Perspective from the 19^th Hole is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

An unorthodox putting technique called aim-point is taking over the sport.  Not everyone is happy about it.

Including those, like me, who worry about slow play in professional golf because aim-point aggravates the slowness.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Andrew Beaton, tried to explain aim-point.

“When the best golfers in the world line up a putt these days,” Beaton wrote, “many of them look completely deranged. 

“Their process for reading greens everywhere from Augusta National to St. Andrews involves standing over the line of the putt, closing one eye and sticking a couple fingers in the air as if they’re trying to hail a cab to the clubhouse.  

“Never in the centuries since a bunch of Scots started malleting balls toward a cup had anyone studied greens quite like this before.”

However, Beaton writes that aim-point has become as popular as it is polarizing.  

“One PGA Tour veteran, 2009 U.S. Open champion Lucas Glover, recently inflamed the controversy when he called for aim-point to be banned and cited it as a factor in golf’s pace-of-play debate.  Others have criticized it for simply looking silly — or worse, violating the game’s unwritten rules when players stomp around too close to the hole.”

Even so, a growing number of top pros swear by it.  They argue it makes the maddening art of reading a green more scientific and that the backlash against it is just uninformed.  

One is Collin Morikawa.

“Aim-point has 1,000 per cent helped me,” he says.  “I don’t think people understand how aim-point works to really say this is right or wrong.”

Beaton goes on to explain the technique this way: 

“First, you straddle the putt’s line at the point of the biggest break.  Then you use your footing to discern the amount of tilt, at which point you assign a number — usually one, two or three — to the slope’s severity.  

“Next, standing behind the ball with one eye closed and a pointer finger aimed at the center of the hole, you raise the number of fingers that corresponds to that slope.  And that’s your line.  So, if you estimate the slope at 2 per cent from right to left, you aim at the point outside your middle finger.  Voilà. 

‘There is nothing textbook about it to players who have been taught to bend over and read a green with their eyes.  Aim-point is feeling instead of seeing.”

And that’s the exact idea an unemployed golf nut with no professional experience in the game had when he first came up with aim-point. 

More from Beaton:

“’Your body is very, very good at balancing itself,’ says aim-point’s pioneer, 57-year-old Mark Sweeney.  ‘And your eyes are very easy to trick with optical illusions.’

“The idea dates back to 2003, when Sweeney was at home watching the final round of Ben Curtis’s improbable victory at the British Open.  On that afternoon, he kept seeing something repeat itself:  Players were misreading the same putt in the same direction on the 18th green.

“I don’t understand why this is so difficult,’ he thought.  

“With all the technology flooding into the game, he believed there had to be a better way to read greens. 

“Sweeney had never played the game competitively, but he did have a background in finance and software development.  So, he wrote 100,000 lines of code for a program that would laser scan greens and calculate the optimal path and speed for every putt.  This was long enough ago that the first platform he made for it was for a PalmPilot.  

“But because golfers can’t lug laboratory equipment with them to model every green, it wasn’t practical on the course.  Its first widespread use was actually on television broadcasts, and Sweeney was part of a Golf Channel team that won a Sports Emmy for the tech in 2008. 

“As Sweeney heard feedback from the industry and parlayed his expertise into a new career as a putting guru, golfers wanted something they could actually use.  First, he came up with a system of charts that told players where to aim.  That was still cumbersome and complicated.  It was only when he was teaching some 7-year-olds that he came up with the version of aim-point that’s widely used today. 

“Sweeney was giving a lesson to a bunch of kids in 2013 and wanted a basic way of teaching them to feel the high side of the hole, so he had them straddle their line like an invisible seesaw.  What he quickly discovered was that the slope corresponds to the number of fingers you hold up because it even accounts for distance.  On a longer putt, those fingers block more of the green and tell you to aim farther from the cup, the same way golfers need to calculate for more break.

“It isn’t an exact science.  It can take time for players to learn how to read slope with their own balance, though Sweeney says most people get within a half percentage point quickly.  Putts can also break more than once, and there are adjustments players need to learn to make, such as how far they hold out their arm with their fingers raised, based on the speed of the green.  Yet he found it was more accurate than simply eyeballing it and guessing. 

“’It happens to match the physics of a golf ball rolling on a green,’ Sweeney says.  ‘For whatever crazy reason.’” 

Some pro golfers were crazy enough to try it.  Brian Gay, a five-time winner on the PGA Tour, was the first in early 2014, and he says it came naturally to him as someone who always used his feet to feel a green’s slope.  But that doesn’t mean everyone accepted it.  

“Other golfers,” Beaton wrote, “looked at him as though he was using an umbrella for a putter.  ‘Most guys were like, ‘What is he doing?’

“Yet, others such as Adam Scott soon followed.  Since then, it’s taken off so much that instructors all across the globe teach the technique.  Viktor Hovland, Dustin Johnson and Justin Rose have all used it.  Nowadays, it isn’t unusual to see an entire group of players and their caddies in the middle of greens, aiming and pointing.” 

The opposite of the benefits of aim-point revolve around the fact that it takes far longer than old-school green reading and slows down the game for fans.

Even beyond pace of play, others chafe at how some players pace around too close to the hole to feel the break. 

So, make your own decision, as I have.  I don’t use it – not smart enough – and I don’t like its use on pro golf tours.

The bottom-line for me:  Using aim-point already slows down what has come to be a slow game anyway.  So, ban it and return to reading greens like they deserve to be ready, which means bending down to see the line and then putting.