Well, hmmm. I started studying the gap, on all seven or eight decades back, after reading about a study in which a group of amateurs had surprised researchers by putting significantly better that way, despite having been given minimum opportunity to rehearse. Even more surprising, the improvement was greater on long haul than on short ones. Cameron McCormick, who's Spieth's teacher, told me one of those advantages is"to eliminate any tendency we have as gamers to become aware
Of the motion we are using in executing a task," a tendency that normally leads to trouble.
Ignoring the chunk made me a much better putter almost immediately-by 20 per cent, according to my friend Tony. Recently, I talked with Dr. Bob Christina, a sport psychologist and an assistant golf coach at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. It was Christina who ran the analysis I read about, in collaboration with Eric Alpenfels, the director of golf instruction at Pinehurst. (In 2008, they enlarged their findings into an overall concept, in a book called Instinct Putting.) "The bottom line for me is that looking at the target frees you up to stroke the ball more naturally," Christina stated.
Another benefit is that it increases your ability to make the most of a talent that many golfers do not realize that they have. If you have played for even a couple of years, you've had the experience of watching someone else stroke a very long putt and knowing, before the ball has traveled halfway into the hole, which it's likely to go in, or stop an inch short, or simply miss to the right, or anything. Somehow, you're in a position to expect the complete trajectory and endpoint of this putt, even though you're standing off to one side and (as much as you understood ) not paying that much attention. "That seemed good all the way," you say-and it really did.
But how could you tell? The explanation must be that our brains know much, much more about the physics of moving golf balls than we give them credit for. Golfers who do what putting teachers occasionally let them do-keep down their head till they hear that the ball hit the bottom of the cup-deprive themselves of the very best chance to enlarge their ball-behavior database. Taking a look at the hole also keeps your inner range finder fully engaged and empowers your increasingly well-educated subconscious to intervene, on its own, as it senses something happening. Besides, the simplest way to keep your mind still would be to aim it, in the beginning, toward what it yearns to glance at.
Individuals who haven't tried it usually assume that consistently making solid contact must require lots of exercise, but it does not -very little more than regretting your hands together with your eyes closed. (For me personally, it has become so automatic that I occasionally inadvertently chip while looking at the gap, and not necessarily with disastrous results.) One surprising advantage is that it helps even when you don't do it. Christina and Alpenfels have found that, when golfers try it for a while and then go back to putting conventionally, some of the progress"transfers" to their old technique. At UNC-Greensboro, Christina uses it as a drill.
Before stars such as Spieth and Louis Oosthuizen became known for it, looking at the hole has been correlated mainly with yippers-for whom it can be quite successful, since it shifts their focus from their tormentor, the ball. But they are not the only beneficiaries. Dana Rader, that owns a golf school in Charlotte, has been teaching it for approximately 30 decades, and she explained that she seldom has students who don't improve while doing it. "I really don't know why everyone does not putt this way," she said.
