These thoughts are from the book Bobby Jones on Golf, a compilation of newspaper articles Jones wrote in the early 1930s. In an article called simply The Pendulum Stroke Jones talks about the perpetually controversial teaching about swinging the putter back and then forward in a straight line, with the putterface remaining perfectly square to that line from start to finish. He says:
It has been described and expressed in exclusive ways, but whilst boiled down, each demonstration resolves itself into a component simply not possible of feat as long as people are constructed as we understand them.While he says that such a stroke is an "ideal conception of accurate striking," he adds:
But so long as human feet stick out in the front, and until a golfing club turns into a croquet mallet and may be swung backward among the legs, there is little wish that this will be attained.Clearly Jones didn't think like Dave Pelz!
It does appear to me that some thing near a pendulum stroke may be made if you lean over a long way enough so the putter is swinging on a line out beyond your ft, but that calls for a posture that Jones himself neither used nor encouraged. He often advised gamers to stand as tall as feasible, and that advice simply would do away with the opportunity of a pendulum stroke.
But whether or not you trust in a pendulum stroke or now not, what he says at the quit of the object is some thing that each golfer struggling at the greens should keep in mind:
The critical concerns in placing are that the putter need to be confronted nicely whilst it moves the ball, and that, as it moves, it ought to be shifting inside the route of the hollow. If those two necessities are met, it makes no difference within the international whether or not or no longer the membership turned into confronted properly or moved alongside the the projected line in the course of the backswing.Let me rephrase that in a more modern way.
As long as the putter is moving toward the hole and the face of the putter is square to that line AT THE MOMENT OF IMPACT, it doesn't matter whether it did those two things for the entire time you were making the stroke.
In other words, what subjects is if the club is doing what it have to when it hits the ball, now not what it does while it isn't hitting the ball!
If you take into account that when you putt, I suppose you will find putting to be less frustrating. Whether you swing on a straight line or an arc, there may be some point all through your swing that the putterface is pointed on the identical factor you are swinging toward. Find that point by using trial and mistakes if vital, then placed your ball there every time you putt and prevent traumatic approximately your backswing. You'll make loads more putts that manner!
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