You're Correct!

For the majority of club golfers, the putting stroke is the least practised, so when you get to the green you may try to flick the ball towards the hole with your wrist rather than swing the putter head through the impact area with the ball.

This flick of the wrists causes many a golfer to miss lots of short putts and lose confidence on the greens rapidly. One of the ways you can remove some of the wrist movement in your putting stroke would be to change your grip, and a great one to try is the claw.

You may have been sitting at home watching the golf on TV when suddenly a close up of a professional golfers putting grip is shown, which you may not have recognised. The grip could have been the claw grip. This grip gets its name because your right hand, when placed in position on the putter, really looks like a claw on the golf club. If you struggle to hole the short putts, take your putter out of your bag and try this:

• Place your top hand (left hand if youre a right handed golfer) on the handle of your putter as normal. Take your bottom hand and place it on the handle so only the bottom half of your fingers are on the front of the grip. Your thumb is at the back and the palm of your hand is away from the handle and pointing down towards the ground and at a spot in between your feet.
• You must feel that your top hand is gripping the putter at around a firmness of 7/10, with the bottom hand having very little pressure. The way you hold the putter, especially with your bottom hand, will see a huge reduction in the wrist action during your stroke. This is great for golfers who struggle with hitting their putts out of the centre of the putter face, or even have a case of the dreaded yips.

By eliminating the wrist action from your putting stroke, your big muscles will now dominate and help you to produce a fantastic pendulum stroke, which will greatly improve your strike pattern, and in turn, the roll of the ball.

During the putting stroke, you use your top hand to control the direction of the putt and the bottom hand to feel the distance of the stroke. Using the claw grip can have a detrimental effect on your ability to judge the feel for your putts due to the lack of pressure the hand applies on to the grip.

Using the claw grip on your long range putts does become difficult to judge the pace due to the fact that your lower hand has very little pressure on the grip. This is because the lower hand in your grip has a huge effect on your feel during your stroke.

If you want to become a good putter then the only way to achieve this is to spend lots of time on the practice putting green. Working on your green reading, distance control and holing out short putts will make you a good putter. The type of grip you choose is irrelevant.