Even if you can’t swing like a Tour pro, you can adopt the style of coolly taking off your glove and tucking it in a back pocket, its fingers flapping, for the walk to the green.
Who started this glove-off-to-putt thing, anyway?No one knows for sure, but Eddie Merrins, the venerated pro of Bel-Air Country Club, who began playing professionally in 1957, credits Arnold Palmer. For his part, Palmer agrees he always took his glove off to putt "for better feel," but he modestly says he doesn’t know if he was the first to do so.
I’ve seen photographs of such legends as Billy Casper, Calvin Peete and Hale Irwin in their younger days putting with their gloves on. John Daly can’t be bothered taking off the glove either, and the guy can putt.
Dedicated range rats will tell you that a glove helps prevent blisters when pounding balls for hours on end, but who has that much time?I can practice for an hour with bare-naked hands to no ill effect. Which gets me back to my original thought: Why not dispense with the glove altogether?If bare hands were good enough for generations of golf greats, they should be good enough for me.
But, no: In the end I can’t resist golf’s rituals. I like the feel of a brand new glove, enjoy flexing my fingers in the taut, white, unsullied leather the first time I pull it on. I suppose I also take satisfaction from looking at the marks when I take it off, seeing the darkening in the fingers and heel and not in the palm.
Bonzagni told me that FootJoy is always in search of a quieter Velcro "that can’t be heard three fairways away when you take off your glove." Personally, I’ve grown to like that ripping sound, signaling an end to hours of effort immersed in the anguish, awe and joy of golf. In fact, my response is positively Pavlovian: When I hear that sound I know the nineteenth hole is coming up next, and I can almost taste that first sip of cold beer.
