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