Bobby Jones once said, “A good putter is a match for anyone.” Butch Harmon said much the same thing in more recent times. “Want to play great golf?” Harmon said, “Don’t hit it out of bounds and become the best putter in the world.”
If it was only so simple. Still, the point is well made. No great golfer has been a prolonged bad putter, while the Hall of Fame is full of so-so drivers and middle-of-the-pack iron players who were deadly once they got onto the greens.
Match play accentuates putting’s lordship of the game. A long bomb can turn the momentum of a hole and a match in a single stroke. And at the end of all team match-play competitions, you can rest assured that a losing captain will trot out the well-worn trope: “They just made more putts.”
Annie Park is the only one of this year’s 24 Solheim Cup contestants to slot a long putter as her equalizer of choice, a change she made for good in the 2018 season. Park is seeing the fruits of that change heading into her maiden Solheim Cup.
“What’s surprising is that the strength of my game is my long game. Last year I was going through changes trying to adjust to (the long putter). This year, my putting has been great and has been saving my rounds,” Park told LPGA.com.
Park used the long putter off and on in her junior golf days. During the 2011 US Girls’ Junior Championship, she played the stroke-play portion of that event with two putters in the bag – one long and one a traditional length. She first considered making the switch permanently in December of 2017, when a friend gave her a long putter another to try. She committed quickly, asking PING to make her a model in January of 2018, which Park immediately liked and added to her bag. Trying to anchor was never in the cards - anchoring was banned in 2016 – but since she came to the long putter after the ban, she didn’t have to adjust the way players like Adam Scott and Bernhard Langer did. Park couldn’t miss what she never had. She’d never experienced any advantage from anchoring so she was free to reap the rewards. Those rewards fully bloomed when Park Monday-qualified for the 2018 Mediheal Championship and had a week that turned her career around. Since then she has never considered going back to a standard-length putter.
She was, however, forced to get a new one. This past April during the ANA Inspiration, Park’s car was broken into outside her hotel and her clubs, including the putter, were stolen.
She now has a similar model that is slightly lighter. But her comfort with all of the long putters she’s tried has been immediate. Park has never taken a putting lesson since making the switch. She’s only had coaches occasionally check her fundamentals.
However, Park does watch films of PGA Tour players winning with broomstick putters: including Scott McCarron, Langer and Scott.
“I like to see how everyone is a little different,” Park explained of what she’s trying to observe. “Generally we’re all the same, we’re all using the same fundamentals.”
Those similar fundamentals have led to vast improvements in Park’s putting stats. She vaulted from 58th in putting on the LPGA Tour in 2018 to 29th in 2019. The biggest difficulty in putting with a long putter is something Park will be staring down in Gleneagles.
“When it’s windy, it’s really hard. It’s super hard to putt. I don’t think people realize that, because you have so much length that you need to hold when it’s windy, and you’re trying not to move too much,” Park explained. “But you have to learn how to adapt to the weather. I played the Scottish (Open) and I still putted well even though it was windy.”
Park is currently back home in Long Island tuning up before the return trip to Scotland for the Solheim Cup. Her confidence with the putter is peaking as she prepares to represent the United States for the first time since the 2014 Curtis Cup, where she went 3-1.
“I feel like I know, even if I’m not swinging it well, I know how to score,” she said. “I know If I’m putting well, I’m going to score ok.”
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