By Devin Powell
A Yale physicist with a lifelong passion for golf has figured out a better way to putt on a slope. Thanks to the geometry of the game, he says, there’s a magic spot just uphill of a hole. The trick is to line up the putt not only from where the ball is actually lying, but also from several equidistant points nearby. Do that and the sweet spot will reveal itself.
There are countless mental tricks golfers use to sink putts on a tilted green.
“Many golfers use a mental image of pouring a bucket out on the green and visualize where the water would flow,” says Mark Broadie, a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University who developed a new statistic for measuring putting performance recently adopted by the PGA Tour.