Point Counterpoint
Should the belly putter be outlawed? Yes
B
ehold the belly putter: ruining the game, one indented abdomen at a time.
These things need to
be banned, as offensive as orange golf balls or Johnny Miller’s 1973 plaid pants. Problem is, the Rules of Golf offer no help. You can get out your
magnifying glass and study the rules, futilely searching for a reason to declare the belly putter illegal. You can parse the verbiage on the rules for golf clubs—words like adjustability, length, volume, alignment—hunt- ing for the passage that will banish these atrocities forever. You won’t find anything
to help your case. The Rules of Golf, like a speakeasy during Prohibition, provide a safe haven for evildoers. In the absence of firm
legal ground, let’s turn to the philosopher Louis Arm- strong, who never used a belly trumpet. If somebody asks you what’s so wrong with the belly putter, you channel Satchmo’s defini- tion of jazz: If you’ve gotta ask, you’ll
never know. Some things just are. When the Rules of
Golf tell you the object of the game is “playing a ball with a club from the teeing
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NCGA.ORG / WINTER 2012
ground into the hole by a stroke or successive strokes in accordance with the Rules”, the only missing codicil is: “And that means no contraptions. Dig?” It’s time the Rule
Makers added another key phrase, too: “You golf your ball with your hands, not your beer gut.” The proliferation of the
belly putter threatens to obliterate golf ’s purity, not to mention its aesthetic. The sight of Champions Tour golfers using belly put- ters in the last two decades to steady gin-frazzled nerves is bad enough; the sight of the otherwise lik- able Keegan Bradley, 25 years young and full of vin- egar, using his sternum to guide his putts en route to a PGA Championship calls for a full-scale intervention by the powers that be. Put simply, the belly
putter detracts from the essence of the game, that brutally difficult moment in time when your eyes, brain and hands must mesh to create perfect contact. Add- ing your stomach to that equation, a plane on which to rest the putter to steady nerves and create a fault- free swing plane, provides a crutch. It’s like giving a sprinter a third leg to generate power, a basketball player a trampoline from which to dunk, a baseball
player steroids with which to smash home runs. Speaking of which, has
Mark McGwire come out in favor of belly putters? Let’s stay with the
baseball analogy. If the belly putter were a baseball rule, it’d be the designated hitter. In fact, if we allow players to anchor putters to their body, why stop there? Why not take a page from the American League’s awful rule book and institute the “Designated Putter”? Might as well. You’re
already allowing putters to lean on an enhancement. Let’s just allow the player to get his ball to the put- ting green, then motion to a player in his golf cart to come trotting on—an ace putter, a dead-eye marks- man who will sink the knee-knocker, then trot back to the golf cart to await his next assignment. Golf would have its own Frank Thomas or Edgar Martinez figure, a well-compensated DP. And if these belly put-
ter users are so hell-bent on using the full body to anchor the golf club, why stop at the belly? If we are to open this Pandora’s Golf Bag, let’s create a “Full Body Putter,” in which the player removes his putter from his bag, then dons a full Velcro body suit. The putter grip would be made of Velcro as well so that the
putter would never have any chance of leaving the body at any time. Attach it to your neck, your chin— heck, your rear end, if that works—and let the magic of a rules-free putting green work to your advantage. Sound insane? Of course it does, just like the notion of letting players, at the game’s most critically nervous juncture, steady their nerves by anchoring their putters against the broad plane of their bellies. Then again, crafting this argument has got me thinking. If the belly putter is OK, and if total lawless- ness reigns on the putting green, surely there’s room for my new invention—the “Remote Control Putter,” using the ever-familiar TV remote to guide your put- ter from afar. You’d never have to leave your golf cart! Genius, I say. Coming soon to a 3 a.m. Golf Channel infomercial near you.
Brian Murphy hosts the KNBR morning show “Murph and Mack” and was the San Francisco Chronicle’s golf writer from 2001-2004.
No S
ince long-shafted putters have been around for
decades—helping older golfers with bad backs and yippy hands and are even gaining currency among young guns on the PGA Tour—outlawing them makes about as much sense as Prohibition. And as the recent Ken Burns series illustrates, that smooth move did not exactly lead
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