How I learned to embrace, if not love, the yips, the debilitating affliction first named by Tommy Armour and battled by golf greats from Sam Snead to Bernhard Langer.
You know you really love golf when even a case of the “yips” doesn’t spoil the fun.
First I had the putting yips, and then the chipping yips. The two often go hand in hand. I’ve been afflicted with the game’s most dreaded virus for more than a decade.
If you have to ask what the yips are, then you’ve definitely never had them.
Golden Age star Tommy Armour is credited—or blamed—with giving the name “yips” to golf’s most dreaded affliction.
The term is said to have been popularized by the Silver Scot, Tommy Armour, a Golden Age star and later a golf teacher, to explain the difficulties that forced him to retire from tournament play. In describing the yips, golfers use terms such as twitches, staggers, jitters and jerks. Merriam-Webster defines the yips as “a state of nervous tension affecting an athlete (such as a golfer) in the performance of a crucial action.”
It’s a struggle to score even passably well when you have the yips. But throughout my troubles I’ve found it of great comfort to know that I have illustrious company in a club no one has ever willingly joined.
Eight-time major champion Tom Watson has said that his putting yips likely cost him one major victory a year during his heyday.
The immortal Sam Snead, whose velvety swing won him seven majors, fought the putting yips for more than 50 years. For a brief period in the 1960s, Snead enjoyed success putting croquet style. But that radical technique was soon banned, forcing Snead to switch, with varying degrees of success, to a side-saddle method the rest of his career.
And it was the putting yips that finally drove nine-time major champion Ben Hogan from the game. Fans cringed as they watched the aging Hogan stand an excruciatingly long time over short putts before he finally managed to pull the trigger.
Sam Snead demonstrates his unique, anti-yip croquet-style putting stroke in the 1960s. Sadly, the technique was soon banned.
I’ve tried everything from putting and chipping cross-handed to stroking short putts with my eyes closed. For a while I even experimented with putting right-handed (I’m a lefty), but that felt unacceptably weird.
Golf psychologists often recommend relaxation and visualization techniques. The theory is that by focusing on something that will keep your mind busy during a chip or putt—such as music, counting numbers, rhymes, and puzzles—your subconscious will stop trying to interfere with the natural flow of the stroke. In extreme cases, when golf ultimately becomes far more frustrating than fun, psychologists agree that the best advice is for golfers to take at least a short break from the game.
I’ve no idea why, but rather than being discouraged by my battles with the yips, I find experimenting with the various workarounds recommended by pros and psychologists endlessly fascinating.
If Bernhard Langer can defeat the yips, then maybe I can too. The two-time major champion has suffered from the putting yips throughout most of his long and illustrious career, constantly changing his technique to overcome his jitters. Most impressively, the German won both his majors on Augusta National’s notoriously difficult greens.
Anyway, things could always be worse. Take the case of Kevin Na. Playing with the lead in the 2012 Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass, Na suddenly developed a case of the full-swing yips. Once as natural as breathing, pulling the trigger on his golf swing became soul-crushingly difficult. Na struggled with the full-swing yips for years before he finally declared himself cured. The Korean-American went on to win five times on the PGA Tour before he cashed out and joined the Liv International Series in 2022.
So the takeaway is that my troubles with the yips could be worse, and that the affliction can indeed be beaten. Like all sufferers, I need to believe that salvation is just a single, jitter-free putt away.
