Dave Stockton is a name that is synonymous now with good putting particularly since the work he’s done most recently with McIlroy. McIlroy has had a few issues with his putting over the years, mostly noticeably Augusta, when he collapsed on the and his putting was really the catalyst for the collapse. But he started working with Dave Stockton since then, and has had the most amazing rise in his career, now sits well on top of the world number one well on his way to a good number of major championships. And Dave Stockton’s putting method is said to be sort of mainly responsible for Mcllroy’s improvement in his putting and therefore his overall game. So here’s a couple of points that I’ve taken from Dave Stockton’s putting method, that I think you could utilize in your game too. Dave talks about reading putts, mainly reading them from the low side of the hole. So let’s say this putt that I’ve got here breaks from right to left, he wouldn’t necessarily be reading the putt from here, but he’d be reading it from here from the low side and you can really feel how the putt will swing around the high side moving down towards you? You can also get a scope of the break of the up and the downhill as well as the side hill. So it’s about reading putts from the low side of the hole, so you can do a good 360 then pick a point on the low side and spend most of the time reading it from there. Now Dave Stockton also suggests that you don’t take any practice strokes. And I see a bit of a strange one for most people it’s only strange one for me because I like a practice stroke. But Dave Stockton talks about how the practice stroke gets you to think too technically about the putt and trying to make the perfect putt. And he would rather you worked on just visualizing the ball rolling towards the hole.

So you’d stand behind and you visualize the ball rolling towards the hole, and then move in, set up and hit it first time. And he says that as a good golfer you’ve done that enough times to make that stroke without actually needing a practice stroke. He also talks about not getting frozen over the back of the golf ball at all. So sometimes we see golfers, they set up, they ground the club, and they stand perfectly still and then they get they a bit frozen. It’s very difficult then to take the club back and particularly if you’re nervous and your under pressure. So he talks about this sort of nonstop method whereas you seeing up to the ball, you don’t actually stop moving at any point at all. So you’d line up, you’d walk into the side, you keep moving, keep shuffling as the club comes back down behind the back of the ball is then often you’ve hit it pretty much before you’ve set up to it. So you don’t stop at all again, that for most golfers would feel quite awkward. The one last part of Stockton’s method that I was thinking a lot of good golfers can really appreciate and really work on, is the fact that the back of the left hand is the guide, the back of the left hand will guide the putter and guide the ball towards the hole, so we get the feeling that the back of the left hand, if you wear a watch on your left wrist, it’s almost the watch is pushing to the target and straight to the target and not twisting and deviating off line. So that’s the real 4 key points from Dave Stockton’s putting method. Some of it I agree with, some of it I don’t but it’s certainly working with McIlroy and if you feel that you’re putting is suffering and you like the way McIlroy is playing the game right now, maybe that’s something that you could invest a bit of time in investigating this idea of Dave Stockton’s putting method to help improve your game.