What Lies in Eight Feet

How professional taste-testers, Marlon Brando, and an orange cat can help us make more putts.

I’ve been doing the same putting drill since I was thirteen or fourteen. I have a plastic bag with ten tees, numbered 1-10. I’ll shake up the bag, pull five tees at random, and mark five three-footers in a circle around a hole. In the spaces between the three-footers, I’ll mark three five-footers and two eight-footers with the rest of the tees. The drill is simple: make ten in a row. Find tee #1, make the putt, then make #2, then #3, and so on. If you miss, keep going, past #10 and back to #1, finishing on whatever tee you missed last.

The drill faces two points of contention with the general golf-practice intelligentsia. First, it’s kind of block practice. You’re hitting different putts from new angles all the way around, in a random order, but they’ll say it’s the same hole, and you get used to the breaks. And second, if you listen to the stats people, PGA Tour make rates suggest the odds of holing all ten putts consecutively is about 9%. It’s an unrealistic expectation to make all ten.

My predominant takeaway from too good a liberal arts education is that beliefs should be formed on the basis of evidence. Here’s what I’ve got. First, I do complete the drill: it usually takes me somewhere in the range of two laps, maybe three or four on an off day. And second, I putt better when I do the drill than when I do something else. That’s what I know, and it’s hard to argue with either.

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My favorite piece of writing, bar none, is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It’s a tough book to excerpt, with all the context and cross-reference and four-dimensional chess, but there’s a scene I’ve been thinking about recently, where James Incandenza’s father gives him an alcohol-soaked lecture in the garage, blaming society’s ills on Marlon Brando. He’s “the new archetypal tough-guy rebel and slob type, leaning back on his chair’s legs … showing no artful respect or care.” Not that Brando is clumsy, himself — but the moviegoer doesn’t “intuit the gentle and cunning economy behind this man’s quote harsh sloppy unstudied approach to objects. The way he’d oh so carefully practiced a chair’s back-leg tilt over and over.” The viewer “never sees that Marlon Brando felt himself as a body so keenly that he’d no need for manner.”

I read Infinite Jest during the pandemic. I had taken a year off school, and I was living alone, where I am now, in a small town in South Georgia. I’d come off a bad freshman season, and I was determined not to repeat my mistakes when I got back to school. If I couldn’t be with my friends now, I might as well come back a better man.

There’s a well-defined pipeline for isolated young men seeking some lone-wolf-type excellence. I listened to the Huberman podcast, looking for a biochemical edge, taking supplements and counting calories, wearing a Whoop[1], tracking a bunch of things that simply are not healthy to track. For the rest, there’s Stoic philosophy, the development of “virtue” and pursuit of the “eudaemon,” the highest human ideal. At some point, it turns from information into a School: finishing workouts before dawn, taking only cold showers, doing hard things for their own sake. Distrusting feelings, favoring unambiguous facts and higher laws, seeking some systematic, rule-based transcendence.

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Here’s my argument: there is no reason to miss a putt inside ten feet.

If you’ve heard the word ShotLink before, you know the stats: PGA Tour players make 50% of their eight-footers. This means they’re missing 50% of them as well. Contrary to popular belief, I really like numbers. A mountain of data tells us that half our eight-footers are going to miss, and I’d be silly to try to claim otherwise.

Instead, consider just one of those eight-foot putts. Let’s say an uphill left-to-righter on the fourth hole of the first round of some event. The greens are bentgrass. It’s a late tee time, around 2pm, and there’s a spike mark that our Tour pro taps down with his putter. Now tell me: is there any reason that this pro is going to miss this putt?

Plenty of things could happen. He could misread it or make a poor stroke or fail to fix a ball-mark in his line. But, if he fixes the green and makes a good read and a good stroke, starts the ball on line with good pace, it’ll go in. There’s nothing about this putt — the green, the cup, the environment — that’s determined that the ball will stay above ground. This is what I mean by having no reason to miss it: the difference between a miss and a make is up to the golfer. It’s entirely within his control. If he does a good job, the putt will fall. Same goes for the next eight-footer. And the next, and the next….

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Nowadays, I’ll listen to something when I practice. I used to practice without it, or with some specific music, carefully chosen to have some effect or something. But now I’ll throw on a playlist or a podcast. It keeps me loose, and I stay focused longer. Last week, I switched it up: I found an audiobook, Malcom Gladwell’s Blink, about what happens in those split-second intuitive judgements that tend to be surprisingly accurate.

There’s an anecdote that stood out to me about professional taste testers. These people can taste not only which factory a product came from but which ingredients that factory repurposed in this batch. They can rate an Oreo on ninety factors with fifteen-point scales.[2] They’re highly trained professionals.

If you get them to rank a panel of jellies, they’ll use their expertise to score each sample, and they’ll agree on a hierarchy: this jelly is better than that one. A study compared their expertise to a panel of college students with no tasting experience. Interestingly, the students’ rankings were highly correlated with the experts’. The students could interpret quality. But then, the study asked the students to first score the jellies in a few categories: sweetness, acidity, texture, etc., before ranking them. Suddenly, the students’ rankings fell from highly correlated to random chance. They lost their perception of quality.

It might seem that professional tasters start with objective scores and make quality assessments from these. This is not the case. They’ve trained to match felt sensations — taste, aroma, texture — with a vocabulary that describes these sensations. Importantly: their perception of taste is the same as ours. They’re just highly refined at explaining these sensations. It’s not that they taste more skillfully than we do, or that they use higher quality information — they merely have “a much better understanding of what goes on behind the locked door of their unconscious.”

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There’s a cat at Sea Island, named Miller. He’s orange. He’ll hang out around the putting green — you can see him in the cover photo. When he was younger, he’d run onto the green and swat putts. But now he mostly hangs out near the carts. Occasionally, he’ll walk over to the green and brush up against you, the way cats do.

He’s a frequent visitor when I’m doing my Ten Tee Drill, and he’s some sort of reminder. He doesn’t stretch himself much. He knows his mere nature is sufficient. Similarly, mine is to make eight-footers. Sure, there isn’t much variety in my drill — it’s block practice. But I get a bunch of reps done from a bunch of angles, and I see the ball go in a lot. I’m reminded that there’s nothing keeping an eight-footer out of the hole, and that making them is nothing more than my nature.

As for Brando, what’s practiced isn’t some mechanical assessment of chairs and bodies, some understanding built up from principles. It’s a subconscious, sensory understanding. It’s purely internal. Just the same as the taste testers: its refinement is non-technical. Understanding the black box doesn’t require prying open the lid. Refine and trust. If an eight-footer is a coin-flip, if Schrödinger's Cat is alive or dead, you don’t need to look inside. Just keep him happy and fed.

Wallace’s sports-writing is confined to tennis — in that chapter, the father calls golf “billiards on a big table … a bodiless game of spasmodic flailing and flying sod.” But his thoughts on tennis apply just so to golf. The ball is “susceptible to whim — used well or poorly. It will reflect your own character. Characterless itself. Pure potential.” As it lies, eight feet from the hole.

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[1] A device I still wear and love, but with which my relationship has changed dramatically.

[2] Apparently, only eleven of these factors are essential to the Oreo, itself.