Let’s Meet Frank Thomas
Do you have several bottles of wine? Fascinating is term that continually arises when talking with our Frank Thomas. His adventurous story of arriving to the United States and his impact on the game world wide. Frank invented the graphite shaft, along with the Stipmeter to regulate green speed and finally the GHIN handicap system. His new adventure revolves around creating not only the best putter but a system to teach putting to the masses. Sit back and enjoy Frank at his best!
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Putting With a Line on the Ball
Frank
I have read your books and receive your weekly putting tips which are very helpful and for which I thank you. I am enjoying my game a lot more now but I do have a putting question, which is bothering me. I have marked a line on the ball the same way the pros do to help me line up properly.The problem is when I step up to the ball, ready to make my putt, it looks like my putter is correctly aimed at the target but this is in conflict with the line on the ball. What am I doing wrong?
Brian
Vancouver
Brian,
I hope you are getting some good weather in Vancouver, one of my favorite places. This I believe, is the site selected for the joint open forum of the USGA and R&A to discuss, with all interested parties the process for equipment rulemaking. Everybody with an interest in golf and in this process is invited to have their say. Vancouver is a great city with some wonderful golf courses, but the decision to hold such a meeting there at that time of year seems to me to be very peculiar. I hope you will be present at the forum and represent many who are not able to make it.
Now about your lining up question; yours is not an uncommon problem and unfortunately something we have run into with several of our students at the Putting Studio. It is generally very good advice to make sure that your putter is aligned at the target line when you address the ball just before you make your stroke. It is very much more important, however, that the face is pointing at the target line when you strike the ball.
There are quite a few golfers who have very good strokes, and when striking the ball will have the face perfectly orthogonal (at 90 degrees) to the target line. The problem is that when they address the ball the putter face may be slightly off line by a couple of degrees. This is a fairly common trait with many good golfers and it is sometimes better to leave this as is (if it is not too far off) rather than trying to correct it which can cause other problems.
The fact that the face might be aligned slightly differently than the line on the ball – because this is how you set up the putter naturally OR you have lined up the ball incorrectly — is not conducive to making a good putt because it creates doubt just when you are about to make your stroke at the ball. This type of mental conflict is something we need to avoid whenever possible, especially when you are about to make a putt.
If you are a natural “open-at-address” person but get the face correctly aimed at the target at impact OR find it difficult to line up the ball with the target line then I strongly suggest – as we have to all our students – you abandon the practice of marking a line on the ball for aiming purposes.
Some students have a routine of lining up the ball with the line on it because they have seen the pros do this with some success. When we first analyze their putting stroke they go through this ball alignment routine and then make practice putts before putting . This has become part of a drawn out pre-shot routine – it is very good to have a preshot routine – but in many cases adding to it by trying to line up the ball and the club adds potential sources of error.
We need to know what we want to do – distance and direction as if you were throwing a ball –having carefully made this assessment and then go and do it relying on your instincts to do what they do best. This must be a simple, relaxed process without any psychological interference.
Brian, I suggest that you stop marking the ball with a line and trying to align this to a target. It has worked well for some golfers but it does not sound as if it is working for you.
Hope this helps and have faith in your instincts.
Frank
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Would you like greater distance
Get More Distance
When a golf ball is launched from a club, it follows a trajectory dictated by its speed, launch angle and spin rate. While this is true for all clubs, the discussion properly centers around the driver: With most other clubs, we’re concerned about distance control, while with the driver we usually just want to get as much distance as we can. (The three-wood is also a distance club, but when the ball is on the ground we don’t have the same options as when we can place it on a tee.) So the question every golfer wants answered is; ‘How can I get the maximum distance — overall distance, not just carry – out of my tee shots?’To begin with, consider the ball. In the 19 th century, golfers noticed that their solid gutta-percha golf balls went further after they’d been used for a while and acquired some nicks and scrapes. This observation is the reason golf balls have dimples today. Those dimples create a roughened surface, which has significant effects on a ball in flight. Where a dimpled ball will travel 260 yards the smooth ball will only go about 130 yards.First, dimples reduce the “drag” or resistance on the ball when it’s traveling through the air. This is not intuitive because generally, smooth things travel through air and water better than rough things. This would be true even for a golf ball, if it were traveling at speeds less than about 50 mph. But in any normal trajectory off a driver, the ball is traveling considerably faster than 50 mph. before it hits the ground. The reason for this reduced drag is complex, but conceptually it is similar to going through a force barrier. The barrier is broken at a specific speed because the size of the turbulent air tail is reduced in size, and the resistance is cut almost in half.In addition to reducing drag, dimples create a turbulent layer around the ball so that when it spins – and every golf shot hit in the air has backspin – it drags the air over the ball, creating lower air pressure on the top of the ball than on the bottom producing a lift force greater than the weight of the ball. This allows the ball to glide, rather than to take on the trajectory of a bullet, in the same way that an aircraft wing provides a lift force to get and keep the plane airborne.
So now that we know that dimples and spin are key factors in determining distance along with ball speed and launch angle, how can we optimize these factors to get maximum distance?
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- You can’t do anything about the dimples, as these come with the ball you selected, and the shape, number, and size for all balls are very similar.
- Next is ball speed. This is also something you have little control of if you are already swinging as efficiently as you can within your physical abilities. So there are only two things left for us to consider: spin and launch angle.
- Spin and launch angle are somewhat linked, because to get a higher launch angle you need more loft, which increases spin. Is this bad? Well, yes if you are already getting too much spin but not a high enough launch angle. This increased spin will increase the height of the trajectory and also increase the drag on the ball, slowing it down. It will make you feel like you are hitting the ball into the wind. The goal, then, is to find the best compromise of lowest spin with highest launch angle. Unfortunately as one goes up, generally so does the other.
After 400 years of trial-and-error experimentation, along came computer analysis of trajectories using aerodynamic properties of spinning balls to help answer the question. It has now been shown that to get maximum distance out of all the club head speed that most of us can muster – around 90 mph without having to tighten our shoe laces – we need to launch the ball higher than we originally thought. The optimal launch angle for that swing speed is between 13 and 14 degrees. Our three wood will often do this better than the driver, and as a result we sometimes find that we actually hit the ball farther with our 3-wood than with the less-lofted driver, which doesn’t make sense.Unfortunately, because the length of the three wood shaft is less than the driver and its loft is higher, that club does not project the ball with as much speed AND will cause a higher spin rate. How can we take advantage of the driver’s additional length and lower loft to maximize our distance with what should be our longest club?Our goal with the driver should be to increase its loft to launch the ball at 13 to 14 degrees, while also lowering the spin rate to about 3,000 rpm. We can accomplish this with the aid of the latest generation of big titanium drivers. Most all of them are good clubs and have the trampoline effect which lowers the spin rate so the choice of brand name is almost entirely a matter of personal preference.Since the driver is the one club in which we are actually swinging up at the ball at impact, we don’t have to create all of that 13-to-14 degrees of launch angle with the club face. The loft of the club should be about 10.5 or 11 degrees, or possibly more as your swing speed goes down. To help create the optimal spin rate of about 3,000 rpm we should:
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- Choose a ball that has low spin properties off the driver. Titleist NXT or DT Solo, Callaway HX Hot or Big Bertha, Maxfli Red Max or Noodle are some examples of low spin balls.
- Tee the ball a little higher to take advantage of the vertical gear effect by hitting the ball a little above the sweet spot. This gear effect, a vertical cousin of the horizontal effect that causes a draw if you hit the ball towards the toe, allows the club head to twist under the ball, decreasing the spin and also producing a higher launch angle. These improvements in the launch conditions make up for the slightly lower ball-speed that results from imperfect sweet-spot impact.
In other words:
Hit it high and let it fly
See more on www.franklygolf.com
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Are Bigger Drivers Better?
Are the New, Bigger Drivers Better?
If you want to take advantage of technology advances in golf equipment, you should consider updating your “old” driver. The new, larger headed drivers will provide the following benefits over those designed twenty five to thirty years ago:
- The first thing that helps all golfers, is that the heads have increased in size from about 300 cc (the volume measured in cubic centimeters) to as much as 500 cc. There seems to have been a race to see who could make the biggest head.
- Unfortunately bigger is not always better. There are diminishing returns with head size and about 400cc seems to be close to the optimum.
- The reason the bigger hollow heads (300cc or 400cc) are better than the 200 cc model is that more weight can be distributed farther away from the center of gravity, in the shell itself. This increases the MOI (Moment of Inertia), which means that the club head is inclined to twist less if you miss the sweet spot. The loss in ball speed is about six mph if you miss the sweet spot by ½ an inch or more. This is considerably better than with heads 200 cc in size.
- Another advantage one gains from the bigger heads is that most of them are made of titanium and have bigger faces. This allows for a spring like effect. The face actually deforms and recovers during impact. The energy losses in the face are less than the energy losses in the ball and as a result the overall efficiency of the energy transfer to the ball from the club is better. The COR (Coefficient of Restitution) is higher. This means that the ball will leave the face of the club faster and more distance will be the end result.
That’s the good news. You need to know, however, that the actual gains you get on average, will be less than the technology can provide. Impacts that you and I make are generally less than perfect hits on the sweet spot. Therefore, I’m afraid it is back to the range and the old faithful BOB system (Buckets Of Balls)!
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