Are you capital on the greens?
Do you know who else that is?
The PGA Tour’s newest winner.
“I should write down all my thoughts so that in 10 years I can look back and laugh at myself,” 33-year-old Adam Schenk said Sunday after winning his first PGA Tour title in 243 attempts. “I’ve only been sitting with one hand.”
Yes, you read that right: Schenk conquered a field of 120 players at the Butterfield Bermuda Championship – and wind gusts of up to 60 km per hour – by, at least in places, using only his right hand on the grip.
And even when his left hand joined the party, it was usually just for show.
“If we were protected from the wind, I could use one hand and hit a lot of nice putts,” Schenk said Saturday after his third-round 67 put him in a 54-hole tie for the lead. “I had a couple of lip-outs. I don’t think I made those one-handed today, but I just put the left hand on top, so it was basically the same as putting it right-handed.”
On Sunday, in conditions better suited to kiteboarding, Schenk was unflappable, hitting 130 yards of 5-iron downwind and shooting an even-par 71 to finish at 12 under for the week, one better than Chandler Phillips.
In Port Royal, where Schenk called the stormy conditions “sometimes laughable,” he made putts. The Tour didn’t have ShotLink last week, but it did record putts per green in regulation, a category in which Schenk was 22nd in the field this week with an average of 1.73.
Schenk was inspired to try one-handed putting after a conversation he had in July with 67-year-old Mike Hulbert, a three-time Tour winner, putting – anyway – with one hand.
Hulbert debuted the technique at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am in 1995. “I just wasn’t putting enough,” he said at the time, explaining the switch that had begun in the form of a David Leadbetter-taught practice green drill. Hulbert enjoyed immediate success with the new stroke, saying, “I can get a good sense of rhythm and the ball just flows towards the hole. When I putt with two hands I tend to get too mechanical.”
Schenk, who said he spoke with Hulbert at the 3M Open, said he was intrigued by Hulbert’s counsel, even if he wasn’t fully convinced. “Can you do that in front of people? That’s a big question,” Schenk said of his thought process. “Can you do it on the Tour, for example? That’s another big question.”
But then another source of inspiration came from the most recognizable sources.
“I saw something on Instagram a day or two later,” Schenk said, “and it’s like the left hand messes up a lot of things in the short game, especially on the putting stroke and when you’re chipping or pitching, the way the club releases, and the way your left hand releases here.”
The solution: Remove his left hand from the process.
The result isn’t pretty, and neither are Schenk’s other go-to hacks, which involve holding the shaft down where the grip meets the metal. But all that matters is that the unconventional approach works for him for now – damn it seems. As Arnold Palmer used to say, swing your swing. And the same goes for putting: stroke your stroke.
“I can tell you ten different ways, theories and techniques that I used in my hotel room this week, trying to figure it out a little bit,” Schenk said on Sunday in the glow of victory. “I guess the answer I’m coming up with is there’s no answer, it’s just whatever works for you, works for you.”
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