It took me a long time to understand why I keep making the same mistakes on the green. It’s not the swing—the putt itself is simple enough; even a child could hold a putter. The problem lies before that, in that one second when I stand there and decide where the ball should roll.
For years, I relied on my eyes. Crouching behind the ball, studying the contours of the green, imagining where the water would flow if it were raining. Most of the time, I was even right. Just not often enough.
Then came AimPoint. For anyone who isn’t familiar with it: You stand with your legs apart over the line between the ball and the hole and feel which foot is lower. That’s it, essentially. No eye, no guessing, no contours. Just your own feet, telling you which way the surface slopes.
When I saw this for the first time, I thought: absurd nonsense. A grown adult standing in a field with legs spread apart, holding fingers in the air, supposedly to know more precisely where a golf ball will roll than with his own eyes. It looks like dowsing with a handicap.
I tried it anyway. And what really struck me wasn’t even that the method works—it does, more or less reliably; Keegan Bradley can attest to that, having gone from being the worst putter on the tour to one of the better ones practically overnight after switching to this method. What struck me was the shift itself: I should stop trusting my eyes and trust my feet instead.
That’s no small difference. My eyes always want to tell a story. They see the flag, the bright green behind it, the hope that the putt will roll straight in because I want it so badly right now. My feet don’t tell a story. They just stand there and say: it’s deeper on the left. That’s it. No wishful thinking, no fear, no “it’ll work out this time.”
This is exactly the shift I depict in *MIND OF GOLF*. *THE FINAL PUT* shows the second before the putt: the moment when the mind has long since decided what will happen, even though the shot hasn’t even been taken yet. *AimPoint* is essentially an attempt to replace the feeling that imposes itself on you in that moment with a more reliable witness. Not less feeling. A different feeling. One you can’t just talk yourself into.
To be honest, I don’t putt any better than I used to because of this. Sometimes even worse, because holding up two fingers while staying focused is apparently an art in itself that I haven’t mastered yet. But I trust the line differently. And that’s exactly what the whole series is about, if I’m being honest: not the shot itself. It’s about the moment before that, when you have to decide which voice in your own head you’re actually going to believe.
If you want to learn the method itself—not just the idea behind it—*AimPoint in Golf: The Putting Method Simply Explained* walks you through, step by step, how to apply it in practice. And for those who want to see what that one moment before the final putt feels like—not just described, but shown—that’s what *THE FINAL PUT* is for.
— Ralf List
