Keegan Bradley always has ranked high in the made-up PGA Tour statistical category of Strokes Gained: Grit.
Maybe it has something to do with playing in inclement conditions during his New England upbringing. Or sharpening his game at shin-kicking Bethpage Black during his college days at St. John’s. Or grinding it out on the mini tours before breaking out on the PGA Tour with a major win (2011 PGA Championship) in his rookie season. Whatever the reason, Bradley is not the kind of guy you want to square off with in a Ryder Cup match or, say, late in the final round of a Travelers Championship.
Such was the scene Sunday at TPC River Highlands, where Tommy Fleetwood found himself on the wrong end of a Bradley charge. After capping his round with a sloppy bogey, Fleetwood could only stand back and watch as Bradley sized up a 6-footer for the win. Bradley’s putt was only going one place — in the bottom of the cup — but how he rapped the left-to-right breaker still raised a few eyebrows. That’s because as he hit the putt, Bradley looked not at his ball but the hole.
Bradley has been using this “heads up” technique for years, but only over short putts. Six feet (5 feet 8 inches, to be exact) isn’t exactly short, but just his year, Bradley said, he extended his “cutoff” range for his unusual putting style to include 6-footers. “I probably wouldn’t have looked at the hole last year from that distance,” he said.
Eyes locked on the hole, Bradley rocked back his long putter and poured in his birdie try, electrifying his legion of fellow New Englanders surrounding the green.
Keegan Bradley’s winning birdie putt at Travelers Championship
Bradley isn’t great from short range — from 4 to 8 feet, he ranks 111th on Tour this season with a 66.67% make rate — but he clearly believes head-up putting works for him, and there’s scientific data to suggest it works for more than just him.
In 2017, golf-biomechanist expert Sasho Mackenzie co-published an extensive study with Neil MacInnis that found, after rigorous testing, that “experienced golfers, who normally putt using a NT [near target, meaning looking at the ball at address] strategy, were found to putt significantly better — both in terms of make percentage and miss distance — while employing a FT [far target] visual focus strategy on moderately sloped putts inside 14 feet.”
In other words, exactly the kind of putt Bradley faced on the 72nd hole.
”I talked to some players, like basketball players,” said Bradley, who counts Michael Jordan among his South Florida pals. ”MJ would say you never look at the ball when you shoot a free throw. You look at the rim. So I started doing it. I started to putt a lot better doing it.”
While unusual on Tour, Bradley’s technique is not unprecedented. Jordan Spieth has employed heads-up putting. So, too, have Louis Oosthuizen and Tony Finau.
“I didn’t feel as free as I wanted, so my coach just said, ‘Well, why don’t you just look at the hole?’” Finau said at the 2021 Masters when asked to explain his technique. “I started doing that, and it just started bleeding right into the tournament. I didn’t have a game plan for it, but it seems to have freed me up.”
