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There are currently seven players in their 20s with multiple PGA Tour victories to their credit. Amazingly, over the past three full seasons of play on the U.S. circuit, exactly one of them has finished the season ranked in the top 60 in putting average more than once.
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That would be 26-year-old Aussie Aaron Baddeley, a two-time winner and acknowledged master with the short stick who has annually ranked in the top 15 in putting from 2005-07. Of the aforementioned seven, he's the lone player upon which you'd bet your lunch money if he were standing over a meaningful six-footer. Otherwise, starvation would be a distinct possibility.
In addition to Garcia (six wins) and Baddeley (two), the other U-30s with multiple PGA Tour wins are Adam Scott (five), J.B. Holmes, D.J. Trahan, Sean O'Hair and Howell. Of the last four listed, each has exactly two victories, but none has ever finished in the top 100 in putting average for a season, a seemingly inexplicable figure.
Emphasis on seemingly.
While it's a bit unfair to paint everybody with the same broad brush, technobabies born in the video-camera age are more in tune with swing technique than the subtleties of feel. Thus, the majority of the younger set lacks a certain finesse, veterans believe.
"Gee, you think?" Steven Ames deadpanned.
Tiger Woods is a relative graybeard at 32, but in the short calendar span between himself and the players closer to the age of Howell, 28, plenty has changed.
"I think out here, Charles and myself and the young guys, we grew up in an era of swing instructors, and that was always impressed onto us that you need to have real solid technique," said Trevor Immelman, the 2006 Rookie of the Year and a one-time winner in the States. "Probably as a whole, all of us spent too much time on our swings and not too much time around the short-game area. I think that's just the way technology with golf went."
Woods, less than a decade older, was far less obsessed with swing technique and poured over his putting stroke instead. So as young players try to close the gap between Woods and world No. 2 Phil Mickelson, the biggest difference is discernible on the greens. Clearly, Woods and Mickelson putt as well or better than anyone. Mickelson famously had a putting green in his backyard as a boy.
"I didn't like to hit balls," Woods said of his well-spent youth. "I'd much rather chip and putt. That was always so much more fun for me because I like to be creative. I don't mind putting out there for hours on end. I don't like to hit golf balls. That, to me, is boring."
Winning, obviously, isn't. Like Immelman, Howell freely admits that he is trying to make up for lost time, if not misplaced priorities.
"For me, personally, it's because I grew up in the generation of video cameras and I grew up in the generation of swing thoughts and swing positions and mechanics," Howell said. "And quite frankly, when you're chasing perfection in a golf swing, you know, that's a lifetime of work. It doesn't leave much time for something else.
"So in my case, I simply didn't spend enough time on it. It had nothing to do with the fact that I wasn't at the golf course for eight hours a day. It's just that I wasn't spending as much time on it as I should have. So over the past few years, I've taken a real hard look at how much time I allocate to each part of my game to keep it balanced."
The balance of power, age-wise, is out of whack. The seven U-30 players with multiple PGA Tour wins have combined for 116 appearances in major championships and amassed a scant 18 top 10 finishes, with Garcia accounting for 13 of them. So as far as the Masters goes, the implication is clear -- place your bold bets on the old vets.
While unsurpassed worldwide depth has made it tougher for everybody to win, the U-30 drought in the majors is vexing. Last summer, when Geoff Ogilvy and Ben Curtis both turned 30 before the U.S. Open, marked the beginning of the second significant gap since 1954 in which there were no 20-something players with a major to their credit. The other came in 1990-91.
Whether a player can improve as a putter with age is open to question. Outside of Vijay Singh, a mediocre putter who breathed new life into his game earlier this decade, examples of players who significantly rehabbed their short-stick woes are rare.
Scott, the supremely talented Aussie, has improved in each of the past 3½ years, rising from a dismal 131st in 2005 to 18th entering play this month. He might be the most polite player on tour, but the 27-year-old bristles when it's suggested that he's a below-average putter.
"I don't think it's necessarily a weakness, but it's not my strength," Scott said. "I didn't get to where I am by having a bad short game, really, is what I'm trying to say.
"I definitely don't think we give it the short shrift, the short game," he said of his generation. "We all know that's how you make the score and how you win tournaments. Everyone hits it pretty good; all the young guys hit it good. And especially the way the courses have been set up the last couple of years, the short game is even more important."
That said, Scott admitted that he's recently committed to investing 45 minutes per day on the practice greens, whether he's in the mood to putt or not. That's probably a good idea, since the image of him missing a gimmie two-footer while contending on the back nine at Doral three weeks ago will be hard for some to shake.
Elsewhere, curious red flares are being fired overhead. Over the past few months, Garcia and Immelman have switched back and forth between conventional and belly putters, while experimenting with oversized grips in the process. Holmes' two victories came via the Claw putting grip and, two years later, a belly putter. In three years on tour, Trahan has never finished better than 102nd in putting. That sounds like paradise for O'Hair, whose best performance on the greens came last year, when he staggered in at No. 121. Which, in turn, would represent marked improvement for Howell, whose best finish in the past three full seasons was 149th.
Can short-game shortcomings be overcome? Can a bad piano player improve? To a point, perhaps, but the rest is most likely inherent. And thus, the deficiencies could be incurable.
"I think that people are given a certain amount of talent for feel," Woods said.
Young or old, there's a harsh concept that's hard to come to grips with.
