Is a pull just a small hook?

No. The difference is structural, not one of degree. A hook has the face closed relative to the path, so the spin axis tilts and the ball bends in the air. A pull has the two matched, the axis stays near level, and the ball holds whatever line it started on.

Does a pull mean I am coming over the top?

Often. Golf Distillery lists it among the causes, and an out-to-in path with the face square to it produces a pull rather than a slice, because no gap is left to tilt the spin axis. The path has not changed. The face has stopped arriving behind it.

The pull goes the right distance and never curves. Is it worth changing?

It is worth re-aiming, which is a different job. A straight, repeatable miss is a bearing error: a tight pattern sitting in the wrong place, and moving where the pair points moves the pattern whole. Holding the face open against a matched path instead rebuilds the gap you do not have.

How do I tell a push from a straight shot at a badly aimed target?

Not from the ball, which does the same thing in both cases. Put the target line in the picture: a club on the ground aimed at your target, and your shoulder line checked against it. If the body was aimed right and the ball flew straight along that line, the miss is aim.

Does an off-centre strike break the reading?

It qualifies it. TrackMan attaches a condition to the rule, that assuming centered contact the ball curves toward the face angle and away from the club path. Contact out of the heel or toe, most of all with a driver, can put curve on a shot whose numbers matched.

What goes wrong, and why

Pull shot, push shot: the misses that don't curve

A pull and a push are the two misses where nothing bent. Here is how the start line names which one you hit, what the nine-flight grid is good for, and why the straight miss costs less than a curving one.

A golfer mid-swing at a charity tournament, the fairway and trees running away behind. U.S. Space Force photo by Senior Airman Danielle McBride, Public domain

The two misses where nothing bent

-2° to 2°Spin axis tilt TrackMan still counts as straight

Golf Distillery defines a pull as a ball that starts left of the target and continues on that line, without lateral spin. Reverse every direction and you have a push. Neither one bends, which is what makes them awkward to read: a slice hands you a curve to interpret, while a pull gives you one piece of evidence, the line it left on, and nothing after that.

Curve comes from the tilt of the ball's spin axis, and TrackMan treats anything between minus two and two degrees as a straight shot, worth about 2.2 yards either side on the 150-yard example in its table. Tilt comes from the face and the path disagreeing: a zero face to path, in TrackMan's wording, is a face angle and a club path that have the same value.

How close is close enough to look straight? Two degrees of gap on an LPGA-length drive of 218 yards already bends it fourteen yards. So a drive that finished well left of the flag and never looked like moving in the air had a face and a path inside a degree of each other, both of them pointing left.

The start line is the half you can see

Adam Young states the modern rule in one line: the ball starts roughly on the line of the clubface and then curves away from the path. That makes the first thirty yards a readout of the face. Leave left of the flag and the face pointed left of it. Then the absence of curve hands you the second number, because a shot that did not bend had a path sitting where the face sat.

Do not read the split as a coefficient. Young's page puts the clubface at around 75 percent of starting direction and the path at 25. The PGA Academy's TrackMan page divides it by club instead, 75 percent for a mid iron and roughly 85 for a driver. Two sources worth reading, two answers, and the safe conclusion is that the face dominates the start line by an amount that shifts with loft.

Nine flights, and what the grid is for

Three start lines crossed with three curves give the nine ball flights: left, straight or right to begin with, then bending left, holding, or bending right. The pull and the push occupy the middle row, either side of the shot that does neither. The grid inverts the problem. You cannot see a face angle or a club path, and no phone camera resolves them, but you can see a start line and a curve.

The grid is older than the instrument that corrected it. Young quotes the version it replaced, in which the ball started along the swing path and finished where the clubface aimed: the same nine boxes with the mechanism the wrong way round. The current version carries a condition of its own. TrackMan phrases it as assuming centered contact, and a strike out of the heel can send a ball on a line neither number predicted.

Hear it

Three clicks: takeaway, top, impact. Start at the tour beat and move to whichever one you can actually swing to.

Why a straight pull costs less than a slice

13 yards against 9Offline cost of one degree of face, then of path, 250-yard driver

Price the two. A matched pair off by one degree, face and path together, on a drive carrying 250 yards puts the ball roughly four and a half yards left of your aim: 250 times the tangent of one degree, with no curve to add. Adam Young measured the unmatched version on the same 250-yard driver: one degree of face change alone moved the ball thirteen yards offline, one degree of path change nine.

Four and a half against thirteen, out of the same single degree. The extra is curve, and curve is where the yards go. It is also the harder repair, because a face-to-path gap is two numbers that have to move in an order. A pull is one error committed twice, by two parts already cooperating. Which is why a slicer who closes the face and leaves the path alone starts pulling it, and why that is progress.

What the video settles, and what it cannot

Neither number is in your footage. A phone films the clubhead as a smear and cannot report a face angle at contact. Pebble Swing reads joint angles out of the frames and the backswing-to-downswing tempo ratio out of the motion, and face angle is not among them. What the frames do hold is the aim of the whole apparatus, and a matched miss is precisely a question about aim.

Both Golf Distillery pages open their causes with poor alignment, the one cause a still frame can settle, provided the frame contains a target line. Lay a club on the turf pointing at your target before you record. Without it the video has no left and right except your own body, and a stance aimed five degrees right, delivering face and path down its own line, produces a dead straight ball you will call a push.

Questions

Is a pull just a small hook?: No. The difference is structural, not one of degree. A hook has the face closed relative to the path, so the spin axis tilts and the ball bends in the air. A pull has the two matched, the axis stays near level, and the ball holds whatever line it started on.
Does a pull mean I am coming over the top?: Often. Golf Distillery lists it among the causes, and an out-to-in path with the face square to it produces a pull rather than a slice, because no gap is left to tilt the spin axis. The path has not changed. The face has stopped arriving behind it.
The pull goes the right distance and never curves. Is it worth changing?: It is worth re-aiming, which is a different job. A straight, repeatable miss is a bearing error: a tight pattern sitting in the wrong place, and moving where the pair points moves the pattern whole. Holding the face open against a matched path instead rebuilds the gap you do not have.
How do I tell a push from a straight shot at a badly aimed target?: Not from the ball, which does the same thing in both cases. Put the target line in the picture: a club on the ground aimed at your target, and your shoulder line checked against it. If the body was aimed right and the ball flew straight along that line, the miss is aim.
Does an off-centre strike break the reading?: It qualifies it. TrackMan attaches a condition to the rule, that assuming centered contact the ball curves toward the face angle and away from the club path. Contact out of the heel or toe, most of all with a driver, can put curve on a shot whose numbers matched.

Sources

Every number on this page comes from one of these.