Putting
Thoughts about the game within the game

I've heard people say putting is 50 percent technique and 50 percent mental. I really believe it is 50 percent technique and 90 percent positive thinking, see, but that adds up to 140 percent, which is why nobody is 100 percent sure how to putt.
- Chi Chi Rodriguez

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
- Ernest Hemingway

Half of golf is fun; the other half is putting.
- Peter Dobereiner

Missing a short putt does not mean you have to hit your next drive out of bounds.
- Henry Cotton

Prayer never works for me on the golf course. That may have something to do with my being a terrible putter.
- Rev. Billy Graham

Around a clubhouse they'll tell you even God has to practise his putting. In fact, even Nicklaus does.
- Jim Murray

While, on the whole, playing through the green is the part most trying to the temper, putting is that most trying to the nerves. There is always the hope that a bad drive may be redeemed by a fine approach shot, or that a 'foozle' with the brassy may be balanced by some brilliant performance with the iron. But when the stage of putting-out has been reached no further illusions are possible.
- Earl Balfour

Hitting a golf ball and putting have nothing in common. They're two different games. You work all your life to perfect a repeating swing that will get you to the greens, and then you have to try to do something that is totally unrelated. There shouldn't be any cups, just flag sticks. And then the man who hit the most fairways and greens and got closest to the pins would be the tournament winner.
- Ben Hogan

A good player who is a great putter is a match for any golfer. A great hitter who cannot putt is a match for no one.
- Ben Sayers

When a putter is waiting his turn to hole out a putt of one or two feet in length, on which the match hangs at the last hole, it is of vital importance that he think of nothing. At this supreme moment he ought to fill his mind with vacancy. He must not even allow himself the consolation of religion.
- Sir Walter Simpson (The Art of Golf)

When the great snooker player Joe Davis saw his first game of golf the putting puzzled him. 'Why', he asked his golfing friend, 'don't they knock the ball into the hole the first time?'.
- Anonymous

I was lying ten and had a thirty-five foot putt. I whispered over my shoulder: "How does this one break?" And my caddie said, "Who cares?"
- Jack Lemmon

But the bitter, inescapable truth remains. Once you've had 'em, you've got 'em.
- Henry Longhurst (of the putting 'yips')

A man who can putt is a match for anyone.
- Willie Park

Find a man with both feet firmly on the ground and you've found a man about to make a difficult putt.
- Fletcher Knebel

Nonchalant putts count the same as chalant putts.
- Henry Beard

The best stroked putt in a lifetime does not bring the aesthetic satisfaction of a perfectly hit wood or iron shot. There is nothing to match the whoosh and soar, the almost magical flight of a beautifully hit drive or 5-iron.
- Al Barkow

It's so ridiculous to see a golfer with a one foot putt and everybody is saying "Shhh" and not moving a muscle. Then we allow nineteen year-old kids to face a game-deciding free throw with seventeen thousand people yelling.
- Al McGuire

If you drink, don't drive. Don't even putt.
- Dean Martin

I may be the only golfer never to have broken a single putter, if you don't count the one I twisted into a loop and threw into a bush.
- Thomas Boswell

If it really made sense to "let the club do the work," you'd just say, "Driver, wedge to the green, one-putt," and walk to the next tee.
- Thomas Mulligan

At its best, the US Open demands straight drives, crisp iron shots, brilliant chipping and putting, and strategic position play. Plus the patience of St. Francis and the will of Patton. At its worst, the Open eradicates the difference in ability between a Tom Purtzer and a Tom Watson and throws both in the same jail of high rough and high risk shots. This is the disturbing tendency in the Opens of the seventies and eighties, one which worries everyone in golf.
- Thomas Boswell

The better you putt, the bolder you play.
- Don January

How did I make a twelve on a par five hole? It's simple - I missed a four foot putt for an eleven.
- Arnold Palmer

I just try to put it on the fairway, then the green and not three putt.
- Peter Thompson

Keep close count of your nickels and dimes, stay away from whiskey, and never concede a putt.
- Sam Snead

I enjoy the oohs! and aahs! from the gallery when I hit my drives. But I'm getting pretty tired of the awws! and uhhs! when I miss the putt.
- John Daly

The next time you see a good player stalking backward and forwards on the green, do not be led away by the idea that he is especially painstaking, but rather pity him for a nervous individual who is putting off the evil moment as long as he possibly can.
- Ted Ray

A tap-in is a putt that is short enough to be missed one-handed.
- Henry Beard

Love and putting are mysteries for the philosopher to solve. Both subjects are beyond golfers.
- Tommy Armour

Never break your putter and your driver in the same round or you're dead.
- Tommy Bolt

The devoted golfer is an anguished soul who has learned a lot about putting, just as an avalanche victim has learned a lot about snow.
- Dan Jenkins

Go ahead and putt, you are not interrupting my conversation.
- Robert E. Zorn

I shot a wild elephant in Africa thirty yards from me, and it didn't hit the ground until it was right at my feet. I wasn't a bit scared. But a four foot putt scares me to death.
- Sam Snead

A "gimme" can best be defined as an agreement between two golfers, neither of whom can putt very well.
- Author unknown

A man was convicted of killing his wife of thirty years by bludgeoning her to death with a golf club. During the man's trial, prosecuters showed how the wounds on the woman's head matched the outline of the man's Ping putter.
- Golf Digest, February 1995

Putting is my weak spot and always leaves me ripping. My other two weaknesses are the driving and the chipping.
- Arnold Zarett

When I putt, my emotions collide like tectonic plates. It’s left my memory circuits full of scars that won’t heal.
- Mac O’Grady

It's a marriage. If I had to choose between my wife and my putter, well, I'd miss her.
- Gary Player

Putts get real difficult the day they hand out the money.
- Lee Trevino

Never concede the putt that beats you.
- Harry Vardon

You get no points for style when it comes to putting. It's getting the ball to drop into the cup that counts.
- Laurie Auchterlonie

In golf, driving is a game of free-swinging muscle control, while putting is something like performing eye surgery and using a bread knife for a scalpel.
- Tommy Bolt

I have three-putted in 40 countries.
- Fred Corcoran

The poetic temperament is the worst for golf. It dreams of brilliant drives, iron shots laid dead, and long putts holed, while in real golf success waits for him who takes care of the foozles and leaves the fine shots to take care of themselves.
- Sir Walter Simpson

The three things I fear most in golf are lightning, Ben Hogan and a downhill putt.
- Sam Snead

When the going is good and the putts are dropping, you love your putter. When it's going bad, it's like it has betrayed you and you want to throw the sucker in a lake.
- Ken Green

There are many ways of performing the operations successfully. I can claim, however, to be in a position to explain how not to putt. I think I know as well as anybody how not to do it.
- Harry Vardon

Short putts are missed because it is not physically possible to make the little ball travel over uncertain ground for three or four feet with any degree of regularity.
- Walter Hagen

Putting isn't golf, greens should be treated almost the same as water hazards: you land on them, then add two strokes to your score.
- Chi Chi Rodriguez

Putting allows the touchy golfer two to four opportunities to blow a gasket in the short space of two to forty feet.
- Tommy Bolt

If God wanted you to putt cross-handed, he would have made your left arm longer.
- Lee Trevino

Bad putting is due more to the effect the green has upon the player than it has upon the action of the ball.
- Bobby Jones

When I came up, my ball was about three yards from the hole. Two putts made 99. I felt I was now really a golfer.
- Arthur Rainsford

The yips are that ghastly time when, with the first movement of the putter, the golfer blacks out, loses sight of the ball and hasn't the remotest idea of what to do with the putter or, occasionally, that he is holding a putter at all.
- Tommy Armour

When you lip out several putts in a row, you should never think that means that you're putting well. When you're putting well, the only question is what part of the hole it's going to fall in, not if it's going in.
- Jack Nicklaus

I didn't hit the ball like I was 46. But I putted like I was 66.
- Fred Couples

Bets lengthen putts and shorten drives.
- Henry Beard

In golf, a player can step and mar the line of his adversary's putt. A player can also hit his adversary or his caddie intentionally with his ball and claim the hole - but it isn't usually done.
- Charles B. Macdonald (1898)

Putting is like wisdom. Partly a natural gift and partly the accumulation of experience.
- Arnold Palmer

The divorce is from my old putter. I think it's final - at least we're due for a long separation. I've suffered with that old putter for two years now. It got so rude I couldn't stand it.
- Shelly Hamlin

The less said about the putter the better. Here is an instrument of torture, designed by Tantalus and forged in the devil's own smithy.
- Tony Lema

Even when times were good, I realized that my earning power as a golf professional depended on too many ifs and putts.
- Gene Sarazen

I call my putter 'Sweet Charity' because it covers such a multitude of sins from tee to green.
- Gardner Dickinson

I'm certainly not a saint out there on the golf course. In fact, far from it. Like when you make a three-putt and become upset. I take one step back and remember there are more important things going on in the world than golf.
- Bernhard Langer

Everyone wants to be known as a great striker of the ball for some reason. Nobody wants to be called a lucky, one-putting s.o.b.
- Gary Player

Not only are three-putt greens probable, at times they are an achievment.
- Charlie Pride