One thing that could decide The Masters? Which golfers can perfect ‘the Quiet Eye’

Moments after last year’s U.S. Open, after Rory McIlroy had missed short putts on the 16th and 18th holes to give the tournament to Bryson DeChambeau, a prevailing question hovered over the course at Pinehurst No. 2: How?

On the 16th hole, McIlroy had missed a par putt from 2 feet, 6 inches. On the 18th, he came up empty on a tester from inside 4 feet.

Was it a low read? Did he strike the putt too softly? Was it the pressure of a decadelong major drought?

Joan Vickers, a professor at the University of Calgary, had her own theory. As Vickers watched McIlroy’s miss on 18, she noticed something subtle.

In the moments after contact, Vickers believed that McIlroy’s eyes had shifted up, toward the hole. He had, in her estimation, violated a core principle of the “Quiet Eye,” a phenomenon she had discovered and named decades earlier.

“When you make that eye movement, your club can come up and it also can move laterally,” Vickers said. “The slightest deviation on the face of the club against the ball is going to cause you to miss.”

Anyone who’s played a round of golf has experienced the excruciating pain of a missed 5-foot putt. It doesn’t matter if you’re McIlroy or John Q. Duffer. The sting is real.

As the golf world descends on Augusta National for the Masters this week, it’s likely that the tournament will come down to what happens on the course’s famous greens. They are undulating and fast, keeping players on edge. A SubAir system beneath ground monitors moisture and speed. Brandt Snedeker once told USA Today that putting at Augusta was like putting in a bathtub.

The champion is often the player who can make the most 5- or 10-foot putts. For decades, Vickers has told the golf world that she found the answer: “The Quiet Eye.”

At its most basic level, it’s a period of sustained focus on a location before executing a motor skill – in this case, a long fixation on the back of the golf ball before the putt. Not that everyone has listened.

“Not too many people know about it,” said Derek Uyeda, a teaching pro and putting coach who works with two-time major winner Xander Schauffele.

That’s sort of true. It isn’t hard, in the vast world of golf influencers and online coaches, to find instructors touting the method. And in 2024, Bridgestone manufactured golf balls with a visual target on the side, borrowing from the Quiet Eye. In other ways, though, it remains an idea on the fringes – intuitive, accessible and often overlooked.

Four decades after publishing her first paper, Vickers remains the Quiet Eye’s leading proponent. Her ideas have influenced everything from how we think about shooting a basketball to stopping a puck in hockey. They might also improve your golf score. Yet when her work began, Vickers was motivated by a simple question: What was the secret of elite athletic performance?

“I’ve spent 44 years obsessed with this one variable called the Quiet Eye,” she said. “I’m not a great athlete at all, but I had these three occasions in life where my performance was magical.

“People keep trying to find something in the physical characteristics of the individual. They can see the characteristics. They can sense them. They know they’re special. And they keep looking at the physical systems, the biomechanics, the kinematics, the physiology. But very few people say: ‘Well, maybe something else is going on?’ ”

For Vickers, the quest began in the 1980s, when she was a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia. She had grown up on a farm on the Saint John River and played basketball and volleyball at the University of New Brunswick in the 1960s. But after years as a coach and athletic director, she turned her focus to the fields of human kinetics, cognitive psychology and educational psychology.

As she looked for a subject to research, she recalled moments of seemingly random athletic brilliance from her own life. Once, while in college, she had scored 27 points. Another time, she served out an entire set in volleyball. In the context of her own abilities, the performances did not make much sense, but they happened.

For a moment, she was perfect.

The experiences in what might be called a “flow state” caused Vickers to wonder: What were the mental processes that allowed amazing performance? Or, as Vickers would say in a speech: What was it that enabled some sport performers to constantly defy the inherent limits of their physical systems and perform at such high levels?

Around the same time, Stanley Coren, a professor at the University of British Columbia, purchased a $250,000 eye tracker, a device that allowed Vickers to collect the eye movements of athletes. By 1987, she convinced the company Applied Sciences to affix the eye tracker to a helmet. The advance in technology led to a study in the laboratory on putting, which led to a groundbreaking discovery.

In graduate school, Vickers had read a book by the American psychologist James J. Gibson, “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.” According to Gibson, elite athletes such as Wayne Gretzky or Larry Bird should be able to see a pattern in the real world for 10 milliseconds and instantly know what to do.

“The theory was that you don’t need this brain with hundred billion neurons and 500 billion glial cells coming together,” Vickers said. “You just know.”

But when Vickers started testing golfers with her eye-tracking device, that’s not what happened. Instead, she found that elite, low-handicap golfers were more successful when they used “a fixation of 2 to 3 seconds” on the ball before taking the putter back.

“I had all these assumptions about what’s going on and guess what?” Vickers said. “It’s not true.”

Vickers published her results in a 1992 paper in the publication, “Perception.” In theory, the long fixation had offered the time needed for a golfer’s brain “to organize the extensive neural structures that control the visuomotor system.”

In other words, the moment of focus on a specific spot allowed the brain to process the task while blocking out any distractions.

The original study did not use the term “Quiet Eye.” That would come later, when Vickers was inspired by watching a Canadian volleyball player named Bruce Edwards lock his eyes on a volleyball while returning a serve. It did, however, lay the foundation for decades of work.

Vickers soon found similar examples of the Quiet Eye in free-throw shooters – the longer a shooter fixated on the front of rim, the more accurate their shot. It later extended to sports like hockey and football. But as Vickers conducted research, putting was perfect for the lab environment. She could control the environment, add slope and increase anxiety.

It eventually led to a definition: The Quiet Eye was “the final fixation located on the top or back of the ball within 1 degree of visual angle for more than 100 ms.”

“If you’re doing the Quiet Eye properly, you’re going to be looking at the back of the ball,” Vickers said. “The Quiet Eye begins in golf putting before you begin the back swing. The Quiet Eye needs to be on the back of the ball, and it needs to stay in that one location through the backswing, through the foreswing, through contact.

“And this is the most important part. After contact, you need to leave the gaze in one location looking down at the green.”

Soon enough, Vickers believed she had discovered more than an athletic phenomenon. It could help golfers learn how to putt – and maybe even win the Masters.

Uyeda, a teaching pro in California, first learned about the Quiet Eye from a friend named Jason Goldsmith, a mental performance coach who has worked with Jason Day and Justin Rose.

Goldsmith passed along the knowledge to Uyeda. Now Uyeda passes it to his players, including Schauffele, one of the world’s best. In practice, the Quiet Eye looks like this: Schauffele will line up a putt and focus on a target point – say an imaginary tee 2 inches left of the hole.

Schauffele will turn his head and attain Quiet Eye on the tee. Then he will move his eyes back down the line to the ball.

“If his eyes are on the tee, he’s thinking about the ball,” Uyeda said. “If his eyes are on the ball, he’s thinking about the tee. He’ll go back and forth, back and forth. So there’s no other thoughts that can get into his brain.”

Finally, Schauffele locks his eye on the back of the ball and hits his putt. But the drill is not over. After contact, Uyeda has his players stare at the ground, visualizing an imaginary ball sitting in the same spot.

“The Quiet Eye, to us, is huge,” Uyeda said.

The act of putting is a complicated exercise. A golfer must read the slope of the green, visualize the break and understand the speed of the green. They also have to cleanly hit the putt. For some, it may be hard to believe that a simple act of concentration can improve such a complex skill.

But the eyes, Vickers says, are a powerful tool.

At some point this weekend, a golfer will have a 5-foot putt for par. Vickers will watch his routine, his preparation and focus. And whether that golfer realizes it or not, she will recognize aspects of the Quiet Eye.