It was Kipling – and I’m talking about Rudyard here not the bloke who made exceedingly good French Fancies and Viennese Whirls – who said, “words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
Those of you who regularly overdose on this stupefying column will vouch for the truth in that statement.
After last week’s hallucinogenic haverings, which were broadly equivalent to some meandering blethers from the Flower Power movement of the 1960s, somebody got in touch and implored me, in no uncertain terms, to “get to the point, man.” And it wasn’t the sports editor this time.
Nothing teaches you humility, keeps you in touch with harsh realities and nourishes a determination to fight on against all the odds quite like feedback from your readers. Or, come to think of it, a round of golf.
With that in mind, then, I’m making a concerted effort today to get to the point. So, let’s make haste and talk about AimPoint.
Being the seasoned golf aficionados that you are, you’ll probably know all about AimPoint. If you don’t, then allow me to briefly explain. And by explain, I mean vaguely rush through some clumsy simplification.
In a nutshell, AimPoint is a very deliberate and popular putt reading technique which involves the player using his or her feet to feel and estimate the amount of slope on a green before utilising their fingers to determine an aim point amid much rocking, pivoting, straddling, shoogling, pointing and posturing.
In some cases, the whole rigmarole can look a bit like a member of the Huli tribe of Papua New Guinea performing the elaborate, enchanting choreography of a sacred fertility ritual. Apparently, the deadeye Hulis knock in everything inside 12-feet.
Not for the first time, AimPoint and its associated palavers and plooters made the news – in the golfing bubble at least – at the weekend when former US Women’s Open champion, Kim A-lim, was captured using the technique for a tap-in at an LPGA Tour event in Thailand.
Admittedly, the TV still image that hurtled around social media quicker than you could say, “can’t you just dunt it in?”, made the deliberation look worse than it was but, in these tetchy, harrumphing times when slow play is always on the agenda, the jury was straight on the case and swift with its damning judgment and withering castigation.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Lucas Glover, the 2009 US Open champion, ranted that AimPoint should be banned completely from the tours as golf continues its ongoing battle with pace of play issues.
“Stomping around the flag is rude,” he added of the general foot tapping and pacing about that’s required in the AimPoint approach.
Getting a small ball to disappear down a hole has been the bane of many a golfing life through the ages. This correspondent’s form with the flat stick, for instance, is so woeful, I once three-putted before I’d even reached the bloomin’ green.
The mighty Old Tom Morris, meanwhile, was so renowned for his toils and troubles on the putting surfaces, a letter sent back in ye day simply addressed ‘The Misser of Short Putts, Prestwick’ was delivered straight to him by the postman.
And what was it Tony Lema once uttered about the putter? “Here is an instrument of torture, designed by Tantalus and forged in the devil’s own smithy.”
Many of you will probably empathise with such a tormented lament as you lift the boot of your car, like an archaeologist tentatively prising open an ancient sarcophagus, and gaze at an array of putters that have all been trialled, tried and ultimately banished amid much cursing condemnation and now form part of a sombre shrine to muttering futility on the greens.
Putting has always been the ultimate golfing test of nerve and skill. For those of us of a more old-fangled approach, watching tour players embroiled in time-consuming, pre-putt routines that just about resemble the complex contortions that are required for some of the more expansive manoeuvres of the Kama Sutra – so the sports editor tells me, anyway – tends to grind the teeth.
In an age when golfing instinct and intuition can often get lost in the clutter of thoughts, processes, visual aids, accoutrements, fads, fashions, sorcery or witchcraft that’s par for the course nowadays, players will always use something or other in an effort to gain an advantage if someone else is using the same something or other.
Advocates of the AimPoint technique insist it can be a reliable and quick way of reading putts if done correctly and is not any slower than the more traditional method of a player, say, sizing up a putt from behind the ball, then having a look from behind the hole and maybe sizing it up from the side of the hole too.
Like everything, though, things can become overly complicated, and overly long, by over thinking. And let’s face it, there’s nothing quite like a putt to get the golfing mind working overtime.
“I've heard people say putting is 50 percent technique and 50 percent mental,” the late, great Chi Chi Rodriguez once observed.
“I really believe it is 50 percent technique and 90 percent positive thinking. But that adds up to 140 percent, which is why nobody is 100 percent sure how to putt.”
Now there’s a point about putting that we can all agree with.
