Canadian golfer Adam Hadwin used a B.C. putting lab to go from being ‘one of the worst putters in the world’ to one of the few to ever shoot a 59 on the PGA Tour.
In the second round of the 2010 Canadian Open, Adam Hadwin looked like a young Canadian star on the rise.
He had just watched a well-struck 5-iron land where it was supposed to land — on the green of the par-three 16th hole at St. George’s Golf and Country Club, the Stanley Thompson-designed gem of a course in Toronto’s west end. This tee shot left him an eight-foot putt for a birdie that could have moved him to eight under par for the tournament, two shots off the 36-hole lead.
“Perfect shot. Easy putt,” Hadwin remembered recently. “Pretty much one of those putts you want to make.”
But it was a putt Hadwin did not make. And it was the way in which he missed that bothered him. Watching himself on the TV highlight reel later that evening, one of Canada’s most promising young pro golfers observed a sad truth about his game. Yes, in some ways he was emerging as an accomplished professional. He had earned his spot in the Canadian Open, his first PGA Tour event, thanks to his success on the Canadian tour — a hothouse of developing talent that helped produce the likes of Mike Weir, Canada’s greatest pro. He would finish 2010 in second place on the Canadian tour’s money list. And come 2011 he would qualify to play the U.S. Open, his first crack at one of the sport’s four major championships.
But Hadwin knew he was reaching this exciting point in his career thanks largely to his undeniable ability for striking a golf ball. He had always been a long hitter, especially considering his diminutive five-foot-nine frame. And he was deadly accurate with his irons.
But once his ball was on the green, Hadwin was building a reputation as a lessthan-stellar putter. Or maybe that was phrasing it kindly. Mark Crabtree, Hadwin’s coach at the University of Louisville, says putting was clearly his “Achilles heel” during his time as a collegian, when he was an honourable mention All-American before he turned pro in 2009. Gerry Hadwin, Adam’s father and a retired golf pro, recently thought back to his son’s formative years as a professional and offered an emphatic assessment of his golf course Kryptonite.
“He was one of the worst putters in the world,” Gerry Hadwin said. “Like, he couldn’t make it from three feet if the hole was the size of a crater.”
And if Adam Hadwin hadn’t thought of himself in such starkly unflattering terms — such is the importance of mental fortitude on a golf course that the select few players who make it to the sport’s highest level generally have a gift for manufacturing near-delusional confidence about even their most glaring inadequacies — the sight of himself missing that eight-foot birdie putt on the 16th hole at St. George’s on the postround highlight package turned out to be a eureka moment.
It wasn’t simply that Hadwin missed the putt that alarmed him. It was how he missed it: wide left, barely introducing the ball into the neighbourhood of the hole. He didn’t even come close. And he wasn’t precisely sure why.
Brett Saunders, the Vancouverbased teaching pro who was Hadwin’s coach at the time, got a text shortly after Hadwin saw that video, which Saunders had already watched himself.
“(Hadwin’s text) was something like, ‘I just watched the replay. We’ve got to work on my putting. I didn’t know I was that bad,’ ” said Saunders.
Action was clearly required. And action would be taken in due time.
In a matter of a few years, Hadwin would transform his putting from a weakness to a strength. He’d do it with hard work — endless repetitions on practice greens all over the continent. And he’d do it with the help of sports science — tweaking his stroke and his putter of choice based on data gathered at a Vancouverarea putting lab run by Saunders and Saunders’s partner, Scott Rodgers.
All these years later, of course, Hadwin is anything but bad. Head- ing into this weekend’s Presidents Cup in Jersey City, N.J., Hadwin ranked 18th on the PGA Tour in strokes gained putting, an advanced metric that measures a player’s performance on the putting green relative to the rest of the field. In other words, when it comes to putting, this year Hadwin ranks among the top 15 per cent of players on the best golf tour on the planet.
And given that 41per cent of the strokes taken on the PGA Tour last year were putts — well, it’s among the most important statistics in the sport. And it helps explain how, back in January, he became just the eighth PGA Tour player to shoot a round of 59, an accomplishment that required the sinking of copious putts and spurred Odyssey, the manufacturer of his preferred model of putter, to present him with a gold-plated replica of the club. The Hadwin of 2010 wasn’t equipped to shoot a round of 59. In some ways, it was remarkable that he was climbing pro golf’s ranks with a blind spot so pronounced. And certainly it spoke to the strength of the rest of his game.
Why was he struggling with his putter so immensely? There were those who were convinced it was a problem that wasn’t going away — that Hadwin simply didn’t possess a knack for rolling a ball into a hole. Golf has long included in its mythology a belief among many that great putters are born, not made. Gerry Hadwin, for instance, has been a gifted putter for as long as he can remember.
“I could make it from anywhere,” Gerry said. “When I was playing my best I’d have a 20-footer and I’d say, ‘Guys, just pick this out of the hole for me.’ And sure enough it’d go in the hole.”
Wayne Vollmer, a former PGA Tour pro from the Vancouver area and a contemporary of Gerry’s, nodded in acknowledgement.
“With a wedge and a putter, Gerry could get up and down out of a garbage can. He was that good. And his son was that bad,” Vollmer said. “It’s definitely not genetic.”
Vollmer remembered watching a 15-year-old Adam Hadwin play a round in which Adam hit the ball beautifully and putted “horrendously,” after which he instructed Gerry to “do something” about his boy’s glaring weakness.
Not that Vollmer had much hope that it would help.
“In our day, we all thought you were just born a good putter — you just had that feel,” Vollmer said.
Vollmer said he was concerned that Adam, for all his gifts, would follow the career arc of many Canadian pros who came before him.
“There was Dick Zokol, Dave Barr, Stan Leonard, myself — all coming out of this area, all terrible putters,” said Vollmer, speaking of the Vancouver-area pros who made it on the PGA Tour.
He could have added to that list Moe Norman, the late legendary ball-striking machine from Kitche- ner who more than once said he “hated putting.” Ditto George Knudson, the smooth-swinging Torontonian and winner of eight tournaments on the PGA Tour in the 1960s and ’70s who was considered the best Canadian player in history until around the time Weir won the Masters in 2003. The great Jack Nicklaus once assessed Knudson as possessing a “million-dollar swing and a 10-cent putter.”
Former PGA Tour player Jim Nelford, like Knudson a member of the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame, said a researcher once attached a heartrate monitor to Knudson during a round of golf. Knudson’s ticker showed no signs of stress from tee to fairway, where he thrived, but went “haywire” when he approached the green.
“George was deathly afraid of putting,” said Nelford. “He was a great ball striker who didn’t like the uncertainty of putting.”
And even Weir, Canada’s only major championship winner, was never known as a great putter. To this day he credits his victory at Augusta National, where the undulating and uber-quick greens have often been said to reduce the tournament to a putting contest, to his prowess with a pitching wedge.
In Hadwin’s childhood stomping grounds of B.C., there had always been a built-in excuse for subworld-class putting among the local pros. Greens in that area were notoriously slow. So when pros ventured south to the lightning-quick country-club greens of the PGA Tour, the likes of Zokol and Barr would have a difficult time acclimatizing.
“It’s not as easy as you would think it would be, trying to adjust from the slow to the fast,” Barr said.
Still, golfers from Ontario — like those from B.C. of Hadwin’s generation who benefitted from improved conditions in the province — probably couldn’t claim the same excuse. So Zokol, for one, developed his own theory about why so many Canadians had a similar reputation for short-grass ineptitude. Knudson, an influential player, was a disciple of Ben Hogan. Hogan, like Knudson, was a much-studied ball-striking genius who often struggled with the putter. Hogan suggested rule changes to make putting less important to the game’s grand scheme: bigger holes, for one, and a system in which strokes made with the putter be worth half as much as strokes generated with a full swing. Putting, in the era of Knudson and Hogan, was almost a dirty word.
“There was a tremendous value placed on ball striking. You were a good player if you were a good ball striker,” Zokol said. “If you don’t value putting, I tend to think you’re going to be a (poor) putter.”
That’s not to say that all of those Canadian pros didn’t, at times, make putts. Hadwin did, even at his worst. But consistency was the overriding issue. And given putting’s importance in the sport, being a belowaverage putter is a recipe for a short pro career.
“I remember saying to (Hadwin), ‘If you don’t become a great putter, you’re not going to make money in golf, right? So what are you going to do?’ ” Saunders said.
“He was one of the worst putters in the world. Like, he couldn’t make it from three feet if the hole was the size of a crater.” GERRY HADWIN ADAM HADWIN’S FATHER
“He finally found a putter he fell in love with. To put it in real-life terms, he finally found his wife of putters, rather than dating five girlfriends a week.” BRETT SAUNDERS HADWIN’S FORMER COACH AND CO-OWNER OF SAUNDERS-RODGERS GOLF ACADEMY
“Adam said, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Well, you’d better make yourself a great putter, then.’ And it was almost like he said, ‘I’m going to show you.’ You challenge him, he responds.” A couple of years earlier, Saunders, who had coached Hadwin since he was a teenager, helped open a socalled putting lab at the Vancouverarea Saunders-Rodgers Golf Academy, co-owned with Rodgers, a fellow teaching pro.
The putting lab, an investment in technology that cost about $50,000, is equipped with various tools to micro-analyze the hows and whys of a player’s putting stroke. High-speed cameras paired with computer software capture and evaluate key markers of performance. Perhaps the most important factor is face angle — whether the putter’s face is square to its intended target line at impact. The lab’s technology can analyze it to the millimetre. It can analyze myriad other factors, too.
When Saunders first brainstormed the idea of opening a putting studio, he didn’t receive buy-in from his top client.
“I said to Adam, ‘What do you think of the idea to spend $40,000 or $50,000 on a putting studio?’ And he said, ‘You’re crazy, man. You could lose a lot of money on that.’ And I said, ‘I think there’s a market for it.’ ”
Hadwin, it’s important to point out, is hardly a technophobe — this is a man who recently acknowledged he met his now-wife Jessica on Tinder, the dating app. And even if he was initially skeptical about the potential for technology to be the answer to his problems, he eventually had to admit that his theretofore prescription for his putting woes came down to his moment-to-moment whim.
“He travelled with a pro shop of putters. It was, ‘Try this, try that. Let’s try this putter. Let’s try this grip,’ ” Saunders said. “There was a time when he putted the front nine left-hand low, and he’d go to a conventional grip on the back nine. Sometimes it was two holes conventional, two holes left-hand low. It was crazy. But suddenly we convinced Adam that we had the technology here where we could say, ‘This is the putter that performs the best. This is the grip that performs the best.’ And that’s the coolest part of it.”
Sold on trying something new, he soon discovered something important. Saunders remembers Hadwin, on his first visit to the lab, repeatedly hitting a relatively standard putt: a dead-flat 12-footer on the green carpet of the small room that housed the high-tech equipment. What surprised Saunders was that Hadwin missed nearly every putt, and almost all of his misses ended left of the cup — exactly where he’d missed on that birdie putt at the 16th hole at St. George’s in the 2010 Canadian Open.
Hadwin was immediately suspicious of the lab’s setup. He told Saunders and Rodgers that the floor, though it appeared flat, must be askew.
“Adam says, ‘Guys, this putt breaks left,’ ” Saunders said.
Saunders and Rodgers assured their client that, no, the putt did not break left. They’d taken great pains to make sure of it. Hadwin, who is possessed of a stubborn assuredness, was still unconvinced. So the story goes that Saunders and Rodgers spent the next 45 minutes placing a digital level along various points of the line of the putt, showing Hadwin that the surface on which he was putting was, indeed, flat.
All of which led to an important revelation: Hadwin, when he was standing over those 12-footers, wasn’t seeing straight. Saunders and Rodgers used the lab’s technology — including a red laser light imposed over the target line and a set of goggles scored with horizontal lines that the golfer is meant to keep parallel to the laser line — to determine that Hadwin was seeing the hole about “two cups” left of where it actually was. Given that a cup is 41⁄ inches in diameter, Saunders and Rodgers figured Hadwin was aiming some- where between six and nine inches to the left of his actual target.
In other words, Hadwin had a good reason for missing that putt at St. George’s: His eyes were deceiving him.
The problem, Hadwin and his coaches came to find out using laser and the specially designed pair of glasses, was in the way he was tilting his head while readying to make a stroke. Instead of looking down the intended target line, he was lifting his head off the line. The fix was easy enough, but Saunders and Rodgers figure they never would have addressed it without the tools available in the lab.
Hadwin, for his part, counted himself astounded.
“It was very eye-opening to see that, to say the least,” Hadwin remembered earlier this year. “It was almost a little shocking to think that I could be playing at the level that I was but doing some of the things that I was doing.”
Said Saunders: “That was a huge moment for him, where he was like, ‘Wow. This is a turning point.’ ”
There were other issues with his stroke, too. Data gathered in that session in the lab determined that the launch angle of his putts was too severe to be optimal. While the putter is known as the “flat stick,” putter faces are generally lofted. Putts roll best, according to the theories to which Saunders and Rodgers subscribe, with a launch angle between one and two degrees. Hadwin was launching his putts at an angle of four to five degrees. That meant that during the first 16 inches of, say, a 10-foot putt, Hadwin’s ball was only in contact with the ground for one or two inches. Putts launched thusly tended to bounce. They also had backspin instead of the preferred overspin, which promotes a smoother roll.
Saunders and Rodgers argued that a less-than-optimal launch angle was making it difficult for Hadwin to control the distance of his putts. On downhill slopes, a putt launched too high has a tendency to run beyond the hole, Saunders said, “and going uphill, you’re bouncing it into the bank and coming up short.”
Saunders had seen this up close while caddying for Hadwin at the 2011 U.S. Open at Congressional Country Club.
“He was sending downhill putts 10 feet past the hole at Congressional,” Saunders said. “He’d have eight or 10 feet for birdie. Whoops. Now he’d have a 10-footer for par.”
Saunders recalls analyzing numbers that suggested the only player in that Open field who struck the ball better than Hadwin was Rory McIlroy, the tournament winner.
If that performance was among many that spurred Hadwin to look for solutions, the solutions came slowly and only bore fruit when combined with plenty of work on practice greens.
Around 2014, the lab numbers made it obvious that his optimal putter, selected from his pro shop of choices, was the Odyssey Tank Cruiser V-Line. That was the same year Hadwin finished first on the Web.com Tour money list, the top run of the PGA Tour’s feeder system, a victory that earned him full status on the big tour. Saunders and Rodgers said the nature of that putter’s face, when matched with Hadwin’s stroke, produce consistently ideal launch conditions. And Hadwin’s results since he began using it would suggest as much.
“He finally found a putter he fell in love with. To put it in real-life terms, he finally found his wife of putters, rather than dating five girlfriends a week,” Saunders said.
After yet more work in the putting lab it was determined in 2015 that Hadwin’s launch angle was most consistent when he putted with a left-hand-low grip.
In 2015, he finished 48th on the PGA Tour in strokes gained putting. By 2016, growing ever more comfortable with the combination of putter and grip, he finished 12th in the same stat — meaning he picked up more than half a stroke a round on the field thanks to his putting prowess. And this season has brought yet more breakthroughs, including his first career PGA Tour victory, the Valspar Championship in March, and his third-round 59 two months earlier at the CareerBuilder Challenge, where he finished second and where even Hadwin had to marvel at his performance on the greens.
“If I was putting from eight, 10, 16 or 20 feet, I made everything,” he said.
Not bad for one of the worst putters in the world, indeed.
Hadwin, who is now coached by Canadian Ralph Bauer but still makes regular visits to the Saunders-Rodgers putting lab, admits when he’s looking for a bit of perspective on his journey, he occasionally looks back on that bit of video from the 16th hole at St. George’s.
“I still watch that highlight to look to see how far I’ve come,” Hadwin said. “Putting was a real sticking point for me. I struggled with it for a long, long time. It’s just one of those things. It took me a while to really clue into the fact that that’s what was going to take me to the next level. I spent a lot of time on it, and now it’s become a strong part of my game.”
There are those who still do double takes when Hadwin sinks a putt.
“I still expect him to miss everything, even though he makes them now,” quipped Vollmer, the old pro who counts himself among Hadwin’s biggest supporters.
Technology helped make it so. But technology was only a piece of the intricate puzzle.
“We’ve used technology to guide Adam. But at the end of the day, his determination and hard work have been phenomenal,” said Saunders.
Hard work and determination — with a little help from high-speed cameras and lasers — have turned Gerry Hadwin’s poor-putting son into one of the best putters on the planet. It also helped Adam Hadwin achieve his goal of making it to this weekend’s Presidents Cup on merit instead of as a captain’s pick, booking his spot for the biennial event after a tie for 13th at the Dell Technologies Championship this month pushed him into 10th in the International team standings.
Said the proud father of a son who suddenly looks as though he’s been gifted with the short-grass knack: “I don’t know how many times I said to Adam over the years, ‘Son, if I could just suck my short game out of me and give it to you, I’d quit golf right now.’ It doesn’t happen that way. He’s just worked his tail off to get better. And it’s confidence.
“If you think you can’t make a putt, you ain’t making it. And now he’s got that confidence. And he’s making them.”