Keep at it Dan.

To supplement my analogy. Golf is so complex but the reason for the disparity in talent is quite simple, people that are great at golf (or throwing trip 20′s in darts) have the least genetically predisposed variation in movement for a given action.

There’s a fine line between practicing something a lot and fixating on it to where you get worse.

Golf ultimately doesn’t come down to practice, it’s something else. Like every golf lunatic I think I know what ‘the secret’ is but it is unattainable for me.

It’s as simple as drawing a circle (an analogy). I could tell you to draw a circle, you would draw a circle, not a great one. Eventually if you got really into it you could learn to draw a really good circle with some great technique and be better than most but you would still reach a point where your circles wouldn’t be getting any better. If we had 1000′s of people drawing circles you would find that some people had the strange ability to draw near perfect circles. Something about them just enabled them to draw them near perfectly. Yes they practiced like everyone else but for whatever reason they had some strange circle drawing aptitude that others do not.

The grass on greens may be cut shorter than usual for tournaments to make them much faster. Some chips from the back of a very slopping back to middle/front where the pin is close, and on the slope are near impossible to stop unless the ball hits squarely the flag stick by chance.

In practice, a string of chips are performed, where the first chip of the string is usually taken as a “warmup” chip, but in real play, the first chip is the one that counts. To simulate warmup shots, the setup routine may include two to three practice chipping swings next to the ball, before addressing and performing the ship to dial in the distance and to adjust for different lies and slopes of the ball.

Putting on unfamiliar greens has more uncertainty than putting on a green that has months of experience on; and one can only perform the proper ingrained putting techniques, while accepting any misses due to unfamiliarity with the green speed and breaks on strange greens, For one, if the practice green for the initial months of practicing is likely to be relatively flat and slow, there needs to be some practicing on sloping and fast greens. Another is that the squareness of putter face angle is much more significant than the putting stroke direction. I have posted a discussion of this in a prior post, and in the current Oct Golf magazine issue, there is a similar short piece on this. Perhaps replacing the marked balled with the ball label square with the initial line of the putt help to get the putter face perfectly squared at impact. Many players set the label or putting guide line drawn on the ball inline with the initial line of put rather than square (perpendicular) to the initial line of the putt.

Practice very long lag puts, and long lag puts from a lower level to an upper level for multiple level greens.

For severely slopping, and very fast greens that are not that sloping, approach shots should try to remain below the hole, specially if the hole is cut in slopes rather than on a flat spot on the green. Sarazen in his autobiography related the story of being recruited to join other major champions to go on an exhibition tour to earn extra money after he first became a champion of majors. In one stop, the greens keeper placed the holes on tricky slopes, and the champions had a hard time putting and thus looking very bad, until the greens keeper was instructed to run ahead to reposition all the hole positions on the remaining greens from slopes to flat spots, so that the champions would not look like fools on the greens.

Avoid getting “short-sided” on approach shots, that calls for chipping severely down hill to a pin cut on the down hill slope, where the ball will run downhill for a long distance pass the hole except for the slim chance of a square hit on the flag stick.

Breaking putts need the precise speed to shape the curving trajectory of the rolling and curving ball. It is like a basket shot. Visualizing the ball rolling and curving at the proper speed to the hole help reading breaking puts.

Aiming to putt the breaking put to the “hight-side” of the hole can increase the chance of making these putts.