More solar questions

New to solar, trying to figure it out and have some questions. I have 2 brand new 6 volt golf cart batteries from sams club wired in series. I have a new 100 watt solar panel kit that came with the panel, wiring and charge controller. I'm not getting the correct voltage at the batteries. I've run a bunch of tests and suspect the charge controller is bad. So I plugged the panel directly to the batteries. open circuit test show I'm getting about 20 volts from the panel. Then hooked up to the batteries it shows 12.1 and holding for the past hour. It is all hooked up properly. Could the batteries be bad? I have a newer better charge controller on the way but now I don't know if that's the problem. I have a previous post named understanding solar that has a little more back ground info. Any help is appreciated. Thank you