Perils Of Putting

Joe Pro has a six-foot putt on the final hole to win the Pizza Time Soy Extender Classic. He's nervous, but for the last four days he has regularly made crucial putts just like this one. He sees the line clearly, and the hole looks bigger than its actual 4�-inch diameter. His last thought before impact is, Smooth and solid.

He misses.

Should Joe consider himself:

a. A spineless choker?
b. Cursed forever with bad luck?
c. Just an average Joe Pro?

The correct answer is c, but not simply so Joe can retain the will to live. According to a new study, PGA Tour players make only 54.8% of their six-foot putts. That's all.

In other words, from a body length away the best players in the world have about the same chance of getting the ball in the hole as a tossed coin has of coming up heads.

If you're a golfer, you are probably surprised. Don't pros routinely drain 10-and 15-foot putts and don't they almost never miss from shorter distances? Don't golf's masters tell you that a six-footer is virtually automatic for a good player?

Then again, as a golfer, you are a member of a subculture plagued with unrealistic expectations, particularly about putting. That's one reason for the PGA Tour's putting study, which was designed to provide golfers with a true standard against which to measure themselves. The study was underwritten by SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, but the magazine had no involvement in the way the study was organized or in the gathering of the data. At each of 15 tournaments during the latter half of 1988, a Tour field staff chose one green with a smooth and relatively flat surface on each course. Then, for the four days of competition, every putt was measured (using the triangulation method to estimate the distance, to the nearest foot, from ball to hole) and recorded. The statisticians also compiled figures for the number of birdie putts made and missed, par putts made and missed, and the total number of putts taken.

Altogether they measured 11.060 putts. For statistical purposes. 2,593 tap-ins of a foot and a half or less were eliminated from the study. And the number of putts from distances longer than 25 feet was too small to provide accurate conclusions. But for distances from two to 25 feet, at least 118 putts were hit at each one-foot interval, giving the statisticians sufficient data to work with. According to the study, the pros made:

?four out of five putts (or 83.1%) from three feet.