Action was clearly required. And action would be taken in due time.

“(Hadwin’s text) was something like, ‘I just watched the replay. We’ve got to work on my putting. I didn’t know I was that bad,’ ” said Saunders.

Brett Saunders, the Vancouver-based teaching pro who was Hadwin’s coach at the time, got a text shortly after Hadwin saw that video, which Saunders had already watched himself.

“It was very eye-opening to see that, to say the least. It was almost a little shocking to think that I could be playing at the level that I was but doing some of the things that I was doing.”

In a matter of a few years, Hadwin would transform his putting from a weakness to a strength. He’d do it with hard work — endless repetitions on practice greens all over the continent. And he’d do it with the help of sports science — tweaking his stroke and his putter of choice based on data gathered at a Vancouver-area putting lab run by Saunders and Saunders’s partner, Scott Rodgers.

All these years later, of course, Hadwin is anything but bad. Heading into this week’s Presidents Cup in Jersey City, N.J., Hadwin ranked 18th on the PGA Tour in strokes gained putting — an advanced metric that measures a player’s performance on the putting green relative to the rest of the field. In other words, when it comes to putting, this year Hadwin ranks among the top 15 per cent of players on the best golf tour on the planet.

And given that 41 per cent of the strokes taken on the PGA Tour last year were putts — well, it’s among the most important statistics in the sport. And it helps explain how, back in January, he became just the eighth PGA Tour player to shoot a round of 59 — an accomplishment that required the sinking of copious putts and spurred Odyssey, the manufacturer of his preferred model of putter, to present him with a gold-plated replica of the club.

The Hadwin of 2010 wasn’t equipped to shoot a round of 59. In some ways, it was remarkable that he was climbing pro golf’s ranks with a blind spot so pronounced. And certainly it spoke to the strength of the rest of his game.

Why was he struggling with his putter so immensely? There were those who were convinced it was a problem that wasn’t going away — that Hadwin simply didn’t possess a knack for rolling a ball into a hole. Golf has long included in its mythology a belief among many that great putters are born, not made. Gerry Hadwin, for instance, has been a gifted putter for as long as he can remember.

“I could make it from anywhere,” Gerry said. “When I was playing my best I’d have a 20-footer and I’d say, ‘Guys, just pick this out of the hole for me.’ And sure enough it’d go in the hole.”

Wayne Vollmer, a former PGA Tour pro from the Vancouver area and a contemporary of Gerry Hadwin’s, nodded in acknowledgement of Gerry’s short-grass prowess.

“With a wedge and a putter, Gerry could get up and down out of a garbage can. He was that good. And his son was that bad,” Vollmer said. “It’s definitely not genetic.”

Vollmer remembered watching a 15-year-old Adam Hadwin play a round in which Adam hit the ball beautifully and putted “horrendously,” after which he instructed Gerry Hadwin to “do something” about his boy’s glaring weakness. Not that Vollmer had much hope that it would help.

“In our day, we all thought you were just born a good putter — you just had that feel,” Vollmer said.

“He was one of the worst putters in the world. Like, he couldn’t make it from three feet if the hole was the size of a crater.”

- Gerry Hadwin, Adam Hadwin’s father

Vollmer said he was concerned that Adam Hadwin, for all his gifts, would follow the career arc of many Canadian pros that came before him.

“There was Dick Zokol, Dave Barr, Stan Leonard, myself — all coming out of this area, all terrible putters,” said Vollmer, speaking of the Vancouver-area pros who made it on the PGA Tour.

He could have added to that list Moe Norman, the late legendary ball-striking machine from Kitchener who more than once said he “hated putting.” Ditto George Knudson, the smooth-swinging Torontonian and winner of eight tournaments on the PGA Tour in the 1960s and ’70s who was considered the best Canadian player in history until around the time Weir won the Masters in 2003. The great Jack Nicklaus once assessed Knudson as possessing a “million-dollar swing and a 10-cent putter.”

Former PGA Tour player Jim Nelford, like Knudson a member of Golf Canada’s Hall of Fame, said a researcher once attached a heart-rate monitor to Knudson during a round of golf. Knudson’s ticker showed no signs of stress from tee to fairway, where he thrived, but went “haywire” when he approached the green.

“George was deathly afraid of putting,” said Nelford. “He was a great ball striker who didn’t like the uncertainty of putting.”

And even Weir, Canada’s only major-championship winner, was never known as a great putter. To this day he credits his victory at Augusta National, where the undulating and uber-quick greens have often been said to reduce the tournament to a putting contest, to his prowess with a pitching wedge.