Making your mark at putting

By Paul Gueorgieff

Making your mark at putting

Do you use an alignment mark on your golf ball for putting?

I don’t and don’t know why others do.

I presume they do so because they have been advised to do so or have seen professional golfers do so.

To be frank I cannot see the logic of it. I also find it a huge time waster.

I see guys line up their putt, carefully place the ball on the ground, carefully line up the alignment line, step back, carefully re-align the ball by 0.01 millimetres, step back, carefully re-align the ball back by 0.1 millimetres, take three practice swings, hit the ball and the three-footer slides past the hole.

So what went wrong? Did the alignment mark help or was it a distraction?

What probably went wrong was the ball was either hit too hard or too soft for the break, the putt was misread or the the putter head was not square at impact which either hit the ball left  or right of the target.

I think an alignment mark can be a distraction. I think it becomes an object when the actual object is to hit the ball in the hole.

I believe golfers concentrate so much on the alignment mark that they forget about pace which is 50 percent of how to get the ball in the hole.

The other 50 percent is hitting it on the correct line. Choosing the correct line is very hard because it all depends on how hard you hit the ball.

If you hit the ball a little hard it takes less break. If you hit the ball a little soft it takes more break. What help is an alignment mark if you hit it too hard or too soft?.

Another problem I see with an alignment mark is that we are standing alongside the ball when putting. How can an alignment mark be helpful when standing alongside the ball, I always ask myself.

An alignment mark might be helpful if you could get down behind the ball and hit it with a snooker cue. But we are not allowed to stand behind the ball.

Putting is all about feel. You have to get a feel for the break and get a feel of how hard the ball needs to be hit. 

I sometimes think some people totally misread putts too. Sometimes I will see a player hit a putt four or five feet wide and they say out aloud that they thought it would have broken more than that. My immediate thought is how could you have misread a putt by so much?

Putting is hard. You are trying to get a ball that is 1.6 inches in diameter into a hole that is 4.25 inches in diameter and all you are putting on is grass.