It’s so easy to blame your putting stroke when a short putt slips by the edge of the hole, but have you ever thought about just how much your alignment affects the start line of your putts?
When it comes to putting in golf face angle and alignment is the biggest factor affecting if your putts start on line. In fact over 90% of the direction of the golf ball is down to the face angle at impact. If you can’t line your putter up correctly at address, what hope do you have of it being square at impact?
Face angle is so crucial that a putter that is 2 degrees open at impact will miss the hole from as little as five feet. When we get out to 15 feet the putter needs to be less than 0.5° open or closed for you to hole the putt. Can you tell the difference between a club face which is square, 0.5°, 1°, or 2° open or closed?
Alignment is very individual, so it’s important to test different options out. I spoke to Bill Price, the senior director of putters at TaylorMade, to find out what helps different golfers line-up the best.
“Generally golfers fit into two different categories,” he explains. “Those who use a line and those who don’t.
“When you look at tour players, it’s all over the board, right? Small lines, long lines, dots, three dots, normal alignment. They have the luxury of coming in here and seeing what happens and what does change.
“I use a lot of research from our sports university, about our eyes and what we see and what happens. What I’ve learned over the years with putters is [as] players, we are either in two buckets – we’re either linear or nonlinear.
“A linear person, in the way they think and the way they’re structured, they like to see lines. A line on a ball, a line on a putter, and they try and put them together. A linear person works extremely well that way.
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“A nonlinear person, works on feel. It’s like throwing darts. You’re not watching this dart back behind you. You’re looking at the target and you’re letting the reactionary of the arm throw that dart to the board.
“Putting is very similar to that. It’s reactionary. We see the line, we feel the line and we see the hole and we let it go.
