The Hole Thing

In many sports, it’s not the feat of strength or agility that the players struggle with the most. It’s those elements that require finesse and focus. The free throw while twenty-thousand opposing fans scream at the top of their lungs, the perfectly placed drop shot, or, as is most pertinent to today’s product, the putt.

How do the pros learn to putt so well?

Well, when Hal Doherty won The Baylin Cup in 1976, donning the traditional golden fedora, an interviewer asked him point blank: how had he managed to sink a twenty-footer on the final hole to ensure his victory? “It’s all in the shoulders,” he said, and sure enough it was; they discovered the bionic mechanisms in his shoulders just five years later, put there by a Soviet scientist Doherty’s camp had managed to extract from behind the Iron Curtain and keep in their exclusive employ. As such, all his victories were evacuated from the record books, and they certainly would’ve seized the fedora as well, had he not been wearing it when he disappeared during a ghost tour of the Seattle Underground. Some say he lives down there even still.

At golf courses throughout the world, you’ll hear all sorts of putting advice. Cain Bradley, after winning at Yonder Meadows in '86, said he imagined the ball was metal and that the hole contained a powerful magnet. Tim Jepson, at Plowman Hills in 1994, explained that an incident with a contact lens as a child left him with a scar on his cornea that appears to him like a line in his vision; all he must do is angle his head so that the line leads from the ball to the flag and then hit it along that line. Tanner Baggs, on the other hand, offered no advice after a victory at Uncular Greens in 2003 but did confess that he never developed object permanence, and so each successful putt filled him with terror as his dear ball essentially “ceased to exist.”

Really, though they may have their own unique outlooks on how to achieve the perfect putt, all would agree: you gotta practice.

And that’s just what you can do with this mat: roll it out and practice your putting right in the comfort of your own home, rain or shine, day or night.

Also, these ones have college logos on them.

So get one and get putting!