History of the Green-Reading Book

A green-reading book is not a yardage book.

A yardage book measures the hole from tee to green. A green-reading book is a topographic map of the putting surface, used as a putting guide. Golfers have carried pocket yardage books for decades. The printed contour map of a green — slope a player can read before the putt — is a later, separate idea.

Jim Stracka invented that second idea in 2007: using a topography map for golfers as a putting guide. He did not invent the caddie yardage book.

Two lineages

Caddie yardage books. Tour caddies drew and sold pocket books of distances. “Gorjus” George Lucas, a former Arnold Palmer caddie, produced his first full book for the 1976 Memphis Classic. From 1976 to 2008 he made the neon / bright-orange hand-drawn books known on Tour as The Book. Lucas was inducted into the Caddie Hall of Fame in 2009. That is the yardage-book line. See also About StrackaLine.

Topographic green maps. Jim’s background was technology, not looping. In the mid-2000s, digital GPS yardage was already in the bag. SkyCaddie was the consumer name for it — how far to the flag, before smartphone apps. Those devices did not map slope on the green. Putting is half the game, and GPS of that era had no data for it. (Chase Stracka’s paraphrase of Jim’s thinking. Not a recorded Jim quotation.)

The spark was a round at The Bridges, Rancho Santa Fe, California, with Scotty Cameron. Sports Illustrated later reported Jim’s thought as: “This is a great putter, but if you don’t know where to hit it, what good is it?” (Mike Purkey, SI, 28 November 2018). SI also reported that Jim had built a CAD add-on to show how water drained off parking lots and other surfaces, then retrofitted that software to laser-scan a golf green. The fledgling company made The Bridges its first project.

Chase Stracka, co-founder, did the early laser scanning.

Books and apps now. Yardage pages and green maps sit in the same catalog — yardage, USGA greens guides, and combos — plus digital maps. They are still different jobs. Side-by-side: Yardage Book vs Green Reading Book. How to read the green page: How to Read a Green Book.

Timeline

  • 1976 — George Lucas’s first full yardage book, Memphis Classic. Distances and hole diagrams. Not green topography.
  • January 2007 — Jim and Chase Stracka launch Stracka Design Company / StrackaLine at the PGA Merchandise Show, Orlando. Laser-scanned Greens Guides. First scan project: The Bridges.
  • 2008 — Stracka acquires Lucas’s Tour caddie yardage-book business. Green maps go into those books. Company timeline published 18 April 2019 on Golf Wire: first green-reading book on the PGA Tour that year.
  • 2009 — Same Golf Wire timeline: green-reading books made available to regular golfers. Lucas, Caddie Hall of Fame. Live About documents Lucas Glover with a StrackaBook en route to winning the 2009 U.S. Open at Bethpage Black.
  • 2011 — First green-reading app in the Apple and Android stores (Golf Wire timeline).
  • 2013 — Nationwide laser-scanning program; hole-location technology (live About; Golf Wire).
  • 2015 — Collegiate program; PGA Tour partnership for green contour and pin data in Shot Tracker (live About). Golf Wire: collegiate teams adopt the books.
  • 2019 — USGA / R&A interpretation of Rule 4.3 on green-reading materials in effect (size and scale limits). Golf Wire notes USGA approval of StrackaLine books that year. This page is not a rules engine. What ships, and the size/scale limits, are on What’s Legal? – USGA Rules. USGA’s own material: usga.org/GRM.

Launch is 2007. Lucas acquisition is 2008.

What the printed book is (and is not)

A StrackaLine USGA greens guide shows dual-view topographic slope in percent. It does not pick the line. Rule 4.3 context — paper size, image scale, no recommended line of play from ball location — lives on What’s Legal?, not here.

Paper vs phone: Printed Green Book vs App.

Person page: Jim Stracka. Company page (do not treat this article as a bio): About. Resource hub: Resources.

Current company figures, not 2007 figures: more than 2 million physical books sold; 31,000+ courses in the database; 13,000+ with full hyper-accurate green data; 900+ NCAA teams (About).

Store-side George copy remains at strackaline.com/history. It is not this page and should not redirect here.