Amid all the hype over Happy Gilmore 2, we bring you news of a real-life golfer who doesn’t play the game like everyone else.
His name is Philippe Gariepy, and if that rings familiar, it might because he starred in a video from the 103rd PGA Championship of Canada that set the internet abuzz this week.
In the snippet, Gariepy, an amiable 49-year-old pro from Sutton, Canada, roughly 90 minutes from Montreal, is shown hunkered low over a putt. Really low. Gariepy is 6-foot-4, but his putter is shorter than some tap-ins. It’s just 23-inches long. (Initial reports said that Gariepy was using an 18-inch putter, the shortest that the Rules of Golf allow).
“You can get much better reads when you’re so low to the ground,” Gariepy told GOLF.com by phone on Wednesday. “And with a putter that short, it’s impossible to yip.”
Over the years, Gariepy has had bouts of the heebie-jeebies. But he said that’s not what pushed him to a pint-size putter. A longtime teaching pro, he made the switch nearly a decade back while playing a casual round with a friend and his friend’s young daughter. Nothing was dropping for Gariepy that day.
“So at one point, I asked the daughter if I could use her putter, which was very small,” Gariepy said. Of course he drained the putt. Sticking with the mini-flatstick, he went on to bury “20- to 30-footers on the next four holes.”
That night, Gariepy cut down his Scotty Cameron to 21 inches. Later that season, using that putter, he advanced to a U.S. Open qualifier playoff, where he lost to a birdie after lipping out his own bid.
In an era when legions of stars — Bernhard Langer, Fred Couples, Adam Scott, and on — were brushing putts with broomsticks, Gariepy had embraced something closer in length to a chopstick.
It turned out to be a fairly easy transition, though it did require him to adjust his stance.
“I tell people, you don’t want to just bend down over the putt because that will hurt your back,” Gariepy said. “I take a wide stance and I use my legs. If you look at me, I’m basically squatting over the ball.”
Aside from forcing Gariepy to get low, which gives him a good look at the break, there are other benefits to his sawed-off approach.
“The shorter the shaft, the less rotation,” he said. “You have more control. The putter just goes straight back and straight through.”
The bigger challenge, he said, can be distance control, especially on shaggy greens. When putting surfaces are running slowly — as they often are early in the season in Canada — Gariepy ditches his short putter for a long one.
“But on slick greens, it’s the short putter for me,” he said.
Gariepy no longer carries the 21-inch Scotty. “It had a plumber’s neck, and I had a tendency to pull it,” he said. In its place, Gariepy said, is a cut-down version of an inexpensive model called a Broom Tour Star 1 with a ladies’ Winn grip and a head that Gariepy has bent to 80-degrees, the maximum legal lie angle for a putter.
That’s the flatstick Gariepy used this week at Pingrove Club de Golf, host site of the PGA of Canada event, which features a field of club professionals. The greens were plenty quick during Tuesday’s opening round, and Gariepy handled them adeptly. He finished the day at one under. On Wednesday, though, he got off to a rough start and his putter was partly to blame. After leaving a bogey bid on the lip on the par-5 opener, Gariepy reached out casually to clean up . . . and whiffed.
“It was such a stupid thing,” he said. “I’ve never done something like that before.”
Though Gariepy said his playing partners didn’t notice his gaffe, he reported himself, making down a triple-bogey 8. He wound up shooting an 83 for an 11-over two-day total that left him three shots shy of the cut. None of which has soured Gariepy on his putting method.
Is a short putter the way to go for everyone? Gariepy doesn’t push it on his students.
“But I let them try my putter when they are curious,” he said. “It rarely works for them.”
With his fellow pros, it’s the other way around.
“I sometimes suggest they try it when they complain about their putting,” Gariepy said. “They try it, they make the putt right away without thinking and they usually say, ‘That’s not for me.”
To each his or her own. Gariepy is confident in his approach, which he said he hopes to show off in the coming years on the senior circuit. He feels he can compete with the 50-plus set. Though his strong suits are his chipping, iron play and accuracy off the tee. Gariepy said also he rolls the rock quite nicely. Except when he doesn’t.
“On a good day, I feel like I can make anything,” he said. “But on a bad day, I can miss them all.”
In that sense, he’s like rest of us.
