you, hate you. All right.
I'm seriously, you know, I can't help it. I'm just
trying to help these people not mess up golfers by
claiming stuff that's scientifically goofy. They don't even know about
the torque of putters that fall towards your feet. If
you make a backstroke and your grip is too weak,
the backstroke will go kind of straight, because that's anatomical
that you you you just contracted a peck muscle. Your
arms can go very straight across your body, but the
torque of the droop towards your feet will combine with
going straight back, and it makes it look like a curve.
If you have the one grip pressure instead of a
three one has a big curve to the inside. If
you have a two grip pressure, it is half of that.
If you have a three grip pressure, it doesn't ark
any at all. That's the golfer's grip pressure, not anybody
designing the putter. And so I've explained all this to L. A. B.
And they just stick their fingers in the ears and
the start houlering, hate you, hate you hate.
Speaker 2: You Are you saying that because it's a center shafted putter,
center shafting, you're you're removing the torque.
Speaker 1: Center shafting and the center of gravity of the putter. Okay,
you take a putterhead shape, there are three dimensions on
where the center of the gravity is depending on the shape. Okay,
a flange putter, the center of gravity is probably halfway
from heel to toe, halfway from bottom to top, and
halfway from front to back because it's a little rectangle
and a cube sort of a three dimensional rectangle lab
has a bigger back, all right, So the center of
gravity is not near the shaft, is one or so
inches away from the shaft to the back, and a
lot of putters do not center that center of gravity
behind the shaft. All right. Now, Usually if you have
a center shafted puddle and you lift it off the
ground and the center of gravity is back to the right,
that putters. Since you lift it so off the ground,
it will twist to the right. That's they've done something
that reduces that. But if you grip it so that
you take care of the droop torque from the li angle,
that grip overwhelms whatever they did with the with the
head check design not relevant. What grip pressure do you
use with your putter?
Speaker 2: Well, I'm now using a broomstick putter.
Speaker 1: Oh so you switched switched lab. Okay, what grip pressure
on scale of.
Speaker 2: One to ten, Probably like a three or four? Very light.
Speaker 3: But you know I've got my left hand, you know,
thumb on top of the putter the grip and the
second one very uh and then my three fingers on
the left hand on the top are very light. And
then I'm probably just you know, holding it in between
my middle finger and my ring finger on my right
hand very lightly, just to guide it.
Speaker 2: And you know, using a pendulum.
Speaker 1: Real, do you got it straight back?
Speaker 2: It feels like it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I bet you don't, because l AB tells you
that you don't need to l A B tells you
that whatever arc you make, the putter will stay square
to that pat Okay, okay, even if that's true, bad putting,
But my putting improved. You got so, yeah, but you
sucked still improvement. He actually knew.
Speaker 2: What Well, that's the whole idea. We all suck well.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't teach people that just want to
suck less. I don't teach people that want to suck less.
I could teach people that want to suck less. I
could sell all kinds of goofy little training aids, but
that's not what I do. What I teach is real skill,
better as good as you can possibly get. We don't
start less.
Speaker 2: Are there putters on the market that you approve of?
Speaker 1: Absolutely not?
Speaker 2: Have you designed the ultimate putter? No? Wait, are you
going to do that?
Speaker 1: Wouldn't make it. He was too egotistically made. He bought
a pudder from Tad more than Tad had stuck in
a drawer, and then he asked me to sell his pudd.
I've been teaching his sixteen year old kid from sixteen
to twenty two for free on my nickel. Six hundred
and fifty miles away and this is uh, he's gonna
help me. And this is how he helped me, said
design pudder. I designed one and sent it to him,
and then he bought a tad more made his unputter
and asked me to sell it for him with a video.
Speaker 2: Wait, wait a minute, I missed who you're talking about.
Speaker 1: His name is Bob Kotch, medical swinger. For six years
he was going to help me maybe, and then he
never helped me, and he asked me to help him
sell his pudder. Oh ouch, Yeah, Well, I mean that's
that's the experience that I've had repeatedly dealing with people
that tell me, you know, I could help you and
I will help you, and you know, years go by
and they never did.
Speaker 3: So wait a minute, are you saying that it doesn't
matter what piece of equipment you used.
Speaker 1: It's a flat slab on the end of a stick. Yeah,
you let me tell you what pudder you want.
Speaker 2: Ah, We're going to do that in a moment. Okay.
Speaker 3: I guess we've been waiting this entire time for your
advice on what putter you would recommend so that we
suck less.
Speaker 1: The same one. Jack Nicholas is to win the Masters
when he was forty six years old.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he's not going to sell it to us.
And there was only one. There's only one of those putters,
his butter.
Speaker 1: Big McGregor. He used a different putter that week, really
huge McGregor, a very large area flat pudd.
Speaker 2: Was it a blad style but just really big?
Speaker 1: Oh no, It was like a frying pan, a square
rectangular frying pan with a stick attached to it.
Speaker 2: And why was he using that? How did this come about?
Speaker 1: He was having success with it, so he put it
in the bag and he used to the masters, you
don't know what I do. Let me tell you why
it's good. Yeah, A no wobble roll rolls perpendicular to
the plane of the green. And that means that your
impact cannot be toe up or held up, because then
you will make a wobble. And that means that your
putter's soul has to conform to ball below the feet
slope or ball above the feet slope, and your stroke
has to keep it flat through impact. Then you get
through wobble, through wobble, no wobble roll. All right. You
have to think about bicycles in the hippodrome. They go
perpendicular to the slanted track, not perpendicularly. Gravity Balls don't
roll perpendicularly to gravity unless you're putting on the floor
a level. Golfers always confuse the two words flat and level.
They cannot get those distinguished.
Speaker 2: Please distinguish them for me.
Speaker 1: Level means the table top has all points equal elevation
above the sea, and if you pour water on it,
the water doesn't go anywhere. Flat could be tilted, but
flat the table is still flat, but you tilted it.
Speaker 2: And all greens are kind of tilted. They have to be.
Speaker 1: When they mean they meant level, they just say the
word flat. Oh okay, so that's bad. A putting stroke
on a level surface like a basketball cord or marble,
the putter soul would slide into the ball and that
will go no wobble, true rolling plane of rotation. Take
the break correctly because it's no wobble, and take the
paste control correctly because there's no wobble. All right, So,
ball below the feet, you got to flatten your putter
and scrape it across that grass without the toe coming up,
with the eel coming up. Ball above the feet, you
got to scrape it across that slope. Right, So flat
is actually a big dag on deal, and the bigger
the flat soul is. That's weird in golf because golfers
always making little rockers under the putter. The bottom of
the putters of a Scottie Cameron is a rocker. There's
very little that's actually flat, and that encourages bad putting,
Thank you, Scottie. It's part of selling putters to people
in gofsmiths stores when they go in there and pull
it off the shelf and they set it down, toe up,
they like it. They set it down, heel up, they
like it. It's a marketing thing, not a performance thing.
But if you get a big flat putter, you can
hardly put anywhere other than where you exactly aim. It's
too big to mess it up. You try to lift
the toe on that putter, that McGregor putter that Jack
Nichols used, it's hard to do it. There's too much heal.
You lift it up, you're just digging the heel in.
You try to lift the heel up, you're digging the
toe in. That's because it's big and flat, and that
means you hit no oval rolls exactly where you aim.
Because it's big and flat. Now, if the USGA actually
knew how these things work, they would ban it. There's
a friend of mine who is a little amateur guy.
He's like seventy five year old psychiatrist named James Payne
Payn and he recently retired. He lives in Chapel Hill.
He made a putter and he's enthusiastic because it does great.
But it's the same thing as McGregor. Because he don't
even know about the McGregor putter, because he's just an
amateur peeling around with stuff. He actually reinvented the McGregor
putter with a big flat bottom. You stick a shaft
down there and then you slide it. You can't hardly
miss where you ain't. You got the aim right, It
goes in. So I teach I don't care about your putter.
Here about flat, no wobble, straight rolls exactly where you aim.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that and if i'm please correct me
if I'm misinterpreting it. But that's what the lab light.
And you lie it flat.
Speaker 2: It's lying flat on the ground.
Speaker 1: No but arc it and they tell you that you
can hark it painlessly because the lab physics of the
head torque will stay on plane even when you ark it.
And then they tell you that when you unark it
back to the impact point, it will perfectly hit exactly
where you were aimed. And that's bogus b e es
focus bog bogy All right, here's here. Let me just
talk about brad facts and can't put.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, I asked you to be controversial.
Speaker 1: All you got to do is look at the Southern
California PGA YouTube of one hour where he's paid probably
five thousand dollars to tell war stories of teaching. Michaelroy
and he's out there, he has one ten foot putt
and he says, I aim the line on the ball,
and I'm one of the first to ever use the
line on the ball, and I always ain't the line
on the ball, but I refuse to match my butterface
aim to the line on the ball because that would
cramp my touch and feel. And then he arcs back
and then he says, I shut the door at impact.
All right, that's what he teaches, and he's he claims
he's one of the best putters ever in the history
of the world. All right. He had one point seven
oh four putts for Green regulation when he was putting,
and he did good. But Jordan Speith had one point
six y nine. So the five or six guys in
the last five years have done better than Faction in
as crazy as best year ever. Two other golfers did
the same thing as Faction, David Toms and David Frost.
One guy named Bob Hans did one point six eight
two in the year two thousand and five, which is
way way better than Brad faxon. All right, but here's
the deal. Five putts from ten feet. The aim of
the ball is one foot to the left of the hole.
He missed four to the right four, and then he
made the fifth one actually win. In the halt. His
aim was correct all five, his reed was correct all five.
And he said, well, it must have been my read
was wrong because I'm teaching in southern California and there's
the ocean somewhere, and there's mountain somewhere, and that makes
me a funny reader because I'm from Providence, Rhode Island,
or wherever he's from. Okay, now that explanation of why
he missed the first four when he's aiming the line
on ball and the fifth one actually went in that's
completely ignorant, bad logic, stupid miss at that point, he
missed it because his stroke and didn't go and where
he games. He can't close the door accurately. He arcs,
but he can't unarc. Okay, Now, all these people that
arc in unarc, including the people that La B encourages
to arc. No putters don't unark themselves. You got to
do it. And if it's arcing because of the torque droop,
you got no way in the world to unark that.
You can't unarched. You can't undroop your torquefall. Now there's
two other ways that putter's arc and you don't know
whether you're doing it or not. I see all these
people I teach, they have no clue on whether they're
actually putting straight. One is you roll your forearms. The
front arm pronates palm down, the back arm supinates palm up.
That's the backstroke. Then you reverse that, suppenate the lead arm,
pronate the back arm through impact. That's full swing habit.
All the pros do that because they don't know what
else to do. They get out there and they done
five hours on the driving range, and they step on
the putting green for thirty minutes to an hour. They
rolled their forearms back and through. It's in all their movies.
It's in all their videos. Colin more Cowa can't put Colin.
He hired a swing coach or a putting coach named
Jeff Sweeney or I believe it is his name, Stephen Swing,
Steve Swing, Australian guy teaching in southern Florid And Sweeney said,
I think I know what's wrong with your petting. And
Colin said, well, God, about time somebody did what's wrong.
And Sweeney said, you're using your full swing motion. And
Colin said, why is that bad? And Sweeney said, I
don't know, but it's not working. What should I do?
I don't know. Okay, So he noticed that the full
swing pro nation of the arms and hands was happening
in the pudding and that wasn't working too good. All right, now,
let's see who was the other guy just recently. I
think it was might have been might have been Cheffer.
I'm not sure. But they noticed for the first time
in their life that when they stroke, their shoulder goes
back in the through stroke. No coach ever told him,
no friend ever told him. No caddy ever told him.
No fellow tour player ever noticed it and said, hey,
that's not good. The first time they ever noticed that,
they had already been playing golf for about ten or
fifteen years, and they had been on tour for four
or five years, and they just noticed that the shoulder
goes that way. That's the third way that you do
things that make it arc. You rotate your torso. That's
what all golfers do on the driving ranch their torso
ten years into playing serious golf, and that's the first
time he notices that. And you say, well, what should
you do instead? Blank? Nothing? All right, Now, let me
tell you what Crenshaw does. Because he goes arking to
the inside, he comes back to the ball, and if
he doesn't time it right, he's dead. But when he
comes back to the ball, he changes to vertical, and
when he gets back to the ball, his lead shoulder
goes up from the ball to his foot. And the
telltale sign is if you stood down the line at
the hole and look back at his putter and took
a picture when it's one foot past impact, the sweet
spot is directly above the line of the stroke, and
the faces square and his shoulder went up from the
ball to the foot. Ain't nobody knows that but me.
Speaker 2: He doesn't know it, And you're saying that is correct.
Speaker 1: I'm saying that he fixed a bad backstroke. Okay, he
has to do a perfect timing. Now, he's got a
video The Art of Hutting with Ben Crenshaw BHS. Right
in the middle of that video, he's got a thirty
foot up he'll put and he says, I'm going to
sink two of them. Boom. The first one he hits
four feet wrong to the right us like faction. And
the second one I think he sank it or he
got a lot closer to the left. But he did
not comment on that first one because he did not
know what was wrong. I do his stroke did not
close because he misstimed it. All right, So you do
an arcing stroke. You have to time every single one
of those perfectly. If you're like a nano second off.
If you're too late closing, you go to the right.
If you're too early closing, you go to the left. Now,
the accuracy of your line control from ten feet away.
If you have a dead straight putt to the center
of a cup ten feet away, one hundred and twenty
inches away, and from the center of the cup to
the right edge of the cup is two and one
eighth of an inch. If you misstroke it by one degree,
you miss the right edge, all right? Now, how much
of the toe is out of square? The very end
of that toe is moved? How much to the right
when you misstroke at one degree point zero three inches? Wow? Okay,
that's not a tenth of an inch, that's one third
of the tenth of an inch, and you're dead all right,
But flat fixes all that, Jeff.
Speaker 3: So many of us when we're out on the golf course,
we have a GPS with us, or we have a
rangefinder with us, and we're looking at like, Okay, I'm
one hundred and forty yards to the pin, or I'm
you know, two hundred yards, or I'm fifty yards to
the pin, but we're trying to get distances there.
Speaker 2: How do you feel about the fact.
Speaker 3: That so many people don't really concern themselves with the
exact distance they are from the hole when they're starting
their first putt or any putt for that matter, and
they're like, oh, it's feel it's just kind of like
I got a sense of where it is over there?
Speaker 2: How what is your your instruction about walking off the
distance of your putts.
Speaker 1: I don't want to number. I want a.
Speaker 2: Fact, and a number is not a fact.
Speaker 1: Appreciate the distance as a fact.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: Fact means if I had to walk to it, how
many places in a military parade stride would take And
the answer is twelve that's thirty feet away. Four military
parade steps is ten feet. Each military pride step is
two and a half feet thirty inches. And if you
don't do the parade step stride correctly in the military,
you make the whole parade look like crap, and they
give you KP and work you make you go dig latrine.
Hope if everybody in the military knows two point five strides,
and if you look from here to the hole and
you say how far is it? The first indication is
how many steps would it be? If I did relitary stripes,
And you can get within two or three feet just
by looking. You don't need to walk it off. But
that is effort, not number. Okay. Now, Uphill is more
effort uphill. Downhill is less effort downhill. Sure, other things
you can do is you can look at a cup
the size of a real cup. If you move it away,
the size regularly shrinks in a parent width. Okay, the
real size is this big right at your nose, like
you're going to drink from a cup liner four and
a half inches or four and a quarter inches wide.
There you go. And if you move that away from you,
it's a certain width, a parent width at ten feet,
and if you move it to twenty feet, it's half
that width. And if you move it to thirty feet,
it's one third of that whip that it was at
ten ten feet. The appearance, that's a brain way of
looking at distance, not a number. You have to appreciate
the distance as a fact right now. In distance control,
that has to be related to your tempo and rhythm,
that effort. And then when you do that, you say,
go to the hole and stop. Don't break your glass
if it's sitting there. Don't go screaming past the hole.
That's like a stick in the eye. If there's a
cliff of California and the Pacific Ocean that's just past
the hole, don't give me enough gas to go off
the cliff. Give me enough gas to get there and stop.
The brain does that and then when you make your stroke,
that's athletic. Right now, The golf world went kind of
off the rails with numbers. When Jack Nicholas started using
artist books in the sixties, that was illegal. That was
called using an artificial device. Wow. The USJ tapped him
on the shoulder and said, you get DQ's if you
use the artist book. And Jack Nichols said, I'm on TV,
I'm a tour player. We got our own rules.
Speaker 2: Buf Whow, I never heard that story. That's amazing, look up.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the USJ chicking out. They didn't want to
defy TV's Greatest Golfer or the tour and said chicken out,
and they did said nothing, And then they changed the
rule and made an exception to using an artificial device
gets you disqualified. And the exception said, if a lot
of golfers do it and think it's okay, it's cheating
because it's not skillful. And that's why you can't use
artificial devices. You got to use your own personal skill.
But if a lot of golfers cheat, we're not going
to say no. We will say instead that this form
of cheating has been traditionally accepted and you won't right now,
Arnold Palmer chimed in because he was like ten years older, sure,
and he said, use your eye. You're not athletic if
you use a book. Right now. In putting, one club
goes a thousand different distances the putt. In chipping, a
chipping club goes a thousand different distances. In pitching, a
pitch club goes a thousand different distances. A sand bunker
club goes different distances. That's a little different because you
got to calibrate how much sandy get. But putting, chipping,
and pitching those require athletic targeting on where your ball stops,
and they don't do that. They do yards instead, and
they get all kind of in between when the yard
isn't exactly what they've been hitting on the driving range,
all right, So they actually would do better if they
knew more about targeting. And that's what I teach. I
teach skill, perception, intentionality. The brains will do the physics.
The brain will come up with the force of the
swing to pop it right down at the hole. Now,
the example is a nineteen year old, pretty serious amateur
one hundred and twenty five yard pit shot from the
top of a hill down to a green slanting a
little bit away from the fairway flagstick right in the middle,
and the green is kind of narrow left and right
long front to back. He hit one down there and
it went off the back. I said, okay, let me
fix you. Take a yellow plastic wet floor sign that
says Pizzo mahido and put it likely behind the flag
stick and swear that if you go past it, you
got a stick in the eye for pain. Now hit
it flush, nice tempo, Hit it flush two feet immediately
right online. Now, let me tell you Leonardo da Vinci
agrees with me, and he's a weird kind of a guy.
He actually wrote that animals have pain and plants do
not have pain, and the function of pain is to
keep animals from colliding with objects in the way. Okay,
now that's yeah, that's buttons on perfect that they can't
say at Harvard Neuroscience. That's exactly what I teach. Okay,
I found that Leonardo agrees with me. I feel pretty
good about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, tell me tell me what you feel about bifurcation.
Speaker 1: I think that it's well time to do it. Yeah, okay,
I mean, you know, here's a here's a little even
further thing, you know, like the grateful dead bus was
called further. Yeah, all right, here's the.
Speaker 2: Thing we took an hour to get to grateful.
Speaker 1: We'll start. You need a new golf organization called real
Golf that dispenses with the u s g A whoa
solid simple, stupid little rules clad as it lays because
out of bound, put it back in bound, don't go
back to the t You can grind your club and
the hazard. Who cares? Those are the rules.
Speaker 3: That was my next question. That's not fair. My next
question was, Okay, you're in charge. What's the first thing
you're going to do with rules? What things are you
going to.
Speaker 1: Do most possible so that amateurs will actually be able
to follow them? A lot degrees and a master in
taxes to follow the USDA rules. They're stupid. What Lincoln
puts rut those rules lawyers. When you go back to
the ab frost thing that hangs on the wall where
the guys, you know, making there's like only twelve rules originally,
and but now they got God, they got nuanced words
that you got to look up in chapter eight to
find out what the meaning was, and you got to
look at the decision to find out how they actually
apply them, and it's just terrible. I mean, the USDA
is all over the map. They don't even know what
skill is. Now, let me rant this real quick on this,
because you asked the question. The yards books were originally
illegal because they're not the golfer's eye and senses telling
him about the conditions of the golf course and how
to play the shot. Anything that's other than that, like
a cat book, a green map, a yards book, a
laser plumb bobby, an unusual use of your putter, all
of those are illegal. That is, the USGA's obligation is
to protect the game of skill from cheating, all right.
They don't want fake scores. They want a real handicap
in a stipulated round. They want real competition according to
the rules of skill. It's not like NASCAR where everybody
drives the same stock card and see who can get
across the fench line a little quicker. It's you. You
got to see it, you got to read it, you
got to put it. All right, Then they made that
goofy exception if it's traditionally accepted. The first case that
they considered was the yards book, and they said traditionally accepted.
We're sorry, go ahead, keet it away. You know what.
The second one was plumb bobbing. They considered the case
of plumb bobbing. They said, so many golfers teat with it,
accepted that wasn't even cheating because plump bobbing doesn't work.
But that's the USJA completely, spaghetti head. I'm being able
to think and apply the rules. Lasers. You know how,
the USJA and RNA met for years talking about whether
you can have a laser. The out was, we're not
going to tell you it's okay. In fact, we say no,
but if any local committee wants to let you use
the laser, knock yourself out. What kind of rule was that?
All right? So the second little rule, but no laser
can be approved by a local committee if it tells
you plays as up or down. This is one hundred
and fifty yards as usually your seven iron or your
eight iron, but since it's ten feet up, use an
eight lasers do that? They said, we don't approve that,
and we don't want a local committee to approve it.
And if you have one of those lasers in your bag,
even if you don't use it, DQ all right now.
They've backed off of that one recently. What is what
is a green map? Yardage books or yardage only, not elevation,
not win calculators. And when they got to the rut
the lasers, they said, well, as long as you don't
use the plays up and down function, it's not any
different from the yard's book. And we already cooked on that.
So they proved lasers, all right, But a green map
is not limited to mileage. It is fall lines and
slope percent numbers and equal conjur lines and that's all
illegal as hell. And you know who makes these books,
Fred Funk's caddy, Mark Long. He hires teenagers and college
kids to wear GPS backpacks and walk the US Open
fairways so he can get the digital data of the
shape of the golf course and the bunkers and all
the water hazards. And then he has them GPS the
greens and then he produces the maps of the golf course,
including green maps, and sells them to US Open contestants
at Tory Pines for two hundred dollars. Now you know
who walks the course with Mark when he's doing that,
and who confers with Mark about where to put the pins.
You know of the USGA, Mike Davis. Google it. You'll
find the articles where they talk about it in the magazines.
There's so dumb that they don't know what illegal is anymore.
They don't even know. Mark Long tells the USGA setup
man where to put the pins, and then he sells
illegal maps, commercially produced maps of information about the course
conditions that it's otherwise verboten. But they don't know that
it's the USG Right now, you remember how they recently
ban using a digital green reader. Okay, here's the actual
text from the USGA. You can't use a digital green
reader to make information into your caddy book, but you
can buy a green map from Mark Long, and they
used his name in the actual press release. Wow. The
only thing about those green maps is they got to
be small if you blow them up. But this is crazy.
You can't use a digital green reader in practice on
the golf course to make a note in a caddy book,
but you can buy a professionally produced one that's got
the information in there.
Speaker 2: Unbelievable.
Speaker 1: They're nuts, all right. And I said, what do you
really feel? Well, you asked me about Bobber. This is further,
we need real golf with for rules and skill, not
happy golf with cheating to put down a happy score.
Speaker 2: Well, Jeff mangham, it is always a pleasure, dude. I
can't believe that.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: What I love about you is you don't need a quarter.
Speaker 3: All you need is ten cents. And man, you are
off and running right. Well, it was great to talk
to you again.
Speaker 1: It's like in Vietnam and the lieutenant says, you got
to dig that in little train and the guys the
private looks back at him from the private from Cleveland
looks back at him and says, what are you gonna do?
Send me to Vietnam. I got my opinion. They can't
send me to Vietnam. I'm already there.
Speaker 3: Oh, Jeff, thanks so much, buddy. Thank you for responding,
and you know, for answering. I don't know if you
answered any of my questions, but I sure was educated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well you do better with that light big putter.
Speaker 2: Well he's nothing of he's not controversial. What a trip, right?
Speaker 3: And how crazy is it that our timing of last
week and this coming week's Mulligan's episode featured two conversation
with Jeff Mangum from September of twenty twelve, twelve years ago.
He's really worth the deep dive if you want to
improve your putting and be thoroughly entertained by someone with
a mind that doesn't seem to occupy the same planet
as the rest of us. And to those of you
who understood the seventies reference to the episode title in
the intro, let me just say hello seekers.
Speaker 2: I'll leave it at that.
Speaker 3: So I'm headed up to Seattle, Washington, Tomorr to play
a couple including Chambers Bay, which I've been warned is
pretty tough, and there's rain in the forecast, so keep
your fingers crossed for us. We're also playing Eagles Talent
Course at Willow's Run in Redmond. This week's Golf Smarter
Ambassador Bob Anklem of Rosemont, Minnesota, or since this is
the week of the Democratic Invention, I have to.
Speaker 2: Say the great state of Minnesota. Not like WC. Fields.
Speaker 3: I spent a lot of time in Minnesota during the
nineties in Minneapolis working with the Twins, and one spring
day at the beginning of the season, I rented a
bike and rode around the lakes for hours on an
absolutely magnificent day when I got to work that night,
as baseball games in the Metrodome those years were played
at night, and I mentioned to one of the team's
employees that it was such a beautiful day, and if
you know, when I was riding around and if it
was beautiful like that all the time, it would be
called California. His classic response was, that's why we have
winter to keep the riffraff out. Anyway, Thanks Bob for
becoming a Golf Smarter Ambassador, and don't forget to tell
your playing partners.
Speaker 2: That you are.
Speaker 3: On this week's Golf Smarter episode, Bob asked for a
free link to Tony Manzoni's video of the Lost Fundamental,
which was his gift just for sharing with us where
he lives, plays and which episode number this is. I'd
like to invite you to also be one of our
Golf Smarter Ambassadors and choose from one of three great gifts.
When you play, all you need to do is introduce
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