@timcookegolf/IG
Welcome to Play Smart, a regular GOLF.com game improvement column that will help you play smarter and better golf.
Being late is an essential golf skill. While placing putts at 10 feet is important, giving yourself stress-free flicks after long putts is even more important. Additionally, unless you’re a professional golfer, the majority of your birdie’s appearances will likely be in the slow late range.
For the best golfers – golf scratchers – 28 feet is their average close to the cup after their 100-yard approach. And for ten assistants, that distance extends to 39 feet. With these numbers in mind, if you want to lower your score, becoming a great lates putter is a good place to start.
The secret to being a great putter is having good speed on the greens. Alignment is important, but on average, the dispersion is greater front-to-back than it is left-to-right. If you could tighten this front-to-back scattering pattern, it would be much easier to reduce three times.
It’s important to feel the speed of the green every time you play, but you should also feel just enough with your putter to take that touch from one lane to the next. If you don’t feel like you have a solid speed with your racket, it may be because you’re putting an inconsistent roll on the ball.
To be a great putter, you want to get the ball rolling at the end as fast as possible. It sounds easy enough, but some guys actually put in a little bit of it backspin on the ball on contact, resulting in inconsistent distance control on the greens.
To help you put more top spin on the ball, GOLF Top 100 teacher Tim Cooke has a great drill, which you can check out below.
Cooke likes to call this exercise the Poker Chip Rise exercise, and it encourages hitting the ball with the paddle in a slight upward motion, which helps get the ball rolling off the end.
All you need for this exercise is a poker chip, a ball, and a paddle. Setup is simple: just place the ball over the poker chip and make a normal stroke. Your goal should be to hit the ball without disturbing the poker chip. If you can do that, your ball should start rolling with topspin right away.
“Be athletic. Be retro,” Cook says. “I feel high. Raise the lead shoulder as you come from the hitting area. Control the face and make the ball roll as fast as you can.”
If you can consistently get this drill right, you’ll know that you’re hitting the ball with topspin, which gives you more consistent control of distance on the greens.