Forward Press, Shaft Lean and the First Roll

Watch a putted ball in slow motion and it does something that surprises people the first time they see it. It does not roll. It launches slightly into the air, lands, skids across the grass with backspin still on it, and only after several inches does it start rolling forward the way everybody assumes it does from the outset.

That skid phase is where putts go wrong. A skidding ball is sitting on top of the grass being pushed around by every blade it crosses. A rolling ball is engaged with the surface and holding the line it was given. Shortening the skid is one of the more reliable improvements available in putting, and it is entirely a fitting matter.

Delivered Loft, Not Static Loft

Static loft is what the putter has on the bench, typically between two and four degrees. Delivered loft is static loft plus or minus however much the shaft is leaning at the moment of separation.

Lean the shaft forward by four degrees and you have removed four degrees. A three-degree putter in those hands is delivering minus one, which drives the ball down into the grass, makes it hop, and produces a long, messy skid. Lean the shaft back — which happens more often than people admit, particularly on short putts under pressure — and you have added loft, launching the ball too high and again lengthening the skid.

Two players with identical putters can produce skid distances differing by a factor of three. The putter is not the variable. The hands are, and the fix is to choose a static loft that agrees with what the hands do.

The Window We Aim For

On our lane at a stimp of around ten and a half, we want to see launch between roughly eight-tenths of a degree and two degrees, and skid under about twelve inches on a ten-foot putt. That corresponds to a delivered loft in the range of one to three degrees.

Get it right and the ball comes off the face and settles into roll almost immediately. You can see it without instruments once you know what to look for — there is a distinct absence of the little hop that a badly delivered putt makes.

Note that surface speed shifts the target. Slower greens tolerate slightly more launch, because a slower ball spends less energy skidding. On a fast green the tolerance narrows and the same delivery error costs more.

Why Forward Press Is Not the Villain

Forward press has a mixed reputation. Some coaches prescribe it as a trigger; others treat it as a fault to be eliminated. From a fitting perspective it is neither. It is simply an input to the delivered loft calculation.

A player with a pronounced, repeatable forward press does not need to change it. They need a putter with more static loft — five or six degrees rather than three — so that the press subtracts down into the correct window rather than through it. Those putters exist, and they are rare on shop racks because six degrees of loft looks wrong to a buyer who does not know why it is there.

Conversely a player who lets the hands hang back needs a lower-lofted head, sometimes as low as one or two degrees. Also available, also rarely stocked.

What matters is repeatability. A press that varies from two to six degrees stroke to stroke cannot be fitted around, because there is no single static loft that lands the delivery in the window. That is a stroke problem and we say so.

Where Ball Position Comes In

Ball position changes delivered loft even with an unchanged stroke, because the putter head is travelling on an arc in the vertical plane as well as the horizontal one. Play the ball further forward and you catch it later in that arc, with the head moving slightly upward and the shaft more vertical, which adds effective loft. Further back does the reverse.

This is the cheapest adjustment available and the first one we try. Half a ball forward or back can move delivered loft by a degree, which is often enough to bring the launch into range without changing anything about the club.

A Test You Can Do on a Practice Green

• Find a flat section and mark a spot with a tee.
• Roll ten putts of about fifteen feet and watch the first two feet of ball travel closely, ideally crouched behind.
• A visible hop, or a ball that appears to be sliding rather than turning, means the delivery is out of window.
• Move the ball half a ball forward in your stance and repeat. Then half a ball back from your original position and repeat.
• One of the three will look noticeably smoother off the face. That is your ball position, and it costs nothing.

If none of the three looks right, the static loft is probably wrong for you, and that is a bench job rather than a practice-green one.

The Part That Gets Skipped

In almost every putter fitting I have observed elsewhere, loft is either ignored entirely or set to whatever the head came with. It is the last thing anybody adjusts and frequently the first thing that should be. Head shape has been discussed for twenty minutes and the number governing whether the ball rolls has not been mentioned once.

It is bendable on most heads, it is measurable in ten minutes, and the improvement is visible to the naked eye. There is no good reason for it to be the afterthought that it usually is.