#178. Dave Stockton on Putting and Pressure

"When you're getting ready to putt,  you don't want to try to make it.  You wanna just roll the ball.  I mean, as soon as you try anything in life, try not to 3-putt--try to do something in golf especially--it's not gonna work. . . . If you don't care if it goes in, that's the chance you'll usually make it every time."
--Dave Stockton, winner of the 1970 and 1976 PGA Championship

Rory McIlroy started working on his putting with Dave Stockton between this year's Masters and U.S. Open.  Recently Dave Stockton's Putting Instruction, an iPhone app, jumped from $.99 to $3.99.  Supply and demand, eh?  I bit. First, though, I listened to Stockton's Youtube video below and was taken in by his Yoda-like advice about not trying.  Stockton takes it a step farther than Yoda, though, by suggesting that you totally detach from the result.  In other words, you'll putt better if you don't care whether you make the putt or not. I suspect there's a connection here between control and caring/trying/efforting your way through the putt vs. surrendering once you've completed Stockton's set-up (including no practice strokes, which could also be connected to control).

Interestingly, this detachment seems the opposite of Jack Nicklaus' advice to Rory before the U.S. Open: “He said he always put a lot of pressure on himself,” McIlroy said. “He expected himself to play well. He expected himself to be up there all the time. And he said to me, ‘I expect you to do the same thing.’”

I cringed when I heard Nicklaus' advice, but I sunk into Stockton's like a jacuzzi on a cold night.  Rory seemed to thrive on both.  It's tricky: expectations, effort (what Stockton calls trying), and pressure.  Stockton himself has expectations about putting: "I expect it to go in, but I'm not going to extend and try to make the ball go in the hole. If you try to make any shot in golf, let alone a putt, and you try extra hard cause it means something, it's not gonna work."  He expects it to go in, but he doesn't put any pressure on himself, and he isn't going to get attached to the result.

So, is the Stockton advice (including more technical suggestions in the app videos) helping my putting?  So far, so good . . . on the practice green. I'm definitely more confident and sinking more putts.  I'll let you know how it translates to the course this weekend.

Some people thrive on the kind of self-induced pressure Nicklaus is talking about, but I bet a lot more of us would benefit from Stockton's advice to ease off and care less, surrender more. McIlroy's a freak of nature.  He can do it all.

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