Putting: Begin at the End....

Hallo. I'm TAFL, one of the guests invited to contribute here on Heavydisc. My primary qualification? I'm old...and I've been playing this silly game for a long time. I've done lots of things wrong and lots of things right and have seen every manner of weirdness happen in play. The hope is that I can offer up discussion on the game that somebody finds useful.

One of the things that I've done well over the years involves the short game, approaches and putts. I figure I'll start by discussing putting. Much of what I'll talk about can be applied to any style of putting you wish--push putting, spin putting, chicken wing, turbo, whatever. I'll also cover what I do, of course, which may be useful for players who have a similar approach.

And, so...we'll begin at the end.

I think that with any approach to putting, what should drive decisions on what technique to use should come down to choices made about what we want from our putts. A look at the end of the disc's flight, then, and what objectives we have for that, drive decisions we make about the beginning of the flight.

When we throw a putt, at the end of it's flight, we want it to finish in the basket (assuming for this discussion that we're shooting at chained baskets). That's the obvious objective. There's more to consider, however, as we may actually miss the target and we may have preferences about how we hit the target, when we do hit it.

I know there are folks who never bother thinking about misses. Those people are extreme optimists and live in a world completely unrecognizable by the rest of us. The rest of us live in a world where things can go wrong and we make allowances for them. We have to consider what we want the disc to do when me miss.

The obvious response, I reckon, is that we want the disc to end up as close to the basket as possible--I know that's what I want, that's my objective. The important question is how to achieve that? In ball golf, one can lob a ball onto the green at the hole and put a lot of backspin on it to stop it quickly after landing, so it stays around the hole if it doesn't go in. We can't do that. I've also considered tiny parachutes that deploy just past the chains and bring the disc to a quick halt, then ruled those out as impractical and illegal.

So, the way I want to achieve my objective of a lie as near the basket as possible after a miss is by having the disc descending to the basket on the putt. I want the flight to have peaked and the disc coming down. If it's at the apex of its flight when it sails by the chains, there's no minimizing the distance of the come back. I want that sucker headed for dirt by the time it gets near the target.

And when it hits dirt, I want to make it unlikely that the disc skips long distances or pops up and rolls off into the underbrush. I want that sucker to flop on the ground like a dead fish.

That's something to consider when developing an approach to putting.

Now, what if it hits the target? (Yay!) Is there anything I need to consider then?

Certainly. The disc can blow through the chains if it comes in too fast, or if it flips vertical and squeezes on through. It can get the leading edge turned up and hang up long enough for a wind gust to blow it out. There are bad things that can happen and I want to minimize those. So how do I do it?

Well, first, I want the disc to be nose down when it hits chains. Why? I want that leading edge to hit and begin sliding down into the basket immediately.

Next, I want the disc to be fairly level when hitting those chains. I want to minimize the chance that it will flip up and slide through the vertical space between chains.

I also want the disc to grip the metal and slow down as it enters. So, I want a really grippy composition.

And I want it to absorb the blow of the chains and without returning all of that energy in springing back, so I want it floppy, in large degree.

I also want it to enter the chains low, in the bottom half. I want that sucker down in the basket as quickly as possible, where it's less likely to blow out or get thrown out by chain action. And I want it to flop there to decrease the chances of it sliding around and out the back.

Can you see now how the expectations of what happens at the end of the flight influences what happens at the beginning of it? I have to figure out ways to achieve the objectives I have for the disc when it hits something--the ground or the target.