A non-majors Golf Thread for 2023 and beyond

[Giff]

I wasted a lot of time copying and pasting lol.

[+] spoiler

When the best golfers in the world line up a putt these days, many of them look completely deranged. 
Their process for reading greens everywhere from Augusta National to St Andrews involves standing over the line of the putt, closing one eye and sticking a couple fingers in the air as if they’re trying to hail a cab to the clubhouse. Never in the centuries since a bunch of Scots started malleting balls toward a cup had anyone studied greens quite like this before.

But that hasn’t stopped professionals from adopting the unorthodox putting strategy known as AimPoint, a technique that has become as popular as it is polarizing. One PGA Tour veteran, 2009 U.S. Open champion Lucas Glover, recently inflamed the controversy when he called for AimPoint to be banned and cited it as a factor in golf’s pace-of-play debate. Others have criticized it for simply looking silly—or worse, violating the game’s unwritten rules when players stomp around too close to the hole.
Still, a growing number of top pros swear by it. They argue it makes the maddening art of reading a green more scientific and that the backlash against it is just uninformed.  
“AimPoint has 1,000% helped me,” two-time major champion Collin Morikawa said. “I don’t think people understand how AimPoint works to really say this is right or wrong.” 

Here’s what you have to understand: First, you straddle the putt’s line at the point of the biggest break. Then you use your footing to discern the amount of tilt, at which point you assign a number—usually one, two or three—to the slope’s severity. Next, standing behind the ball with one eye closed and a pointer finger aimed at the center of the hole, you raise the number of fingers that corresponds to that slope. And that’s your line. So if you estimate the slope at 2% from right to left, you aim at the point outside your middle finger. Voilà. 

There is nothing textbook about it to players who have been taught to bend over and read a green with their eyes. AimPoint is feeling instead of seeing. And that’s the exact idea an unemployed golf nut with no professional experience in the game had when he first came up with it. 
“Your body is very, very good at balancing itself,” says AimPoint’s pioneer, Mark Sweeney, 57. “And your eyes are very easy to trick with optical illusions.”
The idea dates back to 2003, when Sweeney was at home watching the final round of Ben Curtis’s improbable victory at the British Open. On that afternoon, he kept seeing something repeat itself: players were misreading the same putt in the same direction on the 18th green.
“I don’t understand why this is so difficult,” he thought. With all the technology flooding into the game, he believed there had to be a better way to read greens. 

Sweeney had never played the game competitively, but he did have a background in finance and software development. So he wrote 100,000 lines of code for a program that would laser scan greens and calculate the optimal path and speed for every putt. This was long enough ago that the first platform he made for it was for a PalmPilot.  

B ut because golfers can’t lug laboratory equipment with them to model every green, it wasn’t practical on the course. Its first widespread use was actually on television broadcasts, and Sweeney was part of a Golf Channel team that won a Sports Emmy for the tech in 2008. 
As Sweeney heard feedback from the industry and parlayed his expertise into a new career as a putting guru, golfers wanted something they could actually use. First, he came up with a system of charts that told players where to aim. That was still cumbersome and complicated. It was only when he was teaching some 7-year-olds that he came up with the version of AimPoint that’s widely used today. 
Sweeney was giving a lesson to a bunch of kids in 2013 and wanted a basic way of teaching them to feel the high side of the hole, so he had them straddle their line like an invisible seesaw. What he quickly discovered was that the slope corresponds to the number of fingers you hold up because it even accounts for distance. On a longer putt, those fingers block more of the green and tell you to aim farther from the cup, the same way golfers need to calculate for more break.
It isn’t an exact science. It can take time for players to learn how to read slope with their own balance, though Sweeney says most people get within a half percentage point quickly. Putts can also break more than once, and there are adjustments players need to learn to make, such as how far they hold out their arm with their fingers raised, based on the speed of the green. Yet he found it was more accurate than simply eyeballing it and guessing. 
“It happens to match the physics of a golf ball rolling on a green,” Sweeney says. “For whatever crazy reason.” 
And pro golfers were crazy enough to try it. Brian Gay, a five-time winner on the PGA Tour, was the first in early 2014, and he says it came naturally to him as someone who always used his feet to feel a green’s slope. AimPoint merely gave him a system to capitalize on that skill. 
But that doesn’t mean everyone accepted it. Other golfers looked at him as though he was using an umbrella for a putter. 
“Most guys were like, ‘What is he doing?’” Gay says. 
Yet others such as Adam Scott soon followed. Since then, it’s taken off so much that instructors all across the globe teach the technique. Viktor Hovland, Dustin Johnson and Justin Rose have all used it. Nowadays, it isn’t unusual to see an entire group of players and their caddies in the middle of greens, aiming and pointing. 

That’s because it often helps. According to Sweeney’s data, in the 12 months after Max Homa adopted AimPoint, his strokes gained putting per tournament improved by 1.5—a difference that netted him more than $3 million in winnings. Keegan Bradley (1.2 strokes gained putting), Hovland (0.8), Rose (0.7) and Morikawa (0.5) also saw notable improvements. 

Not everyone is a fan of its growing popularity, though. Some argue that AimPoint takes far longer than old-school green reading and slows down the game for fans, which Sweeney disputes. Gay says he actually putts quicker than he used to, while Morikawa conceded it can take longer. 
Even beyond pace of play, others chafe at how some players pace around too close to the hole to feel the break—something Sweeney stresses that he doesn’t teach. There are also those who turn their noses at the aesthetics of AimPoint, saying in a sport steeped in old-school tradition, it just looks plain wrong. 
“The AimPoint mania…it truly drives me crazy,” CBS commentator Jim Nantz said on a podcast last year. “I can’t stand looking at it.”
Those inside golf, though, don’t see AimPoint going away anytime soon. The approach is now taught to kids, and some see a future where nobody bothers eyeballing a green anymore. 
Proponents add that the pushback is merely a symptom of a tradition-laden sport that’s not always changing with the times. 
“There’s a bit of jealousy,” says Joe Hallett, an instructor who has worked with elite women’s golfers such as Stacy Lewis and Inbee Park. “It’s just another skill you learn, like how to hit a flop shot or how to hit a stinger.” 

Just this past weekend, AimPoint had another prime moment in the spotlight. Swedish golf star Ludvig Aberg walked onto the final green at Torrey Pines tied for the lead, needing a birdie to win the Genesis Invitational. The last thing he did before placing his ball down for his 7-foot attempt was pointing a finger and aiming.  
His prize for sinking that putt: $4 million. 

[Nonlinear FC]

Thank you, sir.

I'm going to fully side with "it works and is not against any rules... fair game."

[Rex]

You get relief from that?

[DSafetyGuy]

Harrison Ford flying that plane, too? Probably a little nicer to land there than Penmar.

[Rex]

That guy on the tee box was one cool customer