The Idea

Pace PutterTechnique

Never 3 Putt again!

​The Idea:

​     Have you ever been bowling or played shuffleboard?

Well pay no never mind if you haven’t but it will serve as a good reference if you are familiar with these two activities because my experience with both of those sports is how I came upon the concept of Pace Putter. I realize that putting for pace and not concerning yourself too much about the line is not a new concept. In fact for amateurs, I would venture to say that if you are worried about the line more than your pace that is most likely the root of all of your problems. Once I realized that as an amateur, I had no business spending more than a few seconds studying the line as if I actually had a chance to hit a ten footer or more. I started to concentrate on the pace and the two puts started to happen regularly.

     That brings us to my credentials. I have none. That’s right I am an amateur hacker just like the friend you always get stuck playing with that plays bogey golf and occasionally squeaks out a birdie or two each round. So take all this with a grain of salt if you wish but if you give it a try. I am convinced it will make a difference in your putting game whether you are or not.     So it’s not the idea of concerning yourself with pace above all when facing a putt but it’s how you arrive at the exact touch you need to achieve the pace necessary for each putt you attempt. I teach a method that relies on feel and visualization, two characteristics of any great golfer. That is all pace is, visualizing the distance and feeling the exact contact and acceleration needed to hit that putt just right. This method will have you practicing and executing pace with extraordinary precision ​on every putt.

​I will tell you what this method is not!It’s not calculating angles, speed or slope.​It’s not about grip.​Its’ not about addressing the ball in a certain way.​…and it’s certainly not about your putting stroke.

It is simply putting to a target that is impossible not to hit 99.9% of the time.

     The beauty of this method is that your mechanics are not all that important. As mentioned above, this is not going to be a course on the fundamentals of the grip, address of the ball or your putting stroke. This is all about how we teach you to see the pace and by the time you are ready to strike the putt, your confidence is so high and you feel so comfortable you will execute the perfect stroke.

So how did this all begin?

​     Basketball camp, the way my father taught me how to bowl and backyard shuffleboard.  

     Most ideas come to you in the strangest ways and this was no exception. The first experience (basketball camp) exposed me to the power of visualization for the first time and the second, backyard shuffleboard, years later taught me that it is much easier visualize a big target rather than a small one.

     It was the summer before my senior year in high school and I was at a basketball camp I attended every year at this time. There happened to be guest speaker one of the days and he was not a basketball coach in the traditional sense, no he was teaching something much more esoteric. In fact, it was so new to us all we thought he was a little weird. However, the experience I had that day changed the way I approached sports and most things from then on.

​     You see he was sharing a concept called, “Psycho-Cybernetics.”  If this is new to you it is worth reading Dr. Maxwell Maltz’s book of the same name but we won’t be going into great detail here. However, I will tell you that even though I purchased this book at the time this occurred, I did not read it cover to cover. Ironically, when I began to create this product (around the start of summer 2018) and formulate the ​ideas that came from the following experiences I went through 30 years prior, that is now Pace Putter Technique, I finally did buy the book and read it all the way through. In fact now I refer to it all the time for insight.  What I was not ready for was the unbelievable connection that came on page 148. This is the neat little twist I refer to in the introduction page of Pace Putter. After you go through how this all came about, I think you will be as astonished as I was with what I discovered on that page and I will tell you all about it. 

​ I can’t even recall the coaches name but he was giving a seminar that day on how powerful the mind is and how we could all use it to become better basketball players and athletes in general. 

​     During his seminar, I was called up from the crowd to be a volunteer. I was 6’2” at the time, I did not possess any Dr. “J” like jumping ability so I was the perfect subject. I could touch the rim though so he had me do so. I barely touched it with my fingertips. After that awesome display athletic ability and a few laughs from the crowd he took me aside and explained to me how he was going to add at least 3 inches to my vertical. Anyone that has tested for that knows that is like adding 50 yards to your drive with one try. So he marked my right hand with a big black felt pen right at the top of my fingers of my hand with which I had touched the rim on the first try. Then he took the marker and drew a huge line across the bottom of my palm about 3 inches lower. He made me show the crowd of about 500 high school basketball players. He then took me aside. He told me to take a few deep breaths and visualize the whole path to the rim (Dwight Stones style only this was 2 years earlier) and the explosion up to the rim at the beginning of my jump. I was also to imagine myself being as light as a feather once I left my feet as if I was floating on air and the jump itself was as effortless as a walk in the park. I did a few test runs and although I did get up a bit higher on the rim it was nothing to write home about. The coach came over to me again and said this time he wanted me to take my time and really imagine this whole scenario, to the point of it being completely real.  

     ​I did that and what happened on that next try was nothing short of amazing. I felt so relaxed and from the minute I took off, I knew it was going to be a great attempt. As I left my feet, I felt as if I could reverse dunk and I literally floated and raised up over the rim with my right hand almost an inch down my wrist. It was ridiculous and the whole crowd was stunned. Not because of me but what this guy could bring out of anyone using this simple method. I was hooked and in one short moment experienced the power of the mind and your control over it.   Don’t worry, my method is not about positive thinking and just some abstract form of visualization but a practical way to see the target and strike your putt so you do so with the utmost confidence every time and your results will bear that out. The two-put will be common and expected but we will get to that in the method.  

​     ​So what’s the correlation between bowling and shuffleboard that I mentioned earlier? Well, it’s quite simple actually. When I was a kid my father took me bowling much like I am pretty sure yours did. His whole concept of bowling was don’t ever look at the pins once you start your forward motion towards the release of the ball down the ally. I am quite sure most of you were told the same thing as well. So I began to focus on the first arrows bowled to that spot and inevitably I began to keep the ball in the ally. I bet you thought I was going say that I started throwing strikes – not quite but I did score in most if not all frames from then on. This method comes from the logic that it is much easier to hit a bigger target closer to you and it worked. However, in the bowling arena, there really is no touch necessary so as long as you were online you could heave that sucker as hard as possible. You simply had to control your release towards the arrows you were aiming at.  In putting, obviously touch is involved, however, once you master the 4 ft. circle in the final part of this methodology, you will begin to use the arrows less and less. Oh, wait I just gave some of the method away…..shssssh, back to that later.

​     The second aspect of this method is ​a bit more ambiguous but just a simple a concept to grasp as the bowling arrows and it is amazing how well it works. In shuffleboard, there is a triangle scoring palette. You stand at one side of a long court and slide the pucks down to the opposite triangle and try to settle the puck in one of the scoring regions without touching a line. Well, time after time I would try and focus and hence aim for one of the scoring regions specifically, blocking out any other possible target.

​     ​​ Needless to say, this is very tough to do from about 50 feet away.   Then I stumbled on to something as I was continuously getting beat by my older brother time after time. I thought, what if I just try and get the puck in the big triangle overall instead of trying to be so exact with each scoring region.  When I tried this, my results were astounding. More times than not, the puck would settle in a scoring region touching no lines and hence granting me the points.   I couldn’t believe how well it worked and I began to kick my brother’s butt in shuffleboard from then on and he had no idea what had come over me. Of course being the loving, loyal, younger brother I was I just kept winning and I never told him my secret. To this day he has no idea how this happened but I do and these concepts became the premise behind Pace Putter.

​The Neat Little Twist

​The concept of Pace Putter Technique is not a new or even original one but the way it came to me in the story I describe above is my own journey and experience in discovering it. I had been playing golf since I was about 24, I had never in my life heard this idea or technique explained as it pertained to any sport or skill let alone putting the golf ball. 30 years after I had been formulating the concept Pace Putter Technique I finally purchased and read, cover to cover, “Psycho-Cybernetics.” On pp. 148 this quote from Masters Champion, Jackie Burke is written as follows, “Don’t feel that you have to pinpoint the ball right to the cup itself on a long putt, but aim to an area the size of a washtub.” 

Once you jump into and learn the Pace Putter Technique you will see why I was blown away when I read that quote and Knew I had to follow my intuition and share it with everyone.