Zhang’s father left the putter she used to dominate amateur golf on a train in London in the summer of 2023.
BELLEAIR, Fla. – Rose Zhang met with AimPoint founder Mark Sweeney early this week at Pelican Golf Club to try something new. The suggestion came from Zhang’s caddie, Olly Brett, who first broached the subject after the BMW Ladies Championship in South Korea.
“We just weren’t holing enough putts inside 15 feet,” said Brett, “and we both felt it was more read than stroke.”
Zhang carded a 2-under 68 in the second round of The Annika driven by Gainbridge at Pelican to get to 5 under for the tournament. Alexa Pano and Jin Hee Im hold the clubhouse lead at 7 under.
Zhang currently ranks 91st on the LPGA in putts per green in regulation. Last year she ranked 10th. It’s also worth noting that Zhang’s father left the putter she used to dominate amateur golf on a train in London in the summer of 2023.
She’s been on a short-game journey ever since.
“It’s something new,” said Zhang. “My putting hasn’t been great statistically so I wanted to have a new sort of mindset when it came to the putting green, and it’s been going well so far.”
Rose Zhang of the United States looks on from the seventh green during the second round of The ANNIKA driven by Gainbridge at Pelican 2024 at Pelican Golf Club on November 15, 2024, in Belleair, Florida. (Photo by Julio Aguilar/Getty Images)
When Zhang won the Cognizant Founder Cup earlier this year, it’s not surprising that she ranked first that week in both greens in regulation and putts per green in regulation.
If only she could’ve bottled it up.
Brett has been familiar with the AimPoint system for 13 years and said he didn’t want to mention it to Zhang until he’d gathered enough statistical evidence. Zhang was quick to agree.
“I would almost argue in this year was just as much of a rollercoaster as last year for me,” said Zhang, who won her first tournament as a professional on the LPGA after closing the books on a record-breaking year at Stanford.
“There is a lot of new challenges I faced, old recurring things that I’ve been trying to figure out.
“So I think it’s been going good. I feel like I grinded a lot this year. There’s a lot of good showings, and I’m really excited for my potential to get better.”
Surprisingly, the creator said, developing this skill is easy.
Eight-foot putts are not typically stressful for PGA Tour pros, but the 8-foot par putt that Max Homa faced on Friday morning on the fifth at Augusta National had to be made if he was going to stay tied for the lead at the 2024 Masters. On the outside, he looked calm, but on the inside, he had to be feeling the pressure.
After both Tiger Woods and Jason Day finished the hole, the dance floor was Homa’s. With one foot on either side of his golf ball, he bent his right arm at about a 90-degree angle and held up his index finger and middle finger while staring at the hole. After backing up four paces, bending to take another look toward the hole, and then getting into his address position, Homa set his putter behind the ball. No practice strokes. He made a quick glance toward the cup, made his stroke and buried the putt.
“I mean, that is special,” said Colt Knost on the ESPN+ broadcast before Billy Ray Brown added, “That’s what champions do.”
Max Homa lines up a putt on the no. 9 green during the second round of the Masters Tournament. Mandatory Credit: Adam Cairns-USA TODAY Network
But what was Homa doing with his fingers, which appeared to be what Will Zalatoris, Viktor Hovland, Keegan Bradley, Tommy Fleetwood, Collin Morikawa, Adam Scott and a growing number of other PGA Tour pros are doing? Like those other pros, Homa uses AimPoint Express. This green-reading technique was developed by Mark Sweeney, the man who created the AimPoint putting line that broadcasters like Golf Channel, NBC and CBS used to show viewers a virtual path a ball needed to travel to finish in the hole.
“AimPoint Express is a dramatic simplification of what is a very complicated computer program to figure out how the ball goes from Point A to Point B and goes into the hole,” Sweeney said. “AimPoint Express takes about 100,000 lines of code and converts it into the player feeling how much side tilt there is in the putt.”
What television viewers did not see during the broadcast of Homa’s putt on the fifth hole was that he had not only straddled his golf ball before he putted, but that he also stood halfway between his golf ball and the hole for a few seconds and tried to feel the tilt of the putting surface. Through practice and some training, Homa and other golfers can feel the difference between a one-, two- and three-percent slope to one side or another using their feet.
Then, standing over their golf ball, they extend an arm and hold up the number of figures that correspond to the estimated number of degrees in the tilt they felt — one finger for a one-percent slope, two fingers for a two-percent slope and so on.
Viktor Hovland and Will Zalatoris both use AimPoint Express. (Adam Cairns-USA TODAY Sports)
Sweeney accidentally discovered the relationship between the slope of a green, the length of a golfer’s arm and the width of a person’s fingers.
“I had a much more complicated method of reading greens prior to AimPoint Express,” said Sweeney. “But then I was teaching some young kids, 7- and 8-year-olds, and I had them put their thumb on the high side of the hole, just to get them aiming somewhere above the hole. It turns out that your thumb is perfect for one’s and two’s, it will get you close, but then we started experimenting with one finger per percent. We tested those reads against the math and it was insane how accurate it was. Like, it was within an inch or two every single time (from 20 feet).”
Knowing that, and seeing Homa on the fifth hole holding up two fingers, viewers familiar with AimPoint Express would know that Max was estimating that halfway to the hole, there was a two-perfect tilt in the green. From Homa’s perspective, his target on that putt was two fingers’ width to the right of the hole (probably about 4 inches right), and assuming he hit the putt directly at that target, he was right because the ball went in the cup.
Every week, pros can be seen practicing AimPoint Express and developing their sense of feel for slopes on the practice greens at PGA Tour events. Many of them bring a digital level, and as they stand along an intended putt line, they call out a slope percentage like one, two or three while their caddy looks at the level.
Surprisingly, Sweeney said, developing this skill is easy.
“Within about 15 minutes, most people are picking up half-degrees of slope,” he said. “People are much, much better at feeling slope than they think. Nobody is ever off by more than one percent. Like, it’s almost unheard of that a player is off by more than one percent. No one calls a one a three or a one a four because they are so dramatically different.”
Ben An doing slope detection exercises with his caddie at Riviera Country Club. (David Dusek/Golfweek)
Sweeney claims that anybody, with a bit of practice, can accurately estimate to a half-percent. He also encourages golfers to calculate the slope along their putt’s length twice around halfway between the ball and the hole and use the bigger of the two estimations for their read. Some players, like Homa, take one reading and then turn around and repeat the estimation facing toward the ball to confirm their first reading.
In a Golf Channel interview, Homa said, “Your eyes can lie to you a lot, but your feet, typically, will never lie.”
Tiger Woods does not use AimPoint Express, and neither does Jordan Spieth or Jason Day. Brad Faxon, Loren Roberts and Ben Crenshaw never used it either. Some golfers have a great feel for green reading, spotting slopes and contours on the putting surface and understanding how putts will roll. However, many golfers are not blessed with this ability. Sweeney hates hearing that the skill will come with time and experience.
“As a coach, you have to take someone who doesn’t have a skill and give them that skill,” said Sweeney, who works with several tour pros and teaches lessons at Waldorf Astoria Golf Club in Orlando, Florida. “How do you teach someone green reading if they don’t naturally see what a good green reader sees? I thought ‘Just go do it and you’ll get better,’ was a really crappy answer. It’s like a full-swing instructor saying to someone, ‘I know you’re slicing it off the tee, but just go hit a lot of balls and you’ll get better.'”
Tom Kim and his caddie practice reading greens with a digital level before the start of the Genesis Invitational. (David Dusek/Golfweek)
Aimpoint Express removes the need to walk around a hole and see your intended putt from multiple angles, so for Sweeney, it does not slow play as some people think.
Sweeney postulates that the better a golfer gets at reading greens, the more time they can spend working on improving distance control and developing the quality of their putting stroke.
“It’s really helped me to read the greens, obviously, but it’s turned a lot of that into better speed,” Homa said on Golf Channel. “I’m shocked more people don’t do it, if I am being honest.”
There’s been a lot of talk across social media, on broadcasts, about the process of AimPoint. If you’re unfamiliar, AimPoint is a green-reading tool that many players on the PGA Tour use that allows them to feel the break of a putt by straddling the line and assigning a slope percentage based on the feel. They then use their fingers to find the starting line.
Fans have long made fun of the process, saying it takes too much time and that it’s unnecessary on short putts.
However, Tour players have found success using AimPoint over the last few years.
Just look at Keegan Bradley.
The New Englander used AimPoint to win the Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands earlier this year in Connecticut, beating Zac Blair and Open champion Brian Harman by three shots.
Bradley was a guest on the newly released episode of “Side Gig with Dan Rapaport,” a series on Barstool Sports’ Fore Play Golf YouTube channel.
On the first hole, Bradley was asked about his process on the greens.
“Now that I’ve been doing AimPoint, I try not to let my eyes tell me anything,” he said. “I’m telling you, in 10 years, when these younger kids all get out, no one will be reading greens. Zero.”
Rapaport then asked, “And that doesn’t elicit any emotion in you?”
“What’s the difference?” Bradley questioned.
“Golf is about…” Rapaport said before Bradley quickly joked, “Bending down? Is that what it is?”
For a player who has struggled with the flat stick for the majority of his career, Bradley is 18th in Strokes Gained: Putting this season on Tour. For comparison, in 2021, Bradley ranked 186th (-.548).
“I don’t think the game was meant to be broken down that scientifically.”
Rest in peace, green-reading books.
At least, that is for tournament use on the PGA Tour. These pocket-sized books featuring highly detailed illustrations and in use on the Tour since 2008, join the likes of George Orwell’s 1984, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye among famous banned books.
Unlike those once-controversial literary classics, the green-reading books helped players to detect the directions that putts break and the percentage of slope in different sections of greens. The ban became official on January 1 and goes into effect Thursday at this week’s Sentry Tournament of Champions.
Tour veteran Kevin Streelman, who used the books religiously for the past several years, was a member of the Tour’s 16-member Player Advisory Council that voted unanimously in May that the books had to go. He explained why the move was initiated by the players, noting he didn’t like the optics on TV of seeing the noses of players buried in the books as they determined the break of a putt.
“I think green reading is a skill of the game,” he said. “It’s some pretty cool technology that probably jumped up on us quickly and everyone thought it was time to rein it in.”
“It got out of control for a while,” said Davis Love III. “At the 2016 Ryder Cup, you had people sneaking around with machines and shooting the pins and putting them on 8×12 paper. It’s just a little too much technology. Yes, there’s technology involved in just about everything: rangefinders, GPS, scorekeeping, and all that kind of stuff. But we need to be careful that it doesn’t become a computer game out here.”
The pushback began in 2018 when the USGA limited the size of the books to 4½ x 7 inches, to the scale that 3/8-inch on the book would correspond to five yards on the green. That legislation was deemed by several top players to be too soft. The purpose behind restricting the green-reading books is to ensure that players and caddies use only their eyes and feel to help them read the line of play on the putting green. Critics say the books offered too much assistance. Or as former World No. 1 Luke Donald put it, “We shouldn’t be given a book with all the answers.”
“It’s not that it’s an advantage really, it’s just taking away a skill that takes time and practice to be mastered,” said Rory McIlroy, president of the PAC, at the U.S. Open in June. “I think reading greens is a real skill that some people are better at than others, and it just nullifies that advantage that people have.
“Honestly, I think it’s made everyone lazier. People don’t put in the time to prepare the way they used to.”
Rory McIlroy looks over his yardage book on the fifth green during the second round of the Tour Championship golf tournament at East Lake Golf Club. Mandatory Credit: Butch Dill-USA TODAY Sports
But they will now, and so will their caddies. Scott Sajtinac, who currently works with Brandt Snedeker, estimated he’ll be spending anywhere from 5 to 10 more hours per week on the greens rolling balls to gather as much detail on the putting surfaces without using electronic equipment (no levels or measuring devices are allowed). Expect to see a rise in players and caddies using the AimPoint method of green-reading.
The local rule gives the Tour the ability to establish an officially approved yardage book at each tournament so that the diagrams of putting greens show only minimal detail (such as significant slopes, tiers, or false edges that indicate sections of greens). In addition, the local rule limits the handwritten notes that players and caddies are allowed to add to the approved yardage book.
“Am I happy it is going away? Yes,” said Matt Kuchar. “I think it is good for the game for them to go away. I don’t think the game was meant to be broken down that scientifically.”
Justin Rose, who tends to be more the scientist than the artist, noted that he has won an equal number of tournaments with the green-reading book as he has without it and doesn’t expect that his inability to have the information handy will make a big difference.
“I don’t rely on it. I used it as a quick guide,” he said, adding “there are ways for me to still use it and the concepts and strategies without it. I will still use it in my preparation in my hotel room.”
Jordan Spieth, who is known as one of the deadliest putters on Tour, had become a devout user of the books in recent years yet he, too, was among the PAC members who voted for the ban. Speaking ahead of the Sentry Tournament of Champions, he said that he wasn’t too concerned about losing access to what had become a security blanket of sorts on the greens, noting that Augusta National Golf Club didn’t allow them and he had a pretty good track record there, including a green jacket from 2015.
Jordan Spieth looks over his yardage book on the first green during the final round of the U.S. Open golf tournament at Torrey Pines Golf Course. Mandatory Credit: Michael Madrid-USA TODAY Sports
“I seem to find myself in a really good space on the greens there, really feeling putts,” he said. “I’m one that’s used (green books) because why wouldn’t you use ’em? More for a reference point and a lot of times more for speed than trying to dial in an AimPoint situation or a line, so I’m perfectly fine with the changes.
“I think that to me, putting you have to read it right, you have to put a stroke on it and you have to hit it with the right speed. I thought with the green reading materials it took one of those three skills away from it and I think that it’s a skill that I would say is an advantage of mine and so I’m excited to see what it can mean as far as strokes gained compared to the field on the greens.”
Talor Gooch, who won the RSM Classic, the last event on the Tour where the books were allowed, used a green-reading book en route to his first victory but said he was glad to see them be gone.
“It sways me away from my instincts and my skill set,” he said. “It will be nice to not have almost another voice in my head and I think it will free me up.”
Steve DiMeglio contributed reporting to this story.
