Now occasionally and dependant on the type of golf course you might be playing on, there are going to be times when your ball will rest quite awkwardly against the collar on the back fringe of the green. So imagine my ball’s landed on the green, and it’s rolled up here, and its positioned itself just up against the back collar of the green, almost like the cushion on the pool table or snooker table, and from that position it could be quite difficult to strike down on the putt to get the putt rolling accurately towards the hole. Now because the collar on this green is not really that big, it wouldn’t cause me too many problems, what I’ve done here is recreated that collar feeling. And actually you can practice putting from the collar of the green using something like this. All I’ve done is just lay the club down, put my ball up against it. Now my option really here is I have to hit the upper half of the golf ball. I simply can’t get the club low enough to get to the middle of to the base of the golf ball. So I could practice putting from here, striking only the top path, and that’s the first method that I think you can practice to get the ball from the collar.

So I’d hover the golf club up in the air, I really can’t afford to hit down here, obviously I’m going to hit my putt, sorry my pitching wedge handle, but if you’re doing this on the collar of the green then you hit the long grass first, it effectively clout like a fat shot and it wouldn’t really work. So I’ve got to practice just almost topping the golf ball deliberately to get it to roll forward, and that’s the first method of how I can move the ball forwards from here. Just hit the top half of the ball to run it back down towards the camera. There is another method very occasionally you’ll see good players do on the golf course. They’ll actually turn that putter head over slightly and hit it with the sort of numb flat section at the top. The point of that is it makes my putter very narrow. So if I was to hit down with the point edge here, I’m not going to grab in so much of the long grass, so if you’ve got a lot of long grass on the fringe and you hit with the flat of the putter, club slows down too much.

If we turn the putter toe on and then hit down, we can almost just jab the ball forward with the toe end, and scuttle it forward. It is not going to be massively accurate for line, but you should be able to judge the pace and the direction, sorry the distance okay and it would stop you from fatting the golf ball and leaving it further too close to the fringe. So we turn the putter head over, take a normal golf putting position and then just tap the top edge of the ball there and it will just scuttle down and forwards. So in the awkward position when you find your golf ball up against the back cushion, up against the back fringe, it’s awkward to hit down onto the golf ball, but we have to practice either hitting the top edge or turning the club over, and just tapping it forwards with the toe. But you probably won’t get that shot a couple of times on the golf course, and make sure you do the practice on the side of the putt green before your ran, just to get a feel for which technique works best for you.