Golf Tip: Reading the Grain of a Green

Grain, grain, has anybody seen the grain? Where is the grain? Every time that I look at a green and I hear that there is grain on it, it is like looking for diamonds in the rough, I have never found one of those either. The question becomes as a putter, as a golfer, how do you find the grain? I'll give you a couple of different hints. Number one, it is very unpredictable. Number two, it is there, and it normally grows towards the setting sun and or large bodies of water.

The setting sun right now is over this way, it is to the right of the way I am standing. I am going to start out by seeing if the grain is going towards the setting sun. Watch, this is something you can not do before you putt but you can do after you putt. I am going to go around in a circle, I am running out of grain now so I am going to go back to where I started and see if it is more prevalent there, oh there it is, there is that grain. Now nothing, you can even hear the scraping. I have done this three times today on this green looking for the grain and all three times here in Florida, in Ocala, Florida, it has been growing to our South West.

We happen to have a 40 two acre lake over there and obviously the sun sets to the west. This green is running very hard towards that sun. if you do this do it during a practice round or if you are a member of a course and you are not sure where the grain is on your golf course, on all eighteen greens, go out at some point in time during the day, scrape them a little bit, figure it out, write it down, put it on a little note pad so that you do not have to think about it every time you play. When you finish make sure you do the following, put the grain back down. Then you have done no damage to your course and you won't get anybody mad at you. But you know what? You found the grain, that is what we were looking for.