Stacy "Lewis’s ongoing success on the greens is a blend of art and science"

I'm down at the KIA Classic talking to LPGA players for a story and had the pleasure of sitting in on new World No. 1 Stacy Lewis's press conference.

In a recent SI Golf Plus story, Alan Shipnuck wrote about her improvement on the greens:

Lewis’s ongoing success on the greens is a blend of art and science. To sharpen her feel she does a drill in which she hits a long lag putt into open space on the practice green, away from any target. Without peeking to see where the putt ends up, Lewis then drops another ball, closes her eyes and tries to hit the second ball to the same spot. “No exaggeration, 90 percent of the time the two balls are within three or four inches,” says Hallett.

In the press conference, I asked her to explain the more technical side of her approach without divulging too many secrets. Her answer:

STACY LEWIS:  Yep.  Well, it's Aimpoint and everybody can go take a class and learn it, so I guess it's not too much of a secret.  But I learned it, gosh it's been almost three years, two and a half, three years.  It's really based on gravity and how water flows off of a green.  So every time I walk up to a whole, I'm trying to find a straight putt, and once you find a straight putt, it's how much slope there ‑‑ what affects the read is how much slope is there and then how far away you are from the straight putt.  So the further you get from the straight putt, the more it's going to break.  So it's a combination of that and you have a little chart that gives you the exact read for every single putt.  So it's really, it's almost like cheating.  I can walk around and have down to the inch how far every putt's going to break.  So I can ‑‑ and that's the thing, too, is you're walking around, you're feeling it with your feet versus looking at it, and that's kind of the big difference because a lot of times golf courses try to throw you off visually with mounds or hills or whatever it may be on how putts break.