1 simple fix that changed my range control

I remember the first time I learned about setting a metronome.

It was the fall of 2021, and my golf game was still in its infancy. I was getting a little better, but my energy was focused on the big problems like the wayward drive and the ubiquitous audience and shanks. Even so, my ears hurt when I found myself on the shores of a course featuring Danielle Kang.

Kang, owner of a beautiful mallet putter and one of the strongest strokes I’ve ever seen, was telling me about his lifelong relationship with the metronome – and how the tool helped him develop a simple sense of consistency during the stroke. The tool, he said at the time, wasn’t meant to help with stroke mechanics, just its timing, to help him make sure he wasn’t speeding up or slowing down the stroke, two easy killers of consistency around the greens. .

For those who don’t know, a metronome is a device that produces a steady beat — or number of taps — per minute. The device is mostly used by musicians to keep time, but it offers many advantages in the world of golf, where players rely on its benefits to maintain their own sense of tempo.

Fast forward, now, to the summer of 2024, with your trusty editor game in a time of rarefied energy. After a few more years of fits and starts, my swing was completely perfect, changing my pursuit of competition in another direction. Suddenly I found the fairways with ease, wore down the center of the greens with my irons, and often found myself in a position to make many easy pars. I was at the point in my golf game that I had always dreamed of achieving – well, except for one thing: I had forgotten to putt.

The issue, as I recall it now, was troubling. One round, I left somewhere around 10 10-footers short of the hole. At one point, I hit so many putts that I briefly wondered if I was having a health episode.

One day I lucked into the Old Course, and my swing left me. I was struggling to keep my game right during the round that I desperately wanted to go well. Then, finally, disaster struck on the 13th green – but it had nothing to do with driving the wrong way. I put five from about 100 meters away and decided it was enough. It was time to fix my placement problems once and for all, and I was going to start with Kang’s old trick: the metronome.

I started practicing back home on Long Island a few weeks later with headphones in both ears and music playing. Following Kang’s advice, I opened the metronome app, and started practicing the stroke.

Soon, I noticed a big problem: my tempo changed with every distance. On long putts, I would take forever to get the putterhead back, then slam it into the ball with a powerful pull. For short putts, I would try a slightly variable backstroke that forces an aggressive follow-through (which sends the ball over the hole) or a defensive decel (hello: short miss!).

I stopped looking at the putterhead and instead focused on the sound in my ears. With each putt, I tried to make sure that the backstroke stopped in one stroke, and then followed through with the next one. Then, as I went for the long putts, I tried to focus on keeping that same tempo back and forth, just with the long backstroke.

Within an hour, my distance control problems had improved dramatically. Admittedly the limit of improvement was wireless – now I can look on target and hit the putt in a normal spot – but the effect on my game was huge. Three and four putts were reduced to par 2 putts. My scores were improving, and my mindset about putting had evolved into a real, effective strategy.

It’s not a perfect fix — it doesn’t help a bad read or a bad touch, two problems that many disabled players face — but isomething that requires very little time and energy to fix.

When it comes to managing life in the green, that’s fine with me.