Putting is my worst leak right now, and it isn’t a hunch so much as a pattern I’ve stopped being able to talk myself out of. Across my last several rounds it’s the category quietly handing back the most shots, and the damage isn’t coming from the long lag putts where you’d expect a broomstick convert to struggle. It’s the six to twelve footers, and the miss has a direction, which is the part that finally got my attention.
I pull them.
So I filmed a session and sent it to my coach, and what came back was five and a half minutes that I’ve been chewing on ever since. I’m putting it down here mostly so I don’t lose it, and partly because I’d like to look back in six months and find out whether any of it took. I’m playing a Cleveland HB Soft 2 11C Broom at 46 inches, and I want to actually master this thing rather than give up on it in three months when the next idea comes along.
What’s different about a broomstick
| Conventional putter | 11C Broom | |
|---|---|---|
| Length | 34–35″ | 46″ |
| Lie angle | 70° | 78° |
| Head weight | 365g | 470g |
| Grip | one pistol grip | split, hands apart |
| Posture | bent over the ball | standing tall beside it |
| Stroke it wants | slight arc | straight back, straight through |
The short version is that the shaft stands almost straight up, your hands ride high in front of your chest, your spine stays upright, and the head is heavy enough that it genuinely wants to swing on its own once it’s moving. Which means the job isn’t to make the stroke happen. It’s to stay out of its way.
And the thing I hadn’t understood until this lesson is that on a broomstick the top hand is the fulcrum and the lead arm is the whole suspension system. Every one of the four fixes below is about that arm. Not the putter, not the path, not the read.
The four fixes
| # | Fix | What it’s for |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Top hand rotated so the knuckles point perpendicular to the target line | Stops the wrist breaking down |
| 2 | Lead elbow off the chest, pointed 90° to the target | Stops the pull |
| 3 | Eyes stacked over the knuckles, not over the ball | A reference that actually works at this length |
| 4 | Neck still, elbow keeps moving after impact | Makes it a pendulum instead of a hit |
1. Rotate the top hand
Mine had been sitting rotated underneath the shaft, which leaves the wrist room to hinge, and since the top hand is the fulcrum of the entire pendulum, anything loose up there gets amplified all the way down. Squaring it does two things: the wrist can’t easily break down, and the hand ends up in the same place every single time, which matters for fix three.
2. Get the lead elbow off the chest
This is the one that explains the pulls, and I could have hit a thousand practice putts without finding it, because tucking that elbow into my ribs felt stable and stability was exactly what I thought I wanted. His explanation was simple enough: an elbow pinned to your torso can’t swing on its own, so the body ends up moving the club instead, and a body-driven stroke goes left through impact.
Free the elbow and point it across the line, and the arm can do the work by itself.
3. Eyes over the knuckles
Everyone has heard eyes over the ball, and he was careful to say the cue isn’t wrong, it’s just written for a normal-length putter where you’re folded over at the hips. Standing tall with a broomstick, forcing your eyes out over the ball means leaning over your toes and wrecking a good setup to satisfy a checkpoint that was never meant for this club. The knuckles give the same repeatable reference without the contortion.
Which only works if fix one is already in place, otherwise the knuckles are somewhere slightly different every time and there’s nothing steady to aim at.
4. Neck still, elbow moving
I’d been doing the exact reverse, turning my head to watch the ball go while the elbow stopped dead at impact. Both halves are the same mistake, which is that I had the fixed point and the moving point backwards. The head sits right above the fulcrum, so turning it moves the pivot mid-stroke. The elbow is supposed to keep going through and past the ball, because a pendulum doesn’t stop at the bottom of its swing.
The pre-shot routine I’m building
Four things to remember over a four-footer is three too many, so the point of a routine is to get them happening without conscious thought. This is the sequence I’m drilling, in order, every putt:
- Read it from behind the ball and pick a start line, not a hole.
- Set the face to that line first, before the hands go on.
- Build the top hand grip deliberately — knuckles perpendicular, checked, not slid into place.
- Lower hand on, down the shaft, light.
- Step in and let the lead elbow float off the ribs, pointed away from the line.
- Stack the eyes over the knuckles. Stand tall. Don’t reach.
- One look at the hole, one look back at the ball.
- Stroke. Neck quiet, elbow finishing through.
- Stay down until you hear it.
Steps three and five are the ones I’m consciously adding. The rest was already roughly there.
Three drills, and only three
I had a longer list. I cut it, because a long list is how practice becomes a warm-up you do without thinking. These three are the ones that map directly onto where I’m losing shots, and I’d rather do three properly than seven badly.
Drill one: the gate
What it’s for: the pull. This is the fault that’s actually costing me strokes, and the gate gives you a yes or no answer on every single putt instead of leaving you to guess from the result.
Setup: two tees pushed into the green about four inches ahead of the ball, one either side of the intended start line, spaced maybe half an inch wider than the putter head on each side. Pick a straight six-footer with no break so the only variable is you.
How to do it: ten putts through the gate. Any putt that clips a tee doesn’t count and doesn’t get replayed. The goal isn’t to hole them, it’s to start ten in a row through the gap.
What to look for: clipping the near tee on the left side means the head is travelling left through impact, which is the body-driven stroke he was describing. When that happens, don’t fiddle with the stroke. Reset the elbow off the ribs and start again, because the path is a symptom and the elbow is the cause.
Progression: once ten in a row is comfortable, narrow the gate by a quarter inch per side, then move back to eight feet. Two sessions a week is plenty. This drill gets stale fast if you overdo it.
Drill two: the circle
What it’s for: the three to five foot range, which is where scores actually bleed. Nobody ever ruined a round by lipping out from twenty feet. They ruin it by missing the one coming back.
Setup: six balls in a ring around a hole at four feet, evenly spaced so you get every break direction rather than the same comfortable straight putt over and over.
How to do it: go round the circle and hole all six. Miss one and you start the circle again from the beginning. Keep going until you complete a full lap, then move the ring out to five feet and do it again.
The part that matters: keep your eyes fixed on the spot where the ball was until you hear it drop. Don’t watch it go in. This is fix four, and short putts are the easiest place to build the habit because the wait is only a second or so. If your head comes up to watch, the rep doesn’t count even if the putt goes in.
Why it works on scores: the pressure of restarting the lap after five made putts is the closest thing you get to a real four-footer on the eighteenth. It also gives you an honest number to track week to week, which is how you find out whether any of this is working.
Drill three: the ladder
What it’s for: distance control, which is the first thing you lose when you change putters and the single biggest source of three-putts. A heavier head rolls the ball differently, and until the new speed is calibrated, every long putt is a guess.
Setup: five balls, placed at roughly 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 feet from a hole or a target. No gate, no tees, nothing to think about mechanically.
How to do it: work from the nearest ball out to the furthest, then back down from the furthest to the nearest. The target isn’t the hole. It’s leaving every ball inside a three-foot circle, which is the distance you can reasonably expect to hole out from.
What to look for: which direction you miss. Consistently short means you’re still decelerating, which usually traces back to the elbow quitting at impact rather than to any conscious lack of commitment. Consistently long means you haven’t yet trusted how much roll the heavier head produces.
The variation worth adding: do the last five putts with your eyes closed, opening them only after you’ve heard the ball stop. You’ll be surprised how good your distance sense is when you can’t see the result and start second-guessing mid-stroke.
Where this leaves me
I’m a few weeks into a putter that bears no resemblance to anything I’ve used before, with four changes to a stroke I’d been making on autopilot, in the middle of a season, and it’s currently worse before it gets better in exactly the way everyone warned me it would be and I didn’t entirely believe.
But I’d been treating this as a problem to be purchased away, and the actual diagnosis was a left elbow pressed against a ribcage. None of the four faults were things I could feel. All of them were obvious on video within about thirty seconds to somebody who knew what to look for.
I’ll report back when the six-footers stop leaking left.
Lesson from Coach Mike Lindfield. Filmed at home on a Wellputt mat with a phone on a tripod, which is genuinely all the setup you need to send a coach something workable.