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If you play golf on a regular basis, you’ve likely fallen victim to a “lip out” thanks to a putt that seemed like it was going to drop before somehow failing to go in the hole. Some physicists decided to take a closer look at that phenomenon in search of a scientific explanation, and they’ve published a paper with some advice on how to avoid that brutal development.
Anyone who decides to routinely subject themself to a round of golf on a regular basis is all too aware that there are many, many things that can go wrong when you hit the links.
The so-called “Golf Gods” may not actually exist, but it’s still very easy to convince yourself you’ve angered them in some way when an otherwise perfect drive lands in a divot on the fairway, a great approach shot hits the flagstick and ricochets into a bunker, or a putt that has eye for the hole swirls in and out of the cup.
Wyndham Clark fell victim to one of the most brutal lip-outs in recent memory after a putt that would have forced a playoff with Scottie Scheffler at The Players Championship in 2024 cruelly swirled around the cup before ending up around a foot away, but he’s far from the only golfer who’s fallen victim to one.
If you’ve ended up in a similar situation, you may have found yourself asking “Why?” in a fairly existential sense, but we now have some more information concerning that phenomenon on the scientific front.
A team of physicists took a closer look at lip-outs to get a better understanding of one of golf’s most frustrating mysteries
I can only assume Stephen Hogan and Mate Antali, the physicists who respectively work at the University of Bristol in England and Széchenyi István University in Hungary, had been personally victimized by at least one lip out before deciding to team up to research them.
That collaboration led to the publication of the paper that recently appeared in the journal Royal Society Open Science, which examined the lip outs caused by what they dubbed “the golf balls of death” (a reference to the “walls of death” motorcycle stunt that features the bikes rolling around in a similar fashion).
Hogan and Antali broke down the missed shots into two distinct categories: the “rim lip-out,” where the ball catches the edge and gets ejected at an angle, and the “hole lip-out,” which sees it actually fall into the cup before making its way out without coming to rest.
At the risk of getting too into the physics weeds, lip-outs are the result of the “degenerate saddle equilibria” primarily linked to angle and velocity.
The explanation for the rim lip-out (the more common variety) is fairly straightforward, as it occurs when the center of mass fails to drop below green level. The hole lip-out, on the other hand, sees the ball drop into the hole before it “undergoes a pendulum-like motion” where its “potential energy is converted into spin” that can result in it being ejected from the cup if it doesn’t touch the bottom.
The paper does offer some advice when it comes to avoiding lip-outs, saying:
“Our research has showed that you need to aim as close to the center of the hole as possible, and to arrive at the rim of the hole with little speed.”
I’m aware that’s not particularly groundbreaking insight, as most golfers try to do that on every putt before failing to succeed much more frequently than they’d prefer. With that said, at least you’ll be able to understand what you did wrong the next time you experience a lip out.