For all the power drives that soar over 350 yards and the 160-yard iron shots that stop right on the green, the perfectly executed putt, while more humble, is actually just as impressive. Of all the aspects of the game, putting is perhaps the part that most resembles an art, requiring the perfect balance between delicacy and power.
For the best players on the tour, putting accounts for over 40 percent of all shots taken in a round, which means that regular players like you and me will take over half of our shots with the putter. Simply put: putting is half the game.
It makes sense, then, that the greatest golfers, such as Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, are also considered to be the greatest putters.
With analytics and statistics playing a bigger role in sports now, of course there is data we can look at to see who some of the best putters in the professional ranks are. Strokes gained in putting is a valuable metric in today’s game to measure who is gaining ground on the greens.
In 2021, Louis Oosthuizen led the way in strokes gained in putting. While he’s better known for ball-striking prowess, last year showed a big jump in his skills with the flat stick. Oosthuizen gained .764 strokes in 81 rounds to lead the pack on his way to 4 runner-up finishes, including at the PGA Championship and US Open. His putter of choice is a PING PLD Voss prototype model.
The only other golfer on the PGA Tour to break the .700 mark during the 2021 season was J.T. Potson with a mark of .706 in 87 rounds. Potson utilized his trusted Scotty Cameron GoLo 5 to great effect, notching his best finish of second place at the Barbasol Championship. The rest of the top 5 is filled out with names known around the professional tours as wizards in the short game. Names like Ian Poulter, Patrick Reed, and Zach Johnson are not only mainstays among the ranks of the PGA Tour’s best putters but also often find themselves in the hunt near the top of the leaderboard. Good putting will lead to that type of success.
So what’s their secret? What do they know that we’re all dying to find out? Arnold Palmer stood pigeon-toed when he putted, but that doesn’t work for everyone. The truth is, there probably isn’t one right way to do it. These players, however, know that for a consistently strong putting game, you want the fewest moving parts, to keep your head down at all times, and to keep practicing until you find your edge.
Then, the magic happens.
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