You roll a 12-footer on one green. A few minutes later you are standing 45 feet away on the next hole, and the first ball never gets there. Or you have just hit a long lag with some pace, then get a shorter downhill putt and send it six feet past.
I used to look at those misses as separate putting problems:
A short one here, a long one there.
Maybe the stroke got a little quick.
Maybe I did not hit the first one firmly enough.
After enough of them, another pattern becomes pretty obvious. Sometimes the problem is not the distance itself but the change in distance.
Give a seasoned player five balls from 40 feet and by the third or fourth one we usually look better. We have seen the pace, we have adjusted, so the picture gets clearer.
Golf does not give us that luxury because the first one counts and that is what I want to train today.
Three distances. Short, medium, and long. We will go out through them, come back through them, then scramble the order so you have to find the pace again every time.
No practice ball and no assigning a different stroke length to every station.
If I were standing beside you on the practice green, I would have you do one thing before we talked about any of this:
Roll one short putt.
Then one medium putt.
Then one long putt.
Now come back down.
Long. Medium. Short.
Watch what happens when the distance changes but do not fix it yet. I want to know whether you can leave the last putt behind and see the next one clearly.
That is the job.
