THE CAN’T-MISS PUTTS

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31161, 10 September 1966, Page 17

THE CAN’T-MISS PUTTS

(By M. S. WOLVERIDGE > The ball rolls up 18in from the cup and your partner says: “Putt it.” You are 18in from what—half-a-crown, the Amateur Championship, the Open, £100,000? I should imagine the short putt is the most merciless test that golf has devised for it offers so little consolation. If you make it, then so you should have: if you miss it, then it is utterly irredeemable.

When Murray three-putted the seventeenth hole, I could not help quietly muttering. “Oops, there goes another amateur championship.” He has suffered as much as any from this devilish-length putt. If Murray could putt as well as Durry, you could put a crown on his head and call him the amateur champion of any country in the world. His match with Jones was a classic. When both these gentlemen reach Mexico City

they will notice a slim yet strong young man, who strikes the ball as well as any of them, but who putts like a dream.

He is R. Cole, the 18-year-old who is getting ready to take over from G. R. Player, just as surely as Player took over the crown from A. D. Locke. South Africans are in the super-class when it comes to putting, and the reason is possibly because they play on such awful (by our standards) greens. Coarse grass, bumpy surfaces, no grass: these boys, like the little wizards from Japan, learn to hole putts on anything. In Britain they haven't been able to do it for years: why can’t the English teach their players to putt? The problem is that the greens are so good over there that golfers have little need of the knowledge of grasses, grain or bare surfaces. Consequently, they cannot claim to be experts in this department. Is putting mental or

method? P. W. Thomson is looked upon as a poor putter in Australia, believe it or not, and therefore putts poorly. In Britain, they think he is a wonder on the greens and, of course, he is. With him, it is mental. Player has seemed to drift around the globe with the tag “dedicated” attached to him like a leech. Consequently, he must be a method putter because he practises so hard!

For myself, I have been guilty of seriously describing a 6in putt at Mfack Wack Golf Club in the Philippines as a “nasty, curling down-hiller.” Obviously I am a mess! The gentleman who had the answer was the great golfing scribe, Bernard Darwin, who in his later years was confronted with a three-footer on the last green at Rye Golf Club in Sussex.

He looked it up and down, stood quite still for a moment, and uttered the immortal words: “It’s not on. Pick it up caddy!”