james kinney

My interesting story on “aimpoint”. I was a player in the 2001 New York State amateur. I was playing in the practice round and as we came to one of the holes, there was someone messing around on the green. I could see they were placing something on the ground and writing on a clipboard. I thought it was the superintendent looking for hole locations. He didn’t see us at first and we had to whistle to get his attention. He stepped off the green and we hit our approach shots. When I got up there I started fishing around to see if I could get a hole location because I thought it was the superintendent. It wasn’t the super. The guy had a level. He was measuring the green and writing down numbers on a piece of paper with a sketch of the green I asked him what he was up to. He said he was measuring slope so he could calculate how much break a putt would have. I didn’t understand what he was saying. I’d never heard of this before. I told him I was confused. He said putting was just a physics problem. He asked if I was going to roll a marble off a ramp and onto a sloped surface, how would I estimate how much the marble would “break”. Would I just eyeball it, or would I run the math to figure out how much the marble would curve. When he explained it like that, it clicked. From that point on I started practicing reading slopes. There was an old website he pointed me to that had break charts. I still use those charts to this day. I have no idea what the site was. It was definitely a personal “home grown” website from some person that was probably an engineer. To this day I have no clue who that guy was. 99.99999% sure he was a competitor in that state am. Just no clue who he was. That chance encounter changed how I read greens. I immediately started working on guessing slope with my feet and my eyes. I would go out and drive around my course at night with a level and a notebook practicing reading slopes. Wish I knew who that guy was!

I am going to be doing an analysis that I’m really interested in. I have a list of tour pros that use aimpoint and the date they started using aimpoint. Going to be doing a before and after to see how much their putting numbers changed. I just took a quick look at two players and they both saw a big improvement after starting aimpoint.