Speaker 1: For members only. Golf Smarter number three hundred and fifty
published on September twenty five, twenty twelve.
Speaker 2: Welcome to golf Smarter Mulligans, your second chance to gain
insight and advice from the best instructors featured on the
Golf Smarter podcast. Great Golf Instruction Never gets old. Our
interview library features hundreds of hours of game improvement conversations
like this that are no longer available in any podcast app.
Speaker 3: So we have a simple case, for example, a ten
foot putt across flat green on a filt that you
run into all the time, plus the break. How much
does a break? So I've designed two futt putts to
tell you all about it. You'll find a two percent slope.
We've already described how you though it's two percent, walk
straight down till one hundred inches away you can go,
and then you stop, and you compare where your foot
is to where the hole is, and what's the elevation
drop from the hull to your foot. You imagine a
stream coming out of the whole dead level and how
it is as far as your foot, and hide of
the string above your foot tells you how many inches
it is to the surface. That's what percent. The slope is.
If the string hits your foot at two inches off
the ground, it's slope because you've went one hundred inches downhill.
Two percent is to over one hundred it's a drop
or rise of two inches, a very run of one
hundred inches. That's the percent. It's also called the grade.
If the string inch your foot at three inches off
the ground, and that's a three percent slope. It's through
the level of string from the ult your foot hits
you in the ankle. That's a four percent slope.
Speaker 1: A graduate level education on reading the greens with Jeff Manga.
Speaker 2: This is Golf Smarter, sharing tips and insights from golfers
and golf professionals to help lower your score. It's worked
for your host, Fred Green.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Golf Smarter for remembers only.
Speaker 3: Jeff, all right, go, I'm a jacket on.
Speaker 1: We're back the coffee still at McDonald's.
Speaker 3: I have a member's only jacket.
Speaker 1: And you've had it since nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I got it from the thristle.
Speaker 1: Well, this is a member's only episode and everyone's got
their jackets.
Speaker 3: Welcome fellow jacket word.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know for those of you who do remember
members only jackets, I'm sorry, So let's talk about putting
some more. Explain to me what a stimp meter is
and what stimp means, and why we use that word,
and is is it relevant to us as average golfers.
Speaker 3: Well, let me just describe to you green speed and
the role of stimp meter in knowing and using and
appreciating green speed. Okay, Green speed is the friction in
the grass that opposes the rolling of the ball. If
you're an outer space and you hit a golf ball,
there wouldn't be any friction and it would just go
forever until it was captured by Jupiter or some of
the planet. If you hit a ball on marble, it
has very little friction and it will go for a
long way. If you hit a ball across grass, the
bottom of the grass is in contact with a certain
area of the green grass, the same way the tread
tires in contact with the road in a certain area.
And that area there is basic electrostatic connection between the
grass and the ball that opposes the directionality of the
ball and slows it down and brings it to a stop.
And some greens have less friction than others because they
have tight, short packed grass that makes it more in
the direction of marble. And some greens have more friction
because they have shaggy, buoyant, bulbous, fast and bubbles grass
blades with a lot of water inside them like water beds.
Grass blades are like water beds, and so the more
water there is in the grass blades and the shagger
of the grass, the taller the grass, the less packed
it is that will have a lot of friction. So
there's a range of green speeds, and modern golf course
architects and maintenance technology has tried to bring green speeds
up to the limit of what keeps the grass healthy
and keeps it fast and uniform and true. Today greens
can easily be maintained at around nine feet on the stimpmeter,
which is about fifty oh it may be fifty or
greater quality green surfaces than used to exist in the sixties.
It's way better since nineteen eighty than it ever was
in nineteen seventy and even today it's getting better. So
greens at country clubs and municipal golf courses and high
dollar public golf courses or semi private golf courses they
can all have a very high quality green surface that
does not require us a lot of special speeding up
for en global experiences. For example, everybody says bent grass
is better than bermuda. In nineteen eighty one, Augusta, Georgia
got rid of its bermuda grass and replaced it with
bent grass because university researchers had designed the grass that
would live in the hot and human South, and prior
to nineteen eighty you couldn't grow bent grass in the Custa, Georgia.
So as soon as they were able to grow a
strain of engineered grass bent grass in Georgia, they ripped
out all the permute and redid everything. And they found
out that they're buried elephant grounds, and the greens of Augusta,
Georgia were too steep for the quicker green speed. Remember
it's a combination of the speed and the slope. And
they had too much slope because they had old permuted
greens with a lot of slope. And when they changed
the bent greens, they had to get the bulldozers out
and kind of flattened their elephants a little bit, all right.
So they did the same thing with Pinehurst. You haven't
seen a Donald Ross green because you can't have one today.
The grass is too fast to allow that kind of
crowning that he used to have. His were really crowned
because they were slow. But the story continues into modern
times because now they've gone full circle and now the
highly engineered bermuda grasses or superior to the bent grasses.
Speaker 1: That's interesting.
Speaker 3: For example, Champions is a strain of highly engineered bermuda
grass that you can pack and mow and get low
and true, and it is more heat resistant than the
special bent grasses of Augusta George in Greensboro, North Ohino.
The PGA Tour just finished in the Wyndham Championship and
a billionaire bought a bankrupt country club and the first
thing he did was rip out all the bent greens
and put in Champions dwarf Bermuda greens. And the golf
professionals from PGA Tour exuded luxuriously about the wonderful condition
of the greens at Wyndham Championship.
Speaker 1: Do golf courses want to have their green as fast
as they possibly can? Is that there.
Speaker 3: There's a limit on you know, I mean, if you
want to put on marble greens, not yourself out. There's
a limit to you know, what is the challenge of
golf in the outside of environment. So STEMP thirteen Oakmont
is kind of silly. I mean, who wants to play that.
It's interesting as a vacation, like going to Disneyland once,
but you sure don't want to live there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but when you only play up to play there once,
you're probably just going to get torture.
Speaker 3: You won't come back, right, you won't.
Speaker 1: You won't come back. You'll say, oh, I really want
to play this game because now I finally after eighteen old,
I finally got this bit. Yah, you ain't coming back.
Speaker 3: You take pictures and everything, but you just you know,
it's goofy. It's not really what the skill of the
golf is all about. The skill of the golf is
you know, it's a reasonable test. It's not a goofy
buck based thing. There's a certain point where the green
speed gets beyond controllable. The reads you just you're just
shooting in the dark and making a read because you
can't control your boss bet enough. And you it's the
variation on what it will work is all over the map,
and you know, you're three putton and all that kind
of stuff, and downhill putts are crazy. So somewhere around
stamp twelve, that's where you probably should stop. If you
go past Stemp twelve, you're just you're just toying with
wounded mice.
Speaker 1: And if you're below what number is it like just
you you need to just.
Speaker 3: Add I would say it's today. In Europe, some of
the greens are seven and a half feet on the
Stemp meter, maybe seven on a bad day. They have
some humidity problems. For example, in the Netherlands, it's pretty
much below sea level and the grass is too moist.
The soil is not draining well, and those grasses can
be a little thin, and if they're thin, you got
to kind of grow them tall in order to cover
the green, and then it's not that great. So in
Europe some of the greens are not suitable for really
fast surfaces. As you get further towards the warmer climates,
you can pick up some good greens. I would say
Aldraama and places like that, you can have some really nice,
really good greens. There's a lot of quality golf in Europe.
Don't get me wrong, it's good I'm just saying that
that seven point five on a meter, if you roll
the ball off the bottom of a stent meter and
only those two putter links and the plus a little
bit further, that's not a great green. PGA tours typically
are stimping eleven feet, which is a lot more than seven,
and on a fast, challenging green, they can go up
to twelve and thirteen. You don't want to US Opens.
They're always trying to maximum maximize the green speed for
some reason, because they're just torturous, cruel individuals that are
testing golfers that you know can play lots of golf
courses with high degree of success and they want to
mess with that particular crowd.
Speaker 1: Yes, well, that and growing the rough as thick as
they possibly can, right, I mean, it's the hardest test
in golf. It makes great golfers look like it's.
Speaker 3: Not something that a normal golf would want to do. No,
it's it's not really a golf It's the US Open golf,
but it's not really what normal people will think of.
Is off right Now, back to the limit on how
much you can speed up the grass if you're green
has been designed with x amount of slope. You can't
put pen positions where you're going to speed it up
to thirteen if that slope is too steep. And so
all US Open golf course set up people have been
given the so called Tom Meeks injunction with that Tom
Tom Meeks is the guy that's screwed up. They set
up three different times and they fired. They threw him
out the window. It's called defenestration. Chuck you out the
windows used to be popular in Florence in Dante's day
with the medicis and all that, and sometimes they did
it in the nineteen twenties New York with the mafia.
But any rate, when they throw you out the window,
that means they've had enough because you you messed up
the US Open by putting the pin position on two
great a slope and then you drove the speed of
the surface up past the red line and the ball
won't stop. It's called crazy golf and you look terrible
on TV when the US Open is completely stupid. They
did it at Shinnecock Hills, they did it at Southern Hills.
They did an Olympic in San Francisco. It was it's
just so. Now they have a little rule. If you're
going to be the setup guy for the USJ and
set up the US Open, it puts you in a
room and they say you have one mission in life.
Do not pull a tom meeks So. But anyway, so
that that that combination of green speed and slope, there's
a number. You can figure it out. The combination really
needs another word. I call it the SS the slope stemp.
So if you take the slope two percent and multiply
at times the green speed stemp ten, a ball rolls
off the stemp meter and rolls ten feet across the green,
that would be a SS of twenty ten. The ball
won't stop when the SS is sixty, okay, just in
physicals just won't stay there, all right. It's like you
tilt to the table so much that all the plates
slid off, all right, Now, A sixty can be reached
by any number of pathways a four slope four percent
and a fifteen stemp green, or a twelve stemp green
and a five percent slope, or a ten stemp green
and a six percent slope. S Yeah, that works. No,
do any of those combinations of slope steepness and green
speed when multiplied together equals sixty. They're functionally equivalent ball
and stop. Oh got it?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 3: Ten times six is sixty. Thy yep, Stemp ten green
six percent slope ball won't stop. Four times fifteen is
sixty a Stemp fifteen green, and a four percent slope
ball won't stop. So four percent. If it's a faster
green than a Stemp ten, a Stemp ten, you can
tilt it all the way to six percent and it'll
still it won't roll off. But when you speed up
to a Stemp fifteen, you can only go to a
four percent slope and then it'll roll off. Right. That's
what happened to Augusta National. They're buried Elphin grounds are
too steep and they've got a faster grass on their
golf course green, and then they had to flatten out
the greens. The tilt is permanent. The green speed comes
and goes.
Speaker 1: Oh interesting, yeah, of course.
Speaker 3: Okay, So five times twelve a five percent slope, that's
as far as you can go with a Stemp twelve
green ten toms six. You can go to six percent
when you keep it down to Stemp ten, So if
you slow down you can have steep conter. But if
you ever get to where you really want to go
for the gusto on your green speed and you start
getting a bow stamp ten and eleven and that sort
of thing, your pen positions kind of shrink on the green.
If you had an image of the green and you
said where are all the alliable pen positions? The first
question is how fast is your STEMP speed. STEMP ten
has a lot more pennable positions on green X, then
does stamp eleven. They start to evaporate and the steeper
conters become unavailable wolf for pin positions. The USDA they
have little programs in little charts they carry around to
watch that, and then they get on their weather channel
on the TV and on the internet and they start
predicting the weather for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday
to make sure that they're not going to get side
ambushed by dry, hot, windy weather that makes the greenspeed
go over the red line that happened at shintyk Killops.
So they don't really want to get all that close
to the borderline. They're going to keep away from a
little bit, so they have an absolute red line in physics,
and then they back away from that at ten to six,
six is like the absolute limit. You don't want to
get as close to that six as you can unless
you're real sure about the weather. Let's talk about.
Speaker 1: The the two putts right back to last show we
got that's where we got started.
Speaker 3: Okay, so I've created these two putts that you do
that tells you a lot about green rings with two
ten to actually face. Most are the ones you want
to know, right, the ones and the ones that you
can actually sink, those are the ones you want to
focus on. So that's basically inside fifteen feet and for
a lot of people inside end feet. And that's a
simple putt without any funny conter. And it's flat from
the ball to the hole, even though it's tilted. The
surface is not wrinkled and bumpy.
Speaker 1: It's flat, not necessarily level.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not necessarily. It won't be level because that
won't drain, so it will be tilted. But we're talking
about the surfaces. If you ran your hand over it,
is it one flat plane surface like a table.
Speaker 1: So that means the ball is just going to go
straight from where you are to the well.
Speaker 3: It just means that the break is highly predictable because.
Speaker 1: It's not break is highly predictable as opposed to straight Okay.
Speaker 3: Okay, complicated breaks they go across across different contours other
than one flat plane, and those are more difficult to
predict and to read and to execute. So we have
a simple case. The simple case is, for example, a
ten foot putt across flat green on a tilt that
you run into all the time. What's the break? How
much does it break? All right? So I've designed two
little putts to tell you all about it. Let me
describe it. Okay, okay, this is like a diamond bullet
to the forward version of what I'm talking about. You
find a two percent slope we've already described. How do
you know it's two percent? Walk straight down till one
hundred inches away you can go, and then you stop,
and you compare where your foot is to where the
hole is, and what's the elevation drop from the hole
to your foot. You imagine a string coming out of
the whole dead level and it as far as your
foot and hide the string above your foot tells you
how many inches it is to the surface. That's what
percent the slope is. If the string hits your foot
at two inches off the ground, it's a two percent
slope because you went one hundred inches downhill. Two percent
is too over one hundred it's a drop or rise
of two inches of very run of one hundred inches.
That's the slope percent. It's also called the grade. If
the string inch your foot at three inches off the
ground and that's a three percent slope. If the level
string from the hole to your foot hits you in
the ankle, that's a four percent slope.
Speaker 1: So what we have to figure out is once we
know what the slope is, once we know the degree is,
we have to figure out how to adjust our speed.
Speaker 3: Right, We're going to test a two percent slope on
the livery speed. Okay, here's the next component. The things
that make up break in physics are basically the steepness,
the green speed, the distance of the putt, the conjuring
or the flatness of the surface, and your ball delivery
speed across that surface. How fast is the ball traveling
when it gets to the front lift of the cup.
That's called a terminal velocity or a delivery speed. Those
factors steepness, also direction uphill, flatness of surface, speed of grass,
how far away you're putting, and what is your delivery speed?
You can fix all of those and sort them out,
and the only thing left is how much will it break?
All right, that's like fixing the variables so that you
don't have to deal with ten variables. You have just one.
It's like an experiment. That's what you do when you
do experiments. So we're going to fix all the variables.
Here's one, it's flat. Okay, we've decided we found a
flat piece of grass. It's at least ten feet away
from a hole. It doesn't change contours. Flat number two.
What's the slope we found out it's percent number three.
What's the green speed? It's today's green speed. If you
want to know for mathematical calculations, you need to know
the st meter speed of the green and so you
have to ask somebody to nose or else you have
to under meter. Else you have to know how to
make one or use how to have to know how
to simulate one. Basically, if you swing a conventional hutter
about fifteen inches back from the ball and then let
it re swing itself without you powering it, that will
deliver the velocity of the ball that a STMP meter
gets it off the bottom of the ramp. It's about
the same if you get to two shafts and you
make a little camel out of the two shafts by
holding them together, and then you put a ball on
the shape and you lift the ball up about ten
and a half to eleven inches off the ground and
then let go. It'll roll down the two shafts through
the little channel you made, and then when it comes
off it'll be about the same speed as the STEMP meter.
Or you can buy a step meter, or you can
just ask the greens keeper or the pro shop what's
the stemp the green speed? Plus the golf courses will
push a little sign out by the green. Today's green
is stimping nine point five, so that.
Speaker 1: Would be obviously that would be the easiest way to
do it is just ask. But I'm sure there are there.
There are so many different gadgets and and and apps
for their phone and stuff that's going to help you
determine this and are are they worth.
Speaker 3: What this is? One that doesn't really the apps don't
tell you the green speed. You have to you have
to input that one, okay, all right. The apps will
tell you which way is uphill and how steep is it?
It won't really say see how flat it is? And
I want to tell you the green speed, and I
want to tell your ball delivery speed. Those you have
to input, and it doesn't tell you how far you
are away from the hall, all right, So we're sorting
out all of these how far away we're going to
be ten feet? That's four military paces each military pace
thirty inches or US parade looks like crap, everybody, So
you have to make a thirty inch step to and
a half feet each. Four of those ten feet walk
four feet away from the hall. Your ten feet away
were three four steps away, all right. Now, we would
like conveniently to have a stamp speed of the green
that is ten for easy division. So we really want
to STEMP ten green if we can find it. All right.
So let's say we got a STEMP ten green two
percent slow flat, and we're ten feet away, and we
know which way is directly uphill straight through the hall,
and we chose specifically to go ten feet away side
hill or perpendicular to the direction straight up hill. If
you have a clock and you twist it around so
that the six and the twelve through the hole. The
center of the clock is on the center of the hole,
and the six and twelve points straight up hill. We're
talking about walking along the line towards the three or
the nine perpendicular to the six trove line. The nine
to three line would be the axis of tilt. The
direction of the of the surface is six twelve, and
the steepness is how much the twelve wise it up
over top of the six, or how steep the differences
between the hole and the spot down the six one
hundred inches away. What's the elevation drop from the hole
to the six one hundred inches away. That's the steepness. Okay,
so we've got a two percent grade for steepness. We
have a flat green, we have a st ten, and
we have a side hill ten foot putt. Now here's
what you do with it. You put straight at the
middle of the hole for start line with your normal
delivery speed, and then everything is perfectly sorted. The ball
will not go straight because it will curl downhill. If
you're from the three putting, it will curl downhill towards
the six to your left. If you're putting from the
nine position, it will curl downhill to the sixth position
from your to the right. Let's say we're at the
three o'clock position, and we came dead straight at the
center of the hall, and we putt it with good
delivery pace, the ball will curl low and then it
will cross the six to twelve line, and then it
will stop very soon thereafter, because you have a good
delivery pace. A good delivery pace will carry the ball
past the six twelve line no more than one to
four further rolls. Every roll over golf ball is about
five point two eight inches. That's the diameter of the
cover material of a ball one point six eight inches
in diameter. Just one point six eight times pie equals
five point two eight So if you unrolled the ball
and lay it down like a ruler on the ground,
it goes as far as the spin of your hand
from the wrist line to the last knuckle, not the
tip the last knuckle. That's five about five and a
quarter inches. So if you patch your hands along past
the fall line, one to three of those, that's about
the same as a guinea inside the leather. If you
climbed your hands up a putter from the putter head
to the bottom of the grip material, you'd have about
three handspans and then it's the bottom of the grip material.
So inside the leather is approximately three rolls past the
hull or the falling Okay, Four, you're still in the leather,
so that's not terrible. Five you're outside the leather. And
now you're talking about three putty.
Speaker 1: We don't like to talk about three putty. Oh we
lost you. Oh my god, I can't believe this. We
lost our signal just as you said that's when you
three putty. I'd be like, well, what this is like
a joke. I'm supposed to guess something here, but we
lost our connection. So I'm glad that we're back. You're
still at McDonald's. Is now probably very dark? Were you
when we've bet this for a while? So finish your sentence. Yes,
we don't want a three put So where are we?
Speaker 3: Ok So, we were just we were just we were
just locking down the variables, one of which is touch.
We want to putt our test putt to find out
the break using our usual good touch delivery speed that
only goes one, two or three rolls past the fall
line in case of a miss, and then the ball
stops right. So if you have that skill, you use
that touch delivery speed when we do this ten foot
test putt. Right now, we got all everything sort. Now
we just do is we make a straight putt directly
at the hole with good touch, and then we watch
and see how far it crosses the fall line below
the center of the hole. And we measure all Right, if,
for example, a two percent slope and a stemp tin
green with your good deliver every speed started straight at
the hole curls ten inches below the hole. Guess what
ten inches divided by ten foot putt tells you the
magic number. It tells you that that surface combination a
twenty of a Stemp ten green and this two percent
slope multiplied together as a stemp slope something called twenty
twenty breaks one inch for every foot that you putt it.
Remember it broke ten inches when it crossed the fall
line below the center of the hall. It was ten
inches from the center of the hole to the point
where the battrolled across the falling We measured it was
one grip the length of one putter grip from the
center of the hole to the point where the ball
rolled across low beneath the hole across that fallen petted
from ten feet away. So if you divide the number
of inches that it breaks, and by end I mean
the stemp slope twenty, it broke one inch for every
foot that you were away from the hole. Right, that's
the magic. Now you can you can You can aim
a fifteen footer, you can name a five footer. You
canna an eight footer. And the next point is those
are all the side hill putts. You can aim all
of those based on that formula one inch per foot
for stemp speed twenty slope speed twenty, they're all one
inch per foot. A five foot put breaks five inches. Okay,
on a twenty if you aim from the center of
the hall five inches straight up hill and stick a
teepeg again and start your ball directly at the teepeg
and let it break to the low side, it will
go in the center of the cup if you hit
the same delivery pace that you use to test it with. Now,
if you use a eight foot put breaks eight inches,
you need to get that now. I just need to
stop them talk talk to them later. So now those
are side hipputs. Now here's the next point. If you
wanted to know ten feet putt around the center of
the hall in a big circle. You took a ten
foot string and stuck it right in the middle of
the center of the cup, and then you stretched it
out ten feet away, and you drew a circle around
the cup ten feet out, and you put three hundred
and sixty golf balls on that circle, in a big circle,
and you put it every single one of them. They
aim at exactly the same target ten inches above the hole.
The teepegg on the fall line, ten inches from the
center of the cup. The uphill puts same in it.
The downhill putts ame at it, the todd hill putts
seam at it. They all aim at that one te peg.
And then they eight foot putt they aim at a
t peg eight inches above the hole. And a five
foot putt they am at a t peg five inches
above the hole. Now, some people will say funny stuff
about that, and they will say that downhill putts go
more slowly and they break more, and they'll pill putts
go faster and they break less. Well, that's the difference
between academic people that never get outside their office and
people who play off.
Speaker 1: Go ahead. We've been doing this twice for almost two
hours ago, and you haven't said it.
Speaker 3: Come on, say it, rough and rap Scots have contempt
for academics in there.
Speaker 1: Oh no, man, those people are stupid. Come on say it.
Speaker 3: They're stupid.
Speaker 4: They got PhDs and it means fud dummy. They right papers,
and they have all kinds of pretensions to mathematical expertise
and physics degrees and blah blah blah blah blah. Well
they ain't a patch on my ass because I got
forty years of loving physics.
Speaker 3: But I know golf. They don't know golf. Bad combination.
It's like they know how to mixed paint, but they
never painted house. Okay, you can't apply physics to golf
unless you know the golf. Let me say that one
more time. I don't care if you can do the formulas,
old physics guy at Yale, you don't know how it
applies to the golf course because we're roughing round a Scotch.
We're engineers. We're not calculators trying to get a in
a classroom. We're engineers making a putt go in a hole.
There's a little sloppiness at all, all right, So what
we want to do is bushwhack common putts, And once
you find that is that. Yeah, there is a technical
difference between a downhill putt and uphill putt, but it
doesn't really matter until you get a steep green of
three percent or more and you get passed beyond further
than ten feet. It just doesn't it's not that big
of a difference. Now, the guys in their eye retires
that calculate that if you look back at their notebooks,
they will find out that their little differences aren't that
big until you get beyond this realm of reality. So
we take the stage and we kick them off the
stage and we embarrass them in front of their peers
because they act like they know stuff, but they're basically
bad scientists. They can't apply knowledge, so that makes them
bad scientists to purport to answer questions in golf and
they don't know anything about the golf. They need to
shut up and stop. It's not a diletent sport where
you can come in and lord other people because you've
got a pH d at Yale University. Go away. There
are people that know more about it than you. They
are scientists that apply the knowledge intelligently. And reasonably to
the actual experience of golfers on real greens, about which
at Yale and have in Connecticut they know very darned little.
Speaker 1: Now you know you it not let Yale specific like
you don't like Harvard either.
Speaker 3: Another there's one guy to that write these papers. There's
another guy at Malespi University in British Columbia that writes
these papers. And there's another guy that say, as they
stay and I call them play papers. Want to embarrass
them with their with their peers and physics, because their
peers in physics know that they don't count that they're
not going to make money or get an advancement in
their physics department by writing these little papers. And they
have two weeks off in the summer, and this is
something to go for them to come in and pretend
to do that. It looks a lot more significant to
golfers than it should. But an educated, rough and rowdy
Scott's engineer has contempt for this sort of thing. Okay,
value of the game got too much to allow that
kind of silliness. So we tell the people that yell
and malice being and sentas a stick it stop, go away.
We're going to explain to our friends of the golfers
that you're not there, buddy, that you don't really know
what you're doing. Okay, now back to the test put.
When you apply all this, it has a difference between
danielfo It doesn't matter, does not until you get sleep
and you get far away and we're not there, not
makable pus anyway. So yeah, it is a difference. But
when you're in the cleanup done, man, a five foot
put from any direction, you're you're read to lock and
load if you know that five foot breaks five inches,
and that's on the twenty. So you got to know
whether you're on a twenty or not. Now you can
get the twenties by different ways. A stamp saturn and
a three percent slope is about twenty. A stamp eleven
and a stamp what makes it twenty two one and
a half or some one point sat and something like that.
Whatever whatever calculator tells you, I can't.
Speaker 4: Do it in my head, you know, I gotta admit that.
Speaker 3: But any combination where it comes out of twenty, they
break exactly the same. Wow. Yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 1: That revelation stuff.
Speaker 3: That's awesome. That's right now, they've done this since at
least in nineteen eighty four, because it's nice. Little guy
in Texas as a retired Air Force colonel and at
Tempson put it in his book. So anybody that's supports
today be the originator of this. That would not include me,
because I'm respectful in honor of the past. However, there
are other people who act as if they came up
with it. Well they did, by golly all right.
Speaker 5: So these magnificent concepts of slope and Stemp meter smashed together,
mash up into a new thing called the something, the
Stemp slope SS.
Speaker 3: It doesn't matter how you get there. If you recognize
it's a twenty, you're off to the races on knowing
what you're doing. Right now, let's go to the next level.
Speaker 1: Wait wait, wait, wait, wait wait wait wait, are you playing
with that power thing again? Because your signal got better?
Speaker 3: Okay, I stopped it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but as you were doing that, the signal got
much better.
Speaker 3: Okay, now cool, Okay, we know from one putt, one symbol,
one single symbol, simple little putt, a ten foot putt
on a two percent slope, STEMP ten green, it's a twenty.
We made a ten foot putt, and we've found out
something magical that sorts out everything inside fifteen feet for
that particular twenty, right, we did as one putt. Now
let's go over the top and expand it to many
other slopes that we might actually encounter a one percent
of three percent, four percent, five percent, six percent. We
did a twenty, which means for that green speed, a
two is proportionately what in relationship to a one twice
a month as much. So. That means if it broke
one inch on a two percent stemp ten green, we
now know that on a one percent slope it will
break one half of an inch. Now we have the
entire world of one percent slopes in our little bailliwick.
Let's put the threes in there. A three percent slope
will break one point five times as much as the
two percent. That means the two percent breaks one inch.
A three percent will break one point five inches for
every foot of putt you're five feet away, how much
is it gonna break seven and a half inches. That's
five times one point five that's just three percent slope. Okay,
how much is ten percent ten foot canna breaking on
three percent slope? Fifteen inches ten times one point five.
All right, So we have three percent slopes now in
our balliwick, let's do four. What's the relationship between the
two percent slope and four percent slope? Twice as much?
So a four percent slope will break two inches for
every foot. A ten foot putt will break twenty inches
from the center of the hall straight up. He'll put
a tepeg in two putter grips up and then putt
with your good delivery speed straight at that tepeg and
let it break straight and soon the hole. A five
foot putt will break ten inches because it's two foot
two inches for every foot, and you got five of them. Now,
let's put the five percent slopes into our balloy wick.
What's the relationship between two percent slip and five is
two and a half? If a two percent slope breaks
one inch, a five percent slope will break two and
a half inches for every foot. Because how MUDs will
ten foot putt break twenty five inches? Right? How much
will a five foot putt break twelve and a half inches?
Five times two point five? All right? Now, let's to
be done with all this by putting the six percent
slopes in there, the ones we're not ever going to
see right, it's three times as much. Two percent breaks
one inch, six percent breaks three inches for every foot,
thirty inches on ten feet and fifteen inches from five feet.
Speaker 1: Okay, I think I think we got it. It's like
we'll we're getting It's just like too much detail here,
but I think we got your point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let me run let me run back through it
real quick.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: We're bookwhacking the common putts that we can actually sink
across flat green inside ten feet, and we want to
know the different slopes and the green speeds, how they
combine to generate specific information about how many inches it
takes per foot you put ten feet on whatever it is,
a twenty to thirty whatever it is, and however much
it curls below the hole you measure that that's the
answer for that stamp and slope combination.
Speaker 1: And this will pull on your practice greens before you
get out there. This is where you're trying to figure
this out to take it with you out on the course.
Speaker 3: And you don't even have to know the green speed, right,
if you're going to play from the practice green onto
the course that day, you don't even have to ask
that question because the green speeds that day will be
the same as the green on the practice green. So
whatever it breaks on two percent slope, you can fill
in all the details. If it happens to break ten inches,
that will tell you that that is a stamp ten green,
you can work backwards that way and figure that out.
If if you know it's a stamp ten green and
it breaks fifteen inches from ten feet, that tells just
a three percent slope, you can work it that way.
Speaker 1: I'm liking it, okay, yep.
Speaker 3: So so basically I cre that and I'm proud of it.
Speaker 1: We're proud of you too, Okay. And it's like we
got our own Yale education here. Oh yeah, now, well
we'll give a Stanford education here, a screw Yale.
Speaker 3: Right, that's right. Let's do the last. Let's do the
last little piece of reasonable, rough and rowdy Scotts. Okay,
we didn't really read a putt on the green. We
got a ballpark, right, right, got it. We got a
generalized understanding that needs to be applied to a specific
putt on the golf course. Okay, So when you get
a put on the golf course, if it's flat, if
it's two percent, if it's ten feet away. If it's
a stint tin green the same as a practice green
or whatever it is, then you're you're kind of ready
to lock and load. But that that seldom is exactly
what happens. It's not exactly a two percent slope, it's
not exactly ten feet away. It may be a little
different green speed. You know, it may not be exactly flat.
Speaker 1: It can't be exact.
Speaker 3: That's straight. However, the people that Yale don't know this
part of it. The golfers have to go from the
generalized paradigm from the book to this specific put and
apply the book knowledge reasonably and intelligently and adjusted. That's
the engineer thing. Have to adjust your book knowledge to
the facts that you face in the specifics. And that
means that you readily understand that you don't have the
read just because you did this thing on practice green.
What you have is you have a very close understanding
of where you start, and then you have the task
of making a very minor adjustment to make an executive
decision on what to actually do for this put, and
that will carry you miles and miles past your competitors
in reading puts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the whole bottom line here is going past
your competitors.
Speaker 3: Beat them like a drum beat, like a for the pulp. Yeah,
GoF is pretty good to be a psaltary support, but
it's not the it's not really the blood curtaining and
thrill you get when you beat other people.
Speaker 1: It's kind of true, although whether it's for money or not,
it's just knowing. It's like my favorite is getting in
somebody's head. But yeah, I'm always competing against myself. But boy,
beating someone we were out there playing with is always.
Speaker 3: Somebody see you make that birdie and they can't make it.
Speaker 1: Yep, yep, Yeah, god, Jeff, that was that was awesome man,
Thank you all right, man, my dog is done with you,
so uh so leave the parking lot of McDonald's. Now
go do some more teaching. Let's stay in touch. I
always love having you on because you're always good. Worth
two episodes.
Speaker 3: At least, people are gonna get a forty five page
PDF from me. If they're just sending g e O
F F at putting zone dot com, send me email
G e O F F putting zone dot com.
Speaker 1: Yeah right. If if any of this stuff made any
sense to you at all or you need more, send
Jeff that email. Get the email and peruse it. I've
I've been looking at it and it's like, wow, if
you've ever been to putting zone dot com, it's a
taste of how much detail you'll get because well, listen,
you've heard these two episodes. It's exactly what happens Jeff
Mangum the man when it comes to punish in the world.
Thank you, buddy, I really appreciate it. Safe travels and
we'll be in touch.
Speaker 3: Okay, thank you very much for it. Bye bye.