Five Feet to Glory – From Knee-Knocker to Sure Thing (Part 3)

Much like all good things in life, this trilogy of golf goodness must come to an end.  If you’ve missed out on Part 1 (The Problem) or Part 2 (The Solution) take a few minutes away from watching the Presidential debates and go back to catch up on to where we are now.  Heck, you may even learn something about Indiana and fantasy baseball.

To summarize (for those of you not wanting to miss a word of political punditry), I examined in the previous installments where I could possibly gain the most strokes during a round – putting within 5 feet – and two of the best practice solutions I’ve found to improve that specific aspect of your game.

So today, in this final installment brilliantly entitled ‘The Results,’ I’ll show you how I did using these two practice techniques over a short period this summer.  In a nutshell, I would say that it was completely worth the practice – but for a reason that was not intended and not tracked.

Confused?  Hopefully all will become clear.

I tracked my putting in 9-hole rounds because some of the rounds were played in a 9-hole league that I regularly played in.  To prepare, before these eight rounds were tracked, I took a day at the range and focused solely on the two practice techniques as described in my earlier story.  That’s right – in this one month period I only practiced those two drills ONCE.  Imagine my confidence had I (correctly) done these once a week.

Without further ado, here are the results of my ten tracked rounds (two before the ‘practice drills’ and the eight ‘new & improved’ rounds):

OK, first of all I realize that this is a very small sample size, but I honestly was not expecting that big of a statistical difference.  However, as I said above it was not in the way that I expected.  Before I give you my conclusions, let me state that I realize statistics can be interpreted in a myriad of ways and give a myriad of results.  But the basic conclusion to this three round test was this: I putted better after I took one day to practice and concentrated fully on this stat.  In fact, the only glitch in my rounds played after the practice round was rounds 7 & 8 – which were 18 holes played at a private country club with lightning-fast, horrendously undulating greens that I was completely not ready for.  If you throw out those two rounds, you can see that there was near perfection within 5 feet!

So some more conclusions:

• While I definitely putted better from within five feet, overall my level of concentration and thought that I put into putting in general was a tremendous boost to ALL my putts – not just the closer ones.  Obviously you can see if I’m cutting the number of short putts by almost half then all of my putts were better and I was making more from outside of 5 feet as well.

• This practice drill nearly eliminated the three putt from my vocabulary.  Other than the aforementioned infamous rounds 7 & 8 (thanks FRANK for the invite to THAT course!) I only had one three-putt in the other 6 rounds.  That in itself was a tremendous stroke saver.

Interestingly enough, I had the opportunity to play four additional full 18-hole rounds during a late September vacation trip and I decided to just relax and not worry about tracking putts.  The results were immediate and clear – my putting returned to its traditional mediocre level with three putts, with the frustrated stab at the ball when missing a putt by a few inches, and with all of the other bad habits returning.

For me, the results were eye-opening.  When I concentrated on every single putt and practiced an intense session of the two drills, I was a better putter.  I scored better and I enjoyed the game even more knowing that I was improving.  So do yourself a favor and read Part 2 again – and I guarantee you that you will gain a couple of strokes a round.

Who knows – it might even improve your fantasy baseball skills as well.

Cover Photo by Paul Tichonczuk via Flickr