John Cook on Putting at a Links Course (Video)

Since the Open is this week, here's a Live from the Open clip from Monday, with John Cook demonstrating how to putt on a links course when the wind is blowing. This might help you on any windy course, though.



Cook's keys are simple:

• Widen your stance.
• Place the ball near the center of your body.
• Grip down slightly on the grip.
• Trust your eyes.

I think the "trust your eyes" advice is interesting, especially since -- after setting up with the ball more centered -- John appears to move his ball forward in his stance! Apparently what John sees in this lesson is a bit different than what he says.

This is pretty standard advice, don't you think? But I find Cook's ball position change to be the interesting bit here. No matter how much instruction you hear about how to do something, when it comes to putting, mechanics are no substitute for feel. It's important to make sure you feel comfortable over a putt. If that means you have to break the rules a bit, so be it.

Martin Hall on Playing in the Wind

Wednesday's School of Golf show on GC was about the problems you face when playing links golf. This video is the "extra credit" video they do for GC's website. It deals specifically with playing in various types of wind and has a lot of good tips which are useful for anybody playing in windy conditions. This video is just over 5 minutes long, but it's loaded with good info.



A couple of simple tips from Nick Faldo that Hall mentioned on the regular show concerned lowering your ball trajectory. One was simply taking a longer club -- much longer, like 3 or 4 clubs more -- and swinging much more easily to take spin off the ball and keep it from rising in the air so much (less backspin).

Hall also mentioned some setup tips which sounded quite a bit like Jonas Blixt's setup from Tuesday's post.

And -- I thought this one was pretty neat -- one way to lower your ball flight is to alter your shoulder angle. We're usually taught to keep the lead shoulder a bit higher than the trailing shoulder and thus tilt your spine slightly away from the target. In the wind, Faldo would sometimes try to get his shoulders more level in the wind, which caused his spine to be slightly more vertical and therefore moved his weight slightly more toward his lead side. (Another way to get the "Blixt Effect.")

I had hoped to find a link to the actual show -- GC does that with some of their programs -- but couldn't find one. Here is the link to the page where this video is found; the page also has some other video clips GC thinks might be helpful. One of those clips is about the book Hall mentioned at the end of his show, by the legendary Henry Cotton:



The tip about hitting the bag is one that Carl Rabito used with me. After he taught me the correct way to coil my upper body, he had me hit a bag with half-swings for quite a while. (Like 15 minutes or so, nonstop! But it worked.) It taught me how to square my hands properly once he fixed my turn.

Perhaps they'll post the full episode later... but in the meantime, these clips should give you some help with the wind.