23. Where’s Fred?

The answer is to pick up as many clues as you can about the speed of the green – how it looks, dryness/wetness, local opinion; absorb what you can about the speed and line of the putt i.e. slopiness; then fight against the natural urge to want a definite answer to the conscious question “how hard am I going to have to hit this?” This urge will have an element of embarrassment avoidance about it because you are in unfamiliar surroundings with unfamiliar people whom it would be quite nice to impress. It is a moment when you need to have confidence in your technique, and by that I mean the technique of virtually guaranteeing timing on every shot. I think this is an answer because I believe that a well timed putt fed by fully absorbed information about conditions will go close enough to at least satisfy embarrassment avoidance needs.

Having found your timing with a drive on to the green you are well placed to hone in on the rhythm of that drive fully confident that a similar rhythm will guarantee the putt being timed. The trick is simply confidence in the technique of producing a timed putt: your subconscious will do the rest.

If you have duffed your way to the first green then the answer is similar except that you will have to concentrate on consciously evoking a timed putt from the recent past in the hope that it will be a strong enough memory to switch on your timing. In any event, the trick is the same: confidence in the idea that timing is the be-all-and-end-all.

The evidence of your driving and pitching suggests that your timing was sweet right from the start and that you were able to take the rhythm from a drive to a pitch/chip. However your experience on the first two greens suggests that you were not quite able to take the rhythm on to the greens. The result was that your experience of putting on the first green, which stemmed from that very first putt, influenced your putting on the second green. If your experience on the first green had been just a little happier (and, as you can see from the preceding paragraph, I believe it could have been) then your experience on the second green would have been more satisfactory, and you might have saved a shot. This is a perfect illustration of the need to stick intensely to the method from the very first shot through to the last: they all count the same at the end of the round.

Using the word “aggressive” to describe that first putt on the second hole gives me a clue that you were short with your first putt on the first green and then found it very difficult to avoid forming the conscious opinion that because the greens were “slow” then you were going to have to hit the putts “hard”.

I think there is a subtle point here worth going over again. Your job is to give your subconscious the information it needs, and then to allow it to find the solutions using the mechanism “timing”. The permanent and pervasive threat to the process is that your conscious will take over the task of finding the solution. (My method distracts the conscious by giving it the job of feeding the subconscious. This only works as well as it does because I have identified the physical mechanism the subconscious exploits when it is given the task of exerting a specific force: double-pendulumic motion. It is possible to have some success by simply distracting the conscious with more or less anything – Timothy Gallwey’s “Inner Game of Tennis”. But success is more likely if you are able to distract the conscious with something that enhances the subconscious process.)

The ever present risk of your conscious taking over the process is well illustrated by the example of needing to notice that the greens are “slow” and then NOT deciding that you need to hit the putts “hard”. Both these terms are powerful, and have a sense of exactness in one’s imagination because they are derived from a combination of intelligent analysis and the memory of having played on lots of courses with “slow” greens, which required putts to be hit “hard”.

In reality, though, the terms “slow” and “hard” are understood by our conscious as relative terms. In other words, we can tell when greens are “slower” than what we are used to, and that that means that we are going to have to hit putts harder than usual. What we cannot quantify consciously in any precise way is just how much slower and how much harder. But, once we have noticed that the greens are “slow”, and we have had that observation confirmed by the humiliation of a putt left embarrassingly short, the temptation to consciously make sure that the next putt is hit “hard” can be overwhelming.

So, how, having noticed that the greens are “slow”, do you avoid turning that useful and necessary observation into a conscious commitment to make sure that the putts are hit “hard”, especially if you have just left a putt embarrassingly short? The answer is the same as ever: simply recognise and acknowledge the danger. For example, in your round at Radyr: despite spotting that the greens are likely to be slow you leave your first putt short. At that point, simply make a note of what the putting stroke felt like. This will distract your conscious by giving it the important the task of measuring the relative slowness of the greens using the feel of the putting stroke and the shortness of the resulting putt. By the time you are on the second green, you will have played a few more shots and have a stronger, fresher memory of a lovely pendulumic swing. As you face your first putt on the second green, your visualisation can be augmented by the experience of “measuring” the slowness of the first green. Then you evoke the last lovely swing and bingo! in it pops. Phew!