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Puttering around 2-26-05
News & Record
Q: Why did you focus on putting exclusively?
A: As soon as you start studying golf instruction, you find out that it's 99 percent full-swing. And the odd thing is that 99 percent of full-swing instructors are not very well versed in the skills of putting. They just sort of default into some sort of basic attitude that it's simple and anybody can do it. That's obviously not true. So, not only is putting separate, but it's a small body of knowledge. It's collectible.
The instincts of a lawyer are to identify a distinct field of knowledge and to master it with efficient learning skills. That's basically what I did. I pretty soon realized that there wasn't a whole lot of point in me trying to be one of the other 26,000 swing teachers in the United States. Basically, the competition in putting instruction is not very great, which is ludicrous. It's 40 percent of the game. Q: Looking at what you've studied in your quest for knowledge about putting, it includes everything from physics to kinesiology to yoga and meditation. How do you take this vast amount of knowledge and boil it down for, say, a junior golfer learning how to putt?
A: For technique purposes, I keep it boiled down to four fundamental things that everybody has to do when they putt well. In chronological order of what actually happens, it's: 1. Pick your target; 2. Aim at the target; 3. Stroke the ball straight at the target; 4. With good distance control. Basically, everything that I've learned about the human body and the brain is poured into those four things so that I teach practical, simple tips. Some of them are revolutionary and novel, but they're not different from what excellent golfers always actually do.
Q: Would any of your teaching be considered counter-intuitive?
A: The eyes are not particularly helpful. There are two systems for relating to space, the "what" system and the "where" system. The "what" system involves identification of objects, determining threats and opportunities. None of that is relevant in golf. All golf balls look the same, all golf holes look the same. None of the "what" system matters, but it's almost entirely what people think of when thinking of vision. The "where" system is very dumbed-down, connect-the-dots. In putting when your primary emphasis is on the "where system," it's more about body postures and the direction that you point your eyeball out of your face than it is what is on the other end of your line of vision. It's not about what you're looking at and how you're looking at it. I can close my eyes, look down at a golf ball, turn my head to what I think corresponds to a distance 23 feet away and then turn back and I will have the touch I need. It has nothing whatsoever to do with looking at the target.
Q: So if I were to put you on a green blindfolded, tell you that you were standing 50 feet from the hole, you could putt just as well as if you had your eyes open?
A: I do it all the time. One of the things I used to do when I was working at a practice facility in Texas, I would practice 50-footers with my eyes closed. I'd sink them just as well as I would otherwise.
Q: Tell me how you got a chance to work with Shaun Micheel, the 2003 PGA champ?
A: He saw my Web site and called me. We worked for a day in May 2003, at the Wachovia tournament in Charlotte. Then, he won the PGA championship a few months later, in July. He went from 160th on the tour in putting stats in May to 16th in the field at the PGA championship. He said, "Everyone remembers my 7-iron, but my putting won me the championship."
Q: Friends that you've known through the years, people that know you outside of golf, do they think of you as obsessive when it comes to putting? I mean, you went so far as to take greenskeeping jobs to better understand the putting surface. There's no stone left unturned.
A: Well, I enjoy turning the stones over. I enjoy massive empirical research, in the vein of Aristotle as opposed to Plato.
Q: How do you think your neuroscience approach to putting will be received over in Europe at the conference?
A: Oh, they eat it up in Germany. I'm vastly more famous in Europe.
Q: Why more there than here?
A: Oh, the American system is celebrity-based. If you're not a celebrity in a magazine or on the television, people don't tend to listen to you.
Q: That leads to my next question. Given that you don't have a conventional golfing background -- didn't play in college, not a club pro, that sort of thing -- has it made things difficult for you?
A: Yeah, sure. But I'm sufficiently talented to get around it. It usually takes a lot of hand-holding on my part with the traditional PGA of America teacher before they understand what it is I'm teaching. They have too many preconceptions about what they ought to be hearing.
Q: How does your wife deal with your obsession with putting?
A: She would rather have less clutter. But she knows that I'm actually getting somewhere with it, so she doesn't mind.
-- Jim Young
Geoff Mangum
Putting instructor
Age: 52
Family: Wife, Anne; stepdaughters, Kristian Allen and Susan Allen.
Background: The Leaksville native is a former lawyer who has become a self-made putting guru since taking up golf in 1990. Since then, Mangum has studied thousands of resources and references on putting and has developed an approach to the skill that relies heavily on neuroscience. He lives in Greensboro, where he gives putting clinics at area courses and does volunteer putting instruction for area high schools, colleges and teaching pros.
Mangum, who helped PGA professional Shaun Micheel with his putting just a few months before Micheel won the PGA Championship, has been asked to give a lecture this fall at the PGA of Europe's 2005 Teaching and Coaching Conference. The title of his talk: "Welcome to the 21st Century: Brain-based putting and the retooling of golf instruction."
Mangum also runs a Web site, www.puttingzone.com, which gets
about 75,000 visits a month. |
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