Relocating Place Where Putts Fall : After Bout With Yips Causes Gaston to Quit Competitive Golf for 14 Years, She Regains Her Touch by Using an Unorthodox Grip

Fourteen clubs in each bag.

That’s the maximum, according to the rules of golf, which are as sacrosanct as the Ten Commandments and violated with considerably less frequency.

Andrea Gaston could make a golf ball do the lambada with 13 clubs in her bag. Unfortunately, the infernal 14th is used on almost every hole.

Funny thing about the putter. As the saying goes--disregard the grammar--sometimes a player can’t tell who is gripping who.

“I don’t know what happened,” Gaston said. “All of a sudden, I couldn’t see the ball going in the hole.”

Because it wouldn’t.

And when it won’t go in the hole, on the whole, the game gets a tad impossible. For Gaston, 36, of Canoga Park, that meant a promising collegiate career skidded to an abrupt halt. Her game unraveled like a balata ball with no cover.

Her competitive layoff lasted 14 years, one for each dusty club in the bag. Especially that wretched putter.

“When you get right down to it,” Gaston said, “I had the yips in my putting that would have scared anybody.”

Yipes. Maybe she was finally scared straight, though it sure didn’t happen overnight.

Gaston, who quit the sport out of abject frustration in 1978, fought her way back to win the Women’s State Amateur championship Dec. 12 at the Golf Club at Quail Lodge on the Monterey Peninsula.

A Bay Area newspaper headline trumpeted Gaston’s pairing in the final with close friend Jody Duclos of Moorpark as “a new beginning.”

Indeed, it represented a Mulligan of sorts, a second chance.

*

Gaston’s boyfriend tried to keep a stiff upper lip, but it wasn’t easy. He’d just been whipped by his sweetheart, costing him the sixth and final spot on the Granada Hills High golf team. What previously had been a boys’ golf team.

Gaston offered to back out.

“No, you earned it,” he said. “ You play.”

She did just that. Gaston, who didn’t take up the game until she was 15, had merely begun to roll up an impressive list of credentials.

After making the highly regarded Granada Hills team as a senior in 1975, she qualified for the U.S. Women’s Open as a freshman at San Jose State two years later. She finished 10th individually in the 1977 NCAA tournament and recorded the lowest round in the event, a one-under-par 71.

Notables in the NCAA championship field included future LPGA standouts Nancy Lopez, Betsy King, Patty Sheehan and Beth Daniel--household names of the sport.

“I had every intention of turning pro,” Gaston said.

And why not? Her star was ascending, her scores descending. She was 20 years old and routinely breaking 70 by the summer of 1978. Six months later, though, all she could break was a putter over her knee.

By next winter, Gaston’s short game had deteriorated and her confidence was shot. Just like that, she couldn’t break 80.

In some athletic circles, Gaston’s particular malady would be termed “losing your nerve.” It doesn’t quite work in her case, because Gaston had plenty of nerves--all of them jangling like a four-alarm fire.

Yips is the ugliest four-letter word in golf. Symptoms vary, but typically include cold sweats, white knuckles, involuntary muscle spasms and, ahem, tightening of the esophageal region.

The degree of difficulty in golf is supposed to be inversely proportional to the length of the shot. Gaston could find the green on a 500-yard par-five with a couple of woods and a wedge. Followed by a lag putt. Followed by a gag putt.

The affliction is largely mental. Gaston tried everything short of voodoo dolls to fix her stroke.

“I could still hit the ball just fine, but my short game. . . . “ Gaston said, her voice trailing off. “It’s funny. When you get into a situation when you’re desperate, you start looking for anything. “

Funny? Definitely the wrong word. Gaston eventually consulted a hypnotist, but to no avail. Her sense of dread on the putting surface was equal parts overwhelming, frustrating, infuriating, embarrassing and paralyzing.

Bernhard Langer of Germany, one of the world’s best players, has fought the yips his entire career. Langer’s current remedy--relapse could be a three-putt away--is a funky cross-handed putting grip that defies description.

There is one known cure.

“I stopped playing,” she said.

Starting in late 1978, Gaston played only a few times each year for the next decade. She gave up tournament golf--once the training ground for her profession of choice--cold turkey. Even when she played a rare recreational round, Gaston didn’t bother with the short putts. Why ruin an otherwise pleasant afternoon?

“If I had a two-footer, most of the time I’d just pick it up,” said Gaston, who works for an acoustics engineering firm in Westlake Village.

Gradually, as the years rolled by and the humiliation and pain ebbed, Gaston’s zest for the game returned. Five years ago, Gaston began playing more often, though her putting remained sporadic at best. Tournament golf, though, was still out of the question.

Two years ago, Gaston began using a cross-handed technique and the putts started to fall more consistently. Twisted as it seems, as a left-hander who plays golf right-handed, perhaps the cross-handed method was Gaston’s best solution all along.

More than a decade of maturity and added perspective didn’t hurt, either.

“Standing over a putt wasn’t do or die anymore,” she said. “Whether I made it or missed it was no reflection on me as a person.

“In the earlier days, how you played defined who you were.”

A friend began pestering Gaston to enter amateur tournaments. Gaston reluctantly agreed, yet picked her spots with care. In the summer of 1992, Gaston entered an 18-hole regional qualifier for the Women’s U.S. Public Links championship. Twenty-five players were seeking three berths in the Publinks field.

“I figured that if I had a bad day, it was no big deal, since it was just one round of golf,” she said. “But if I had a good day. . . . I still had a sleepless night preparing for it.”

Yawn. She earned medalist honors. From there, the comeback--commensurate with her confidence--picked up speed.

Three months ago, Gaston jumped squarely into the national spotlight when she knocked off former U.S. Amateur champion Carol Semple Thompson in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur in Rochester, Minn.

Gaston said she putted “lights out” all week, which made the victory even more gratifying. It was a noteworthy upset--Thompson is considered one of the best amateurs in the nation.

At the State Amateur, another potential Waterloo became a watershed moment. In the second round of match play, Gaston was 1-down with one hole remaining. Appropriately enough, she needed to drain a four-foot knee-knocker on No. 18 to force sudden death. Otherwise, Highway 101 beckoned, and it was not the road to putting salvation.

Kerplunk. Gaston then won the match on the second extra hole. With a wave of a hand--not to mention the putter-- angst became anticipation, just like that.

“I will definitely look forward to the next four-footer for the match,” Gaston said. “Now I can stand over those putts with confidence and think, ‘I’m gonna make it.’ ”

Her showdown with Duclos in the final marked a reunion. They hadn’t seen each other since, oh, around breakfast.

The pair caravaned to Monterey, shared a motel room to cut down on expenses and had their fathers serve as caddies. The players joked all week about how they might meet in the final, then set about proving it was no laughing matter.

After the stroke-play portion was complete and the roommates qualified for match play, the two were placed in opposite brackets. The days rolled by, the opposition body count mounted and the final pairing became a reality.

“We never thought it would actually happen,” said Duclos, 34.

The two had more in common than just their room key. Duclos was a college standout at UCLA in the late 1970s, but married and had three children in six years. There weren’t enough hours in the day to play golf at a competitive level.

In short, Duclos’ game also was mothballed, though not by choice.

“I’ve always had that itch,” Duclos said. “I started having kids, but I was always wondering when I could get back into golf.

“It seemed like whenever I got back in shape and my game started coming around, I got pregnant again.”

The pair met on the practice range at Westlake Village Golf Course 2 1/2 years ago. Gaston recalls noticing that Duclos was wearing a pair of spikes that weren’t exactly on the cutting edge of golf fashion. Duclos’ set of Ben Hogan clubs wasn’t state of the art, either.

“She comes from my time,” thought Gaston, who struck up a conversation.

Their time, obviously, hadn’t come and gone. Telling time, though, remains a problem.

On the morning of the championship match, Duclos woke up in the dark motel room and stared at the ceiling. She was too excited to sleep and was positive that Gaston’s alarm clock was going to sound at any moment.

Duclos, who politely left off the lights so Gaston could sleep, showered and dressed for the showdown.

Gaston, half awake by this point, took a peek at her night stand. The alarm clock, which malfunctioned earlier in the week and almost caused Gaston’s disqualification for being late, must have broken down again.

Gaston grabbed her watch.

It was 4 a.m.

Their tee time, not to mention daybreak, was several hours down the road.

“I’d already been up for an hour,” Duclos said, laughing.

It broke the tension. Both went back to bed, actually got some quality shut-eye, and set out for the championship match.

Neither played well on the front nine, and neither forged more than a one-hole lead until Duclos three-putted the 14th hole to hand Gaston a 2-up lead. Gaston closed out the match, 2 and 1, by knocking in a 20-foot putt to save par at No. 17.

Gaston had made another pivotal putt. Then again, she’d had practice. Duclos admitted with a grin that she made Gaston putt out in situations where she would have conceded the tap-ins to another player.

Duclos, of course, knew better than anyone that the short game wasn’t Gaston’s long suit. Heck, it wasn’t a suit at all, it was a straitjacket.

“I knew Andrea had a little problem with the short ones sometimes,” Duclos said.

Gaston laughed, perhaps because Duclos had used the past tense. Of course, now that those white-knuckle yips seem long gone, Gaston is past being tense.

“If I was (her),” Gaston said, “I’d have done the same thing.”