A Putter change...

17/6/12 Sunday. Golf has been a matter of steady practice for several week now, the benefits are showing in my game off the tee, fairways and greens. Putting is still a work in progress with the change to a mallet ’2 ball style’ stick. Considering that a couple of years ago I purchased the club and it has been consigned to the cupboard until this season there was a lot of consideration put into this decision.

It began as a casual exercise just to mix up my weekly practise sessions that always include using other sticks besides my game day set. The purpose of this is to enforce the correct technique standard of good golf in my game. I do play well enough with the various blades and cavity back sets that get in the bag on these practise rounds and range hitting sessions. The use of the blades in particular sharpens up my ball striking delivering better accuracy and distance to my golf game. The only stick that I never altered in practise was the putter until recently. It was just an exercise in having some fun with a different stick on the green to break up the monotony of hitting balls initially. As with using different clubs in other practise it soon became a technique tuning routine as well.

My accuracy on the green with the Wilson 100 club improved after incorporating the Proline 2 ball mallet putter into practise drills. In close within a two metre radius of the hole the Proline was a major failure in my hands. Not that is mattered it was only being used as a practise tool, yet soon enough purely because of my dogmatic golf attitude I wanted to be more accurate with it. This club has a totally different feel and much less allowance for error when putting. A mishit would go dramatically off line over long or short distances on the green. This began to attract my attention when hitting the ball, the slightest inaccuracy on the club striking the ball would result in a miss to the left or right. Yet the same inaccurate contact using the Wilson 100 would still have the ball going in the hole.

Sure enough the more I worked on improving the accuracy with the mallet putter the Wilson began to feel unwieldy and less responsive. Finally I bit the bullet and used the Proline in a competition and the results were as good as with the Wilson, no damage to the score from inept putting. What was affected was my in close putting, once the practise removed the mishits the Proline went into the bag. This mallet style club always felt so much more comfortable in set up. Combined with the improvements and confidence from coaching in January I was willing to experiment with a putter change.

One thing that is important to acknowledge is that I have never had the ‘yips’, have been rounds where the putter was a major failing but nothing more. Considering that the theory of a golf score allows for two putts per hole, with a Par of 72 on a course that means 36 of those strokes are putts. With that much of an input to a golf score getting your putting right in technique and equipment is of significant importance. At the minute I am confident with either style of putter in my hands and it is not causing any confusion in my game. When now using the Wilson in practise my confidence is already there because of how effective a practise tool the Proline was when first used. Thankyou for your time and attention, “Hit ‘em straight all” 

 Geoff