GOING FOR THE GREEN
Adam Hadwin’s putting wasn’t always this good — just ask his dad.
Putting final piece as Canadian makes PGA breakthrough
Before Adam Hadwin held up the trophy as Canada’s latest winner on the PGA Tour in Florida, his father was holding court a continent away.
Gerry Hadwin, the 58-year-old director of golf at Ledgeview Golf Club in Abbotsford, B.C., was watching on TV with some of the club’s members on Sunday afternoon as Adam played the final round of the PGA Tour’s Valspar Championship. Watching on TV, and also nervously pacing.
“I broke the hinges on the door, I was going in and out smoking so much,” Gerry said.
But with Adam lining up a 53-foot birdie putt on the 13th hole, Gerry was struck by a feeling.
“I said, ‘Guys, I’ll bet you any amount of money he’s going to make this putt,’ ” Gerry said. “And bang! Sure enough. Right in the hole. I pretty much called it. I did get a little loud after that.”
It got a little louder later on, when Adam clinched his first victory on the PGA Tour and the many benefits that came with it. Not only did the 29-yearold pro take home a winner’s cheque worth $1.1 million, he also earned a berth in the Masters next month. All in all, it was a momentous accomplishment. And it was built in large part on Adam’s superior short game, specifically a putting stroke that has ranked among the PGA Tour’s elite the past couple of years.
Gerry, speaking over the phone from Abbotsford, said he was proudest of a particular aspect of Adam’s rise to prominence — specifically the work Adam has put in to become a better player on and around the greens. It was only a handful of years ago that the short game was the glaring weak spot in Adam’s arsenal.
“He’s always been a great ball striker,” Gerry said. “But he’d hit it closer from 200 yards with a 5-iron than he would from 100 yards with a wedge.”
And as for putting? Well, it went against the family bloodline that putting was, in the words of Adam’s coach at the University of Louisville, Mark Crabtree, “an Achilles heel.” The short game, after all, had always been Gerry Hadwin’s strength as a player. Now a retired pro, Gerry laughed a little as he remembered how it used to frustrate him that, for a long while, the talent seemed to have skipped a generation.
“I could get it up and down from a locked car … And putting, I could make it from anywhere,” Gerry said. “But Adam, he should have been on the PGA Tour when he was 17 or 18. He hit it better than anybody on the tour back then. I can honestly say that. But from 100 yards and in, he couldn’t get it in a hole if the hole was the size of a crater. I’m serious. He couldn’t make a three-foot putt … It hurt. It hurt a lot. I said to Adam, ‘If I could will you my short game, I would give up the game and never play again. But I can’t.’ ”
Rises to golf stardom are rarely instant. It was six years ago this summer that Hadwin first found himself in contention at a PGA Tour event, playing in the final group on the final day of the Canadian Open at Vancouver’s Shaughnessy Golf and Country Club before finishing tied for fourth.
Between then and now, he’s moved up and down the ladder on various developmental tours, had good years and dismal ones, switched swing coaches (once) and switched putters (many, many times). Gerry Hadwin offered a guess on the number of different models Adam has used over the years.
“Oh, 19 or 20,” he said. “I’ve given a lot away to friends. He changed putters whenever. He went from putter to putter to putter. He’d change. He’d change back. He’d change again. He’d bend ’em, because he would get upset. It was that bad.”
But Adam eventually found some consistency working in a putting lab overseen by coaches Brett Saunders and Scott Rodgers, wherein highspeed video analysis identified the strengths and weaknesses in his stroke and eventually led him to adopting the left-hand-low technique he currently employs. Perhaps the best evidence that he’s been improving ever since, beyond the fact that he currently ranks third on the PGA Tour in strokes gained putting, an advanced metric that’s a well-respected measure of shortgrass superiority, is that he’s been using the same putter since 2014. That’d be the Odyssey Tank Cruiser V-Line. Adam was presented with a gold-plated version of the model last week, this to commemorate the Jan. 21 round in which he became just the eighth PGA Tour player in history to shoot 59.
As good as Adam’s become, Ralph Bauer, Adam’s current coach, offered an example of how the player remains seriously committed to improving his putting. On Wednesday, in final preparations for the Valspar Championship, Adam was among the first players on the course for a 6:40 a.m. practice round. About 12 hours later, he and Bauer were last to leave the practice green at sunset.
“Everybody out there is a pretty good putter,” Bauer said. “To be one of the top ones takes a lot of work. And that’s what he does — he puts a lot of work into his putting.”
On Sunday, all that work on the greens helped Adam overcome his only significant stumble of the weekend — a double bogey after hitting his drive in the water on No. 16. Gerry Hadwin said he didn’t see that shot go in the water on Sunday; he’d ducked out for a smoke break. But even though the setback washed away Adam’s two-shot lead with two holes to go, Gerry said he had a feeling his boy would come through.
“He’s such a grinder. I still felt he could win,” said Gerry. “I’ve always had a gut feeling with him, that this is what he’s going to do. And it probably works out about 80 per cent of the time that he does what I’m thinking he’s going to do.”
What he did, in the end, was par out for a one-stroke win over Patrick Cantlay, who bogeyed the 18th after finding a greenside bunker. With Adam’s ball resting against the greenside collar 31 feet from the hole, the old pro’s son from Abbotsford delicately bladed a wedge to tap-in range using the kind of artistic touch that suggested he’d been born with the gift.
“That’s probably what makes me proudest,” Gerry said. “In six years he’s gone from being one of the worst putters in the world to being one of the best. I guess that’s learning something. Isn’t it?”