Reading a green correctly, Lee Trevino says, is a bit like driving home from work.
You know the way.
You know the obstacles.
“If you have 10 red lights on your road,” Trevino said, “you know how fast to go to make all the red lights.”
Then there’s diagnosing a putting surface incorrectly.
“If I sent you home tomorrow a different route,” Trevino said, “you don’t know how long it would take you, and you would probably get lost.”
Green reading, as described as only Trevino can, courtesy of an older video featuring the six-time major winner recently posted by X user Ian Ellis Golf. (His feed is filled with videos, should you be interested.) There was more on the ever-perplexing subject, though, and you can watch the Trevino video below, and below that will be some thoughts. At the least, who doesn’t like watching one of the game’s best players and talkers in his element?
In the video, Trevino broke green reading into two parts: green reading on older greens, and green reading on new greens.
Trevino said these “are the most difficult ones in the world to read” because most are flat.
“Oh, they’ll slope a little bit,” he said in the video. “They’ll go from back to front. Maybe you’ll have a little uphill putt, but it won’t be much of an uphill putt.”
How come?
“The reason that these greens are flat is because of drainage,” Trevino said. “In other words, they want them to retain water. We didn’t have all the irrigation systems that we have today on the golf course. So they have to retain water. It’s the hardest putt in the world to make is a straight putt. I’ve always said that because you can’t make a mistake on it.”
So what’s the approach?
Look around you, Trevino said.
“First of all, you have to look for just lakes,” he said. “If there is a lake on the right or the left side or there’s valleys or there’s mountains or you’re on the East Coast or you’re on the West Coast, but if it’s a permanent lake, chances are that that ball is going to break towards that lake simply because of erosion. Everything drains that way.”
Then look around the green for bunkers, he said. In the video, Trevino used an example.
“Do you have two bunkers, one on the right, one on the left? Do you have two bunkers in the back of the screen?” he said. “Now, you have to take this green, you split it in half. So if you’re actually to the right of this line, chances are that putt is going to break from right to left. If you’re to the left, chances are that putt will break from left to right.
“Now, the reason for this is because after a period of time, that golf course being at 30, 40, 50 years, that sand being blown out of that bunker actually top-dresses this green, and it starts mounting up. In other words, it starts building up on that side. And if you don’t believe that, the next time you have a big rainstorm on your golf course, you go out and look at it, and there’ll be a river of water right down the middle of that green, and that’s the reason for it.”
Newer greens need a different strategy, Trevino said.
“People will look up at a mountain, they’ll say, well, that ball is going to go away from that mountain,” Trevino said in the video. “Not necessarily so on a new golf course.”
Why’s that?
“Because that architect knows that over a period of years, erosion and water flow is going to lean that green away from that mountain,” he said. “So what does he do? If the mountain is here [on the left], he takes the away mountainside of that green, and he builds it up. So you could be playing in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California, and that putt could break towards the mountain. Same thing on the East Coast. Same thing on the West Coast.”
How do you read those then?
Walk around, Trevino said.
“You want to be able to survey it,” he said. “Now, the way that I survey a putt, and you’ve seen me many, many times walk completely around this particular putt, 360 degrees I go. What I do is I approach the back of the ball. I look at the cup and I split this 360 degree circle into 180. I don’t read anything past this line. I look at valleys, or I look at humps on this side. I look at valleys and humps on this side. And then I determine which way that ball is going to break. That’s the reason that I go all the way around.”
The surveying can start as you approach the green.
And Trevino also described this in a very Trevino fashion.
“How many times have you seen a golf professional approach the green, and his head is going from the right to the back to the left to the front to the left front and everything?” he said in the video. “And people in the gallery are always saying, ‘Look at him, he’s looking for his neighbor or his girlfriend or his wife or he’s trying to get a few phone numbers.’ No, that’s not true at all.
“I’ll tell you what we’re doing here is we’re approaching this green and at the same time we’re surveying it. We want to know which way that putt is going to go. It’s easy as you’re walking up that green to look and you can see all the undulation in this green. And you’re able to tell approximately which way that ball is going to go.”
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