Putting green & short game

Every putt that matters starts on line or it never had a chance. Two tees barely wider than the ball, a pace in front of you, tell the truth about your start line on every single roll — instant, binary feedback no video can match.

Rounds leak from three feet. Twelve short putts arranged like a clock face around the hole force you to hole the same length across every break — uphill, downhill, left-to-right, right-to-left — until three feet stops being a question.

Getting out of the bunker is a technique; getting the ball close is a distance skill nobody practices. Three landing zones and one swing thought — longer follow-through, longer shot — turn the sand into a place you can actually score from.

Nine up-and-downs, each scored as a par 2: chip plus putt. Par 18 is the standard-bearer of short-game tests because it measures the only thing that matters — did the ball get in the hole in two — under a number you cannot argue with.

A putt dying at the front edge is at the hole's mercy; a putt rolling a bit more than a foot past hits the hole at its widest effective size. Training one dying speed — about seventeen inches past when it misses — makes more mid-range putts fall without adding three-putt risk.

Greenside bunker fear is really low-point confusion — nobody told the club where to enter the sand. A drawn line settles the question: enter there, every time, and the ball rides out on a cushion of sand whether you caught it perfectly or not.

Take the hole away and touch appears. Lagging balls to die against the fringe line trains pure distance control — the skill that turns three-putts into two-putts — without a target small enough to tempt you into steering.

Distance control you cannot fake: every chip must finish beyond the last one but inside the far edge. The corridor shrinks with each ball, and so does your margin for a stabbed or scooped strike. Touch, under gently rising pressure.

Nobody stares at their hand throwing a ball of paper at a bin. Putting while looking at the hole reconnects stroke to target, melts over-control, and is the fastest distance-control fix available to a player who has started steering.

Chipping falls apart when players stare at the hole instead of the spot where the ball must land. A towel on the green makes the landing spot the entire game — pick it, hit it, and let the roll take care of itself.