I’ve noticed that most pros don’t rely on just one method to read a green.
And there’s one in particular you might find interesting — it became popular thanks to Ben Hogan, and I still see it used today.
The thing is, when we amateurs (me included) putt, we usually rely almost entirely on what our eyes tell us.
And that’s a problem.
Because the human eye is terrible at measuring slope. Really bad. It exaggerates obvious breaks, downplays subtle ones, gets influenced by surroundings...
It reads shadows and color changes as slope, it fills in what it thinks it should be seeing..
Crazy, right?
But it’s been studied. That’s just how we’re wired.
That’s why pros use more than one source of information to read a putt.
And here comes the trick: Ben Hogan used the soles of his feet. He would feel the ground through his feet, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, letting his body tell him how the ground was tilted.
He cared more about that information, that feeling, than what his eyes showed him — even more than the hole itself.
To understand how much slope there was on each side of his intended line.
He would often do this with his back to the hole, to remove visual suggestion. No “perfect lines” drawn by the mind. Just gravity.
Apparently, Hogan chose which side of the hole to roll the ball in from based on how he felt the slope.
"The hole doesn’t tell you how the ball gets there. The slope does."
Now, I know this trick alone is already a gift you’ll never be able to repay me for —but since it’s the holidays, I felt like adding a small extra detail for those of you who are Golfletter subscribers based in mainland Spain.
If you’re interested, just leave:
- your name
- the email you use for the Golfletter
- and your address
Have a great weekend, golfers!!