The Arrogance of Tradition

Kneel behind the ball and see the slope. Think where water would flow. Observe the nearest high point and find the nearest body of water. Trust the local knowledge. Trust your gut.

These are all traditionalist tactics that are now being met with a now-not-so-new approach to green reading that challenges the widely accepted norms. It’s unfamiliar. It’s misunderstood. It’s AimPoint.

And it’s a disruptor.

Every generation has disruptors that challenge accepted norms.

Tesla.

Apple.

Starbucks.

They look different. They’re controversial. And traditionalists resist them—until they don’t.

Brandel Chamblee is no exception. He recently posted about AimPoint being “tough to stomach” because “it interrupts the flow of walking, looking and feel… and shifts the narrative of skill.” He seems to think that the “mystery, genius and touch” are all integral parts of “great putting.”

This line of thinking needs reframing.

Here’s what Brandel fails to recognize: Not everyone has elite level skills or time to cultivate the genius to be intuitively good at putting.

Traditional green reading works fine—if you have Jordan Spieth’s intuition or decades to develop it. The arrogance in imposing his view of how things should look and feel during a round of golf is striking. It denies that there’s a segment of golfers who don’t possess the “imagination, intuition, and feel” to putt even halfway decently.

He’s not calling for a ban. But publicly lamenting that a tool exists which helps players improve? That’s gatekeeping dressed up as aesthetic preference.

This perspective subjects those players to haphazardly guessing at the abstract topic of green reading because of a narrow view of what defines “great putting” and stifles their ability to improve.

The “rules” that defined putting as having historically been about “interpretive art” and a full “intuitive bucket” are, to steal from Captain Jack Sparrow, more like guidelines anyway. AimPoint serves as a tool to gather information and allow players to develop their own interpretive artistry through visualization strategies and an essential understanding of slope and its impact on ball roll. Green reading is the input—the stroke and speed are still the art.

If there’s anything that needs clarification, it’s this: describing AimPoint as something that’s “hard to quantify” when it’s quite literally a measurable number makes no sense.

And if pace of play is the real concern, let’s be honest—the problem isn’t the three seconds someone spends reading slope. It’s everything else.

The look and our perception of a player and how they utilize their 40 seconds of available time prior to hitting their putt is irrelevant to the desired outcome. The scorecard doesn’t care how you read the green. It doesn’t include asterisks for players who used a system instead of “feel.”

Brandel is entitled to his opinion. He can sit in his Tesla, sip his Starbucks and tweet from his iPhone about how technology ruins the purity of the game.

The irony will be lost on him.