Pair wants to take the mean out of the green T
Caddy and partner operate Surrey workshop that zooms in on the science of putting
he seed was first planted a decade ago when Brett Saunders caddied for Korean pro Sung-Ho Lee at the final stage of the PGA Tour qualifying school.
Tee to green, Lee was among the best players in the field that week but, and stop us if this all sounds familiar, he was a lost soul with the putter in his hand. He would three-putt 10 times over the 108 holes, eventually finishing outside the top 25 and the magic ring by one stroke.
That one shot cost Lee his PGA card and it didn’t sit well with Saunders.
“I did a s--- job that week and it cost him his job,” Saunders recalled. “I got on the flight (back to Vancouver) and said: ‘That’s not going to happen again.’”
That was the start. As for the finish, well, it’s still being written by players like Brooke Henderson, Adam Hadwin and Alena Sharp.
Saunders, a no-nonsense Aussie, and his partner Scott Rodgers now run a high-performance centre at Morgan Creek in South Surrey that specializes in putting and has become the go-to place for many of this country’s top players.
On this day, it also welcomed one interloper hoping to be educated about the dark art that has tortured everyone who’s ever picked up a club.
Ten years ago, Saunders set out on his own quest for enlightenment, a journey that brought him into the orbit of Dr. Paul Hurrion, a British biomechanics consultant who had just developed Quintic, a camera-based teaching system that has since been employed by players such as Rory McIlroy, Padraig Harrington and Eddie Pepperell.
It’s also the centre of the operation at Saunders’ and Rodgers’ workshop and while it doesn’t promise miracles, it will provide knowledge, understanding and numbers, a lot of numbers.
“We saw it as a way in,” Rodgers said. “We were starting out and we felt no one was doing it.”
“You have the science of putting and you have the art but if you’re launching it at six or seven degrees (explanation to follow) it’s tough to get the art of putting down,” Saunders said. “Our goal is to follow what the science tells us.”
Quintic supplies a stream of data that analyzes the interaction between the putter face and ball and its effect on speed and direction. That, at least is the simple explanation.
As for the more complex, well, the eight cameras located around the indoor teaching centre spit out numbers that measure, ahem, launch angle, spin rate, skid (how long it takes for the ball to complete one full revolution), rate of acceleration, pre-contact speed, attack angles and face rotation.
It follows the path the putter travels during the stroke. There’s also an overhead camera that captures any head movement during the stroke. And there’s a heat map that measures weight distribution through the feet.
As you might guess, those numbers tell a story.
Your agent is a decent player but something evil happens when a putter is placed in his hands. We now know why. Quintic revealed I basically hit a high fade with backspin on the greens. That’s good when you’re hitting a long iron. It’s less desirable when you’re staring down an eight-footer.
A couple of adjustments later the launch rate was reduced to an acceptable number that had the ball rolling forward in the general direction of the hole. This represented progress. As for the movement of the head before impact that resembled a nervous spasm, we’re working on that.
“There are no secrets in here,” Rodgers said.
I was afraid of that.
Still, it came as some comfort to know Hadwin was suffering from a similar malady when he came to Saunders and Rodgers in 2011. Hadwin, then a Canadian Tour player, qualified for the U.S. Open that year at Congressional with Saunders on his bag. He made the cut and was the second-ranked player in the field from tee to green behind the winner, McIlroy.
Alas, Hadwin was dead last in putting.
A lengthy session with Quintic revealed why. It would take some convincing but Hadwin was consistently aiming left of the hole. He believed this was the result of a design flaw on the putting surface until Saunders spent 45 minutes measuring the contour of the carpet to demonstrate it was, in fact, straight.
That was the first problem. The second concerned the accursed launch angle, the angle at which the putter face strikes the ball. Research shows the optimal number is around one degree. Hadwin’s was five-plus.
“He worked so hard on his putting for 12 months but he was still bad because he wasn’t practising the right things,” explained Saunders.
Five years after that session, Hadwin finished 12th on the PGA Tour in strokes gained putting. The next year he recorded his first tour win at the Valspar.
Saunders also started working with Sharp a couple years ago and became her full-time coach last July. She recorded a T6 at the Australian Women’s Open in February. Henderson, who just recorded her eighth career win on the LPGA Tour at the Lotte Championship in Hawaii, is also a regular client.
“Whether it’s someone trying to make their living at golf or a guy just trying to beat his buddies, everybody wants to make a few more putts,” said Rodgers. “We’ve worked with five-year-olds and guys in their 70s and they want the same thing. That’s the best part about this job.”