Weir’s five-footer and yours: a pressure routine for short putts on Canadian greens

Ask a Canadian golf fan about putting at the national open and two pictures come back. One is Nick Taylor at Oakdale in 2023, holing from 72 feet for eagle on the fourth playoff hole to become the first Canadian citizen to win the event since 1954. The other is Mike Weir at Glen Abbey in 2004, and what people forget about that afternoon is the length of the putts. Weir had ten feet on the 72nd hole to win. In the playoff he had 25 feet for eagle on the 18th, then five feet on the 17th. He holed none of them, and Vijay Singh took the trophy on the third extra hole.

The long one makes the highlight reel. The short one decides the result, for a Masters champion in front of a home crowd and for you on a Saturday in June with three friends watching. This piece is about the short one: why it gets harder exactly when it matters, and a fifteen second routine that makes the pressured version of the stroke look like the relaxed one.

What the numbers say about putts inside six feet

Television makes short putts look automatic. Shot Scope, which collects data from real amateur rounds rather than practice greens, shows how far from automatic they are. From six feet and in, its scratch golfers hole 92.8 percent. Ten handicaps hole 89.3 percent, twenty handicaps 84 percent and twenty-five handicaps 82.5 percent. For comparison, the same page puts the PGA Tour make rate from inside five feet at 96.7 percent.

Those gaps look small until you do the arithmetic. A golfer who faces ten putts of that length in a round and holes them at the twenty handicap rate misses one or two more than a scratch player would from the same spots. Those strokes are sitting on the green, a stride from the hole.

Why a four-footer feels like a forty-footer

Nothing about a short putt is physically demanding: no bunker lip, no carry. The difficulty is that it is the one shot where you know the exact price of failure before you hit it, and your playing partners are standing still watching.

The second difficulty is the way most of us practise it. On the putting green before a round, short putts get hit casually, one-handed, often while talking. On the course they get hit with a tight grip and a racing pulse. You rehearse a relaxed stroke and ask a tense body to produce it, often at the end of a hole that has already gone wrong.

A routine gives the anxious version of you the same checklist the relaxed version used.

Fifteen seconds, in the same order every time

Start behind the ball, crouched low enough to see the slope around the hole. Give the read eight seconds or so. A putt of this length has one break or none, and a longer look tends to manufacture doubt rather than information.

Choose the target out loud, silently if you prefer: left edge, right edge, dead centre. A putt without a named target is struck in hope, and hope makes the hands tentative.

Make a single rehearsal stroke beside the ball while looking at the hole, to feel the length.

Now set the putter face square to your line first, and only then build your stance around it. Most club golfers do the reverse. They settle their feet, then try to aim the face from inside that stance, which is how a putt gets pushed or pulled before it has moved an inch.

Finally, one look at the hole, eyes back to the ball, stroke. A second look invites a second thought, and the second thought is where the stroke loses its nerve.

The routine fits comfortably inside Golf Canada’s own expectations. Its 2026 pace of play policy for championships allows 40 seconds a stroke, 10 more for the first player on or around the green, and on the green the clock starts only after the ball has been marked, cleaned and replaced.

Aim at a blade of grass a foot away

From five feet the hole is a generous target, and generous targets invite sloppy strokes. Shrink it. Find a mark on your start line about twelve inches in front of the ball: a discoloured blade, a healed pitch mark, a speck of sand. Then roll the ball over that mark and forget the cup.

You cannot look at the hole while you putt, but you can see a spot a foot ahead the whole time. The aiming problem becomes a start line problem, which is the part of a short putt you control.

Shorter going back, longer going through

When short putts miss for mechanical reasons, the cause is nearly always deceleration. The backstroke gets too long, the brain notices, and the hands brake on the way through to avoid hitting it too far. A slowing putter face twists, and from four or five feet a twisted face is enough to miss the cup.

Reverse the proportions. Take the putter back a little less than feels necessary and let the follow-through be longer than the backstroke. The face stays square because it is accelerating, and the ball holds its line through the final two feet, where a dying putt is at the mercy of every footprint.

Pace also helps on a busy public course in July: a ball that arrives with some speed takes less break and rides through the footprints left by the groups ahead.

Inside four feet, hit it straighter

On a putt of three or four feet on an ordinary green, you can usually strike the ball firmly enough to take most of the break out, and aim inside the edge rather than outside it. That is margin, not bravado: a putt aimed at the edge and hit a touch too hard misses, while a putt aimed inside the hole and hit a touch too hard usually catches the cup anyway.

The exception is the slick downhill putt, which cannot be muscled. That one needs the break and a pace that would finish a foot past. Treat it as a different shot with a different plan, not as a failure of the firm-putt rule.

September greens and two rules worth knowing

A late-summer aeration changes the short putt more than anything else. Under Rule 13.1c you may repair ball marks, shoe damage such as spike marks, and scrapes left by equipment or the flagstick on your line. You may not repair aeration holes or grooves from vertical mowing, which are normal maintenance, or the natural wear of the hole. On a punched green, strike it firmly enough to roll over the holes.

The second rule concerns your stance. Rule 10.1c says you must not make a stroke with a foot deliberately placed on each side of, or touching, the line of play or its extension behind the ball. Everything else among the rules club golfers get wrong matters less on a short putt than these two.

Practice that has something riding on it

Casual three-footers teach the stroke you already have. Train the stroke with a consequence attached.

The tee gate. Two tees a foot in front of the ball, just wider than a ball apart, on your start line. Putt through from four feet. Clipping a tee means the face was open or closed at impact by an amount you would never feel.

The streak. One hole, five feet, and you need ten in a row. A miss sends the count back to zero. By the eighth putt your hands will tell you something about how you handle a putt that matters, which is the point.

The clock face. Six balls around the hole at three feet, then six at five feet, moving out only when the inner ring is holed. Every ball breaks differently, so you read as well as stroke.

Two twelve-minute sessions a week beat an hour of 150-yard shots.

The two-footer you keep conceding

Saturday golf in this country runs on picked-up putts. The hidden cost shows up in a first competition, when a golfer who has not holed a genuine two-footer since the May long weekend has to hole several in a row with a card in someone else’s pocket.

Golf Canada’s terms of competition add a detail newcomers do not expect: in its championships you may not putt or chip on or near the green of the hole you have just finished, nor test that surface by rolling a ball. The practice putt after a miss is gone. The fix costs nothing: once a month, hole out every putt and post that round to your Golf Canada record.

Where to keep short putting sharp in Canada

The best practice green is the one at the course you are about to play, because it runs at today’s speed. Beyond that, the question in this country is the calendar: a stroke built in June is rusty by the next spring unless it gets used indoors.

Public practice facilities make the outdoor months easy. In Calgary, the City’s McCall Lake range has a practice zone with two putting greens and a chipping area, and Confederation Park has practice greens with a chipping area; buckets at City ranges start at $5 for 25 balls. North of Toronto, the Markham Golf Dome opens daily from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. and lets golfers who buy a bucket that day use its outdoor short game and putting areas, alongside a 100-stall outdoor range and a 40-stall dome for winter.

Short putting is also the one part of the game that survives a Canadian winter at home, because it needs a flat strip of floor and nothing else. A mat is genuinely useful at this distance, unlike for lag putting, where a carpet rolls at one speed and a golf course never does. One large Canadian golf retailer carries a long list of them. Prices checked on the day this page was updated ranged from $59.99 for an Odyssey Mini B-Square mat and $149.99 for a Palladium 10 ft by 1.3 ft mat up to a PuttOut AirBreak on sale at $399.99 until September 30. A plain mat does the job for five-footers. A simulator studio is built around full swings rather than short game work, so ask before booking one for putting.

Keep score through the season as well. The Golf Canada app records putts per hole, which turns a vague feeling that you are putting badly into a count of how many short ones actually got away.

If the tee gate keeps catching the ball, the face is the problem rather than your nerves, and that is worth a lesson. The PGA of Canada’s Find a Pro search lists professionals by city and province, and a coach can usually spot a face angle issue in one session. A putter that does not suit your eye can make aiming harder too. Panxis Golf has no commercial relationship with any retailer, coach or facility named here.

Three numbers to write on your scorecard

• Putts missed from inside six feet. That count, not total putts, shows where the round leaked.
• Putts where you skipped the routine. Compare it with the first number after five rounds.
• Two-footers you actually holed rather than picked up. Aim for all of them, once a month.

Weir’s five-footer at Glen Abbey is a reminder that nobody is immune. The routine is a reminder that most of the misses are optional.

Make percentages come from Shot Scope. Rules references are to the Rules of Golf of The R&A and the USGA, administered in Canada by Golf Canada, together with Golf Canada’s 2026 pace of play policy and terms of competition.

How this page was put together

Mat prices and the sale deadline were checked at Golf Town (Canada) on the day this page was updated. Panxis has no commercial link with this retailer.