Hitting every putt the right speed makes the game a lot easier. Think about it: putting only has two variables, line and speed. If you hit a 25-footer the right speed, you can misread it by a foot and still leave yourself a tap-in. Conversely, you can hit the edge of the hole with a putt going too fast and have a 6-footer coming back.

Ben Crenshaw preached the message of dying putts in the hole for decades. “Give gravity a chance,” the World Golf Hall of Famer, and one of the greatest putters in history, would say with an ecumenical fervor.

It’s a hard point to argue against, especially when you look at the history of major championships. The only top-shelf players who slammed putts in the hole were Arnold Palmer and Tom Watson. Both are legends because they made all their 3-footers coming back. Jack Nicklaus won more tournaments tapping in on most greens than any player in history. And if you look back at Inbee Park in her prime, most of her putts fell in on the final roll.

“Harvey Penick used to put a dime on the front lip of the hole and tell me to try to stop a putt on that dime,” Crenshaw told me 20 years ago. “I could never do it, and Harvey said, ‘That’s because the ball is round, and the hole is round. If you’re rolling it slow enough to stop it on that dime, it’s going to fall in.”

Which brings us to Lilia Vu, the California native who had the round of the morning on Friday at The Club at Carlton Woods, a 3-under par 69 to move her to 7-under at the halfway point of The Chevron Championship. At 3:00 p.m., when she finished, Vu held the lead, her first in a major championship. And almost every bit of it was due to hitting putts the right speed.

“I'm known to be a pretty firm putter, I guess, but I think here it's pretty slippery out here,” Vu said after completing her second round. “You can't really afford to blast it by nine feet.”

The four birdie putts she had on the front fell in on the final roll and the 18-footer she made on the par-4 ninth would have gone into a hole the size of a shot glass. Even her eagle effort on the par-5 18th was hit the perfect speed, leaving Vu a tap-in for her sixth birdie of the day. A few shots got away from her, leading to three bogeys, but a good putter can always put a mistake or two behind her.

If there’s a critique in Vu’s game – and it’s not really a criticism – she tends to go at flags no matter where they’re located, a swashbuckling characteristic that might cost her, but will also win her a lot of tournaments.

“I think I unconsciously do it because my caddie always tells me, like, ‘Oh, left center of the green is perfect,’ and then I'll hit and it's directly at the flag,” Vu said. “He's like, ‘Well, that wasn't left center,’ and I'm like, ‘Sorry, it just happened.’”

Her coach in Brett Lederer, who tried the PGA Tour for a cup of coffee and now teaches in Long Beach, California with Jamie Mulligan, was known as an aggressive ball-striker who also never met a tucked pin he wouldn’t attack.

But you can get away with that when you roll putts the right speed.

“I think I've grown a lot since COVID, and I think I just never looked back,” Vu said. “I was in such a bad mindset my rookie year. Everything was life or death, and that's not how I see things anymore. I feel like there's always a solution to any problem, so I just try to stay positive, even though I get really angry sometimes when I make a mistake. I just try to look up and be positive.”

Crenshaw has never met Vu, but he understands exactly what she means. “It’s so easy, when you haven’t struck it well or you haven’t been scoring well, to start pressing on the greens, trying to make up for a couple of poor shots by jamming a putt in the hole,” he said before Vu ever picked up a golf club. “But that’s exactly the wrong approach and leads to more problems when you run a putt six feet by and have to struggle to make it coming back.”

“Most players don’t understand the concept of capture speed,” said short-game guru Gareth Raflewski. “When a putt is dying at the hole, the entire hole is in play. It can go in the front, the sides, even curl around the back and fall in. But if you’re hitting the ball hard enough for it to go three feet past the hole, the effective capture size is smaller than a quarter. Five feet by, it’s smaller than a dime.”

So forget the old “never up, never in” adage, a saying almost never uttered by a major champion. Instead, watch players like Lilia Vu. And listen to the best that ever rolled a ball on turf.

“Give gravity a chance.”

Lilia’s Putter Puts On A Show At Chevron

Related Articles