You're Correct!

There will be times during a round of golf when youre over a putt and you tell yourself to be positive and hit it firm, but invariably you hit your putt too firm and it rolls five or six feet past the hole.

Now the pressure is on not to three putt. Fresh in your mind is the image of the last putt and you leave the next one a couple of inches short. If you had really paid attention to the first putt, the chances of making the comeback putt would have been much higher.

Whenever you hit a putt, you must pay attention to what it is doing right up to the point when it comes to rest. Even if youre so annoyed with the putt you just hit, watching the entire roll of the ball is crucial, even more so if your ball runs beyond the hole. The next time youre at the golf club, go to the putting green and practise this drill:

• Find yourself a putt of around 10 feet and try to hit the putt around five feet past the hole. Pay close attention to the way in which your ball not only passes the hole, but also as it continues to a finish. You will see if the ball moves from right to left or left to right. This is critical because you are watching the way your comeback putt will behave.
• Now that you have seen the break of the putt, take a look to see if the comeback putt is either a little uphill or downhill. Then the only thing you need to focus on is the speed. Line it up and make the stroke, and pay attention to the roll of the ball. You may not hole the first couple, but once you start to hole them, you will hole more of these putts out on the course. This means less three putts, so lower scores will quickly follow.

Hitting putts firm and straight will only ever be successful on a very small scale. If a putt breaks then even a ball hit at a faster speed will move a little. Then you have to look at how fast can the ball be travelling and still finish in the hole. The faster your ball is moving, the chance of you holing the putt is greatly reduced.

After seeing your first putt running past the hole, the chance of you doing it again is small. More often than not, you will not hit the comeback putt with enough speed to get the ball to the hole. Whats more is, when this happens, your putt will not only stop short but it will be right in the centre of the hole too.

One of the biggest mistakes made on the comeback putt is slowing more break. This usually happens because you become too tentative and are trying not to three putt. Yet the result is that you decelerate on the forward stroke and miss both the speed and the line, meaning you three putt anyway.