The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
Why you should be putting with pin in
AS you are all aware by now, the new Rules of Golf were introduced on January 1 and among those new rules is a change to Rule 13, which now allows a player to putt on the putting green with the flagstick still in the hole and unattended, whereas previously this would have incurred a penalty of two strokes or loss of hole in match-play.
We’ve already seen a number of top professionals on tour doing this on TV since January 1 but is there any advantage or disadvantages in putting with the flag still in the hole?
The USGA in a statement on its website (www.usga.org) says: “There should be no advantage in being able to putt with the unattended flagstick in the hole. In some cases, the ball may strike the flagstick and bounce out of the hole when it might otherwise have been holed, while in other cases, the ball may hit the flagstick and finish in the hole when it might otherwise have missed.”
Well, that’s the official line from the USGA but when it comes to matters on the short game and putting especially, there’s no one more qualified than Dave Peltz, the American short-game guru, to speak on this matter, and his views on this were recently publicised in the media.
Peltz is of the belief that you should mostly putt with the flag in and he has, of course, conducted a study on this, but he says that you need to look at several factors before deciding whether or not to leave the flag in the hole whilst putting, and Peltz being Peltz he takes a rather mathematical and scientific view of the whole thing.
First of all, assuming the pin is securely in place, standing vertical and not swaying in the wind, the hole is 4.25” wide and the diameter of a standard flagstick is half an inch, so if you look at the space left for a golf ball, the 2.125 inch half-hole minus the quarter-inch half-pin, leaves you 1.875 inches between the cup edge and the pin.
Given that golf balls are 1.68 inches in diameter, this leaves a gap of .195 inches of open space for the ball to fit into the hole with the flagstick in place and while this doesn’t sound like much space, especially if the pin is leaning slightly toward the golfer, it has been tested by Peltz who insists that you should putt with the pin in!
Peltz conducted a Pin In/Pin Out test as far back as 1990 and published his findings back then in GOLF Magazine. His testing was performed with a special putting device built to roll putts accurately aimed with a laser - a true, pure roll - from two feet away.
The device rolled putts at different speeds, hitting different parts of the pin on flat, uphill and downhill sloping greens and the test results were conclusive, you actually have a much higher percentage of holing putts when you leave the flagstick in.
The scientific reason for this is that a significant amount of energy is lost from a putt’s speed when the ball hits a flagstick and this speed-loss enables gravity to pull the slower moving ball down into the hole more often.
In your own game if you want to make yourself feel better about leaving the pin in, think about how many times you have seen long putts and chips from off the green hit the pin and still stay in the hole, I’ll bet it’s a higher percentage than those you have seen hit the flag and stay out.
As a little test, putt 12 balls from a three-foot circle all the way around the hole, do the same drill for six-foot putts and repeat this drill 10 times on 10 different days, keeping track of your results and then you will see the advantage.
If the top professionals who are playing golf each week for millions of dollars are doing it, then it must work, which is why I’m going to give it a try when I get back to playing golf after my winter break.