Bobby Jones on Putting in Down the Fairway

In Down the Fairway, Bobby Jones talks about putting. He had his struggles on the greens and discovered some things that are beneficial for every golfer to understand. He wrote:

    "At the start, putting was not a 'game within a game' to me. It was nothing more than going up to the ball and knocking it into the cup, or making a free attempt to do so... From a fairly good kid putter, I became a wretched adolescent putter, having discovered how many things could happen to the ball in the course of three or four feet. That was always my hardest distance. It is today. There was a time when I honestly would rather confront a ten-foot putt that had to be holed than one of three feet. I felt I could at least hit the longer one.

     I was a bad putter, or at best an indifferent one, up to Skokie, where the national open championship was played and my putting held up a rather shabby game so that I finished in a tie for second place, a stroke behind Gene Sarazen. I was changing my putting style continually in those days, some times two or three times in the same round, so I can't tell you what was the matter; indeed, I think now it was not any one style or several styles at fault. I think I was thinking too much about how I looked--I was always trying to copy some good putter--and how I took the club back, and which hand I struck with, and a number of things other than the one thing to concentrate on--putting the ball in the hole."

Sound familiar? This could be Bobby Jones describing my putting woes. In my next article I will talk about how Bobby Jones solved his putting problems.