Back when golf was fresh and new in America, the greatest putter on
Earth was Walter Travis (1862-1927). Travis immigrated to Long Island
from Australia in the 1880s, and took up golf at the age of 35. He was
so methodical and scientific in his learning that he dominated American
golf for the next three decades and was the first US superstar. His
fellow pros all called him the Old Man, and everyone in America called
him Champion.
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In 1904 Travis traveled to England and defeated the British
at their own game in the British Amateur, using a borrowed Schenectady
putter. His Schenectady putter was so lethal the Brits banned
any center-shafter putter like it for a half a century. This
putter is now enshrined in the USGA's Golf House Museum in Far
Hills, New Jersey.
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Travis wrote the first instructional book on putting, his The Art
of Putting (1904), and was the Editor in Chief of the best golf
magazine of all time, The
American Golfer (1908-1936). He later taught Walter Hagen, Bobby
Jones, and many other pros and amateurs the art of putting. At the
Garden City Golf Club, Long Island, Travis was famous for practicing
putting hours on end, draining putts into holes that were a mere three
inches in diameter. He pioneered many of the fundamentals in putting
technique, and this was his personal mainstay for training his skill.
Bob Labbance, Travis' recent biographer, describes Travis' regular
putting drill:
"He would practice to cups in the Garden City practice green
that were only slightly bigger than the golf ball, so when he took
his ground game to the course, the hole looked like a bushel basket.
He would often drop four balls on the points of the compass, two feet
away from the hole. When he sank them all he would move back a foot
and try again, repeating the procedure until he didn't miss from every
distance up to ten feet."
An Interview with Bob Labbance
GolfClubAtlas.com, author of The
Old Man: The Biography of Walter J. Travis
(Sleeping Bear Press 2000).
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