WHY DOES THIS . . .OFTEN LEAD TO THIS? : IN PUTTING, IT’S CALLED THE YIPS : Hard to Explain, but Something’s Clearly Missing

The sun was shining when Lanny Wadkins walked off the 18th green after a practice round at Pebble Beach. But he stopped smiling when he was asked a question he didn’t want to answer, about a subject he didn’t want to discuss, about a word he didn’t want to hear.

Right on cue, a dark cloud materialized out of nowhere. Mighty thunder pealed, echoing off the grandstands like trash cans being dropped on a cart path. A cold wind suddenly began to blow.

Wadkins narrowed his eyes, as if to say “See! I told you so!”

What words can cause such a response? Besides the obvious ones, of course, words such as . . .

Audit . . .

Better sit down . . .

and There’s a Mr. Starr here to see you.

In golf, there are no more awful words than these knee-knocking, wrist-breaking, mind-bending, brain-twisting, elbow-quivering, eye-watering, stomach-heaving bad boys . . .

The Yips.

Just hearing the word mentioned, Wadkins walked away as fast as he could.

“I don’t want to talk about the yips,” he said over his shoulder. “Just like I don’t want to talk about shanks, either. I guess it’s a nerve thing. I don’t know. That’s as far as I want to go in this discussion.

“You start talking about yips and you might bring them on. So why risk it?”

Sounds sensible enough. But just because you don’t talk about the yips doesn’t mean you can’t get them, does it? You know what the yips are. It’s when you simply can’t make a putt, when your brain tells your hands what to do and your hands aren’t listening.

Johnny Miller has the yips. He admits it, which surely is the first step to recovery, right? If it were only that easy. Miller says describing the yips to someone who hasn’t had them is almost impossible, but he gives it a try anyway.

“When the putter went off like a firecracker in your hands and you knocked a 10-footer eight feet past the hole--or left it four feet short,” he said.

Miller is in such a state because of the yips that he is going to play only five Senior PGA Tour events this year, even though there’s more prize money waiting to be raked up out there than there are grains of sand in the bunkers.

The scariest shot in golf has to be the putt when you have no idea where the ball is going to go. That’s what the yips can do to you.

“You can stand over a 10-foot putt and no matter how hard you try, you can’t take the putter away from the ball,” Miller said. “Everything freezes. You lose all sense of how hard to hit the putt. Finally, the putter bolts away from the ball and then forward with an uncontrollable jerk.

“Your mind leaves your body, as though you’re in a movie watching somebody hold the putter for you.”

Sounds attractive, doesn’t it?

The yips are so ugly and so destructive and so unpredictable, no wonder Wadkins doesn’t even want to talk about them. They might be catching. Heck, they can cure cholera, but there’s nothing you can do about the yips?

If he has problems putting, Wadkins said it’s always something mechanical. He said there is always a sign when something is going wrong with his putting.

“The first indication is that the ball doesn’t go into the damned hole,” he said.

“But even if your stroke looks like crap and the ball still goes into the hole, you leave it alone. You don’t change anything.”

And if it doesn’t go in the hole, well, then it’s time to go to work. Jesper Parnevik has had putting problems on occasion, which means he is sort of an expert about how to shake the yips. What to do? Basically just about anything you can think of.

Parnevik’s low moment on the greens might have been before the 1996 PGA at Valhalla when he was playing a tournament in Sweden and used five putters, one of them long-handled.

Nothing seemed to work, but someone in Sweden whom Parnevik knew asked him to try something in addition to that funny-looking putter with the rubber insert--a new grip.

“It was flat, it looked like a hockey stick,” he said. “It looked really funny. I tried it and I started putting well.”

Parnevik didn’t make the cut at Valhalla, but at least he felt better about himself. He visited putting guru Dave Pelz, who told him that putting is a lot of luck. That changed Parnevik’s attitude, which changed his luck, which improved his putting. Go figure.

“You know, everybody misses putts,” Parnevik said.

Short game guru Dave Pelz tells his clients at his 31-city, one-day putting clinics that half of the six-foot putts the pros try don’t go in and that less than 25% of 10-footers go in.

“And those are the best players in the world,” Pelz said.

“What you’re doing is building a frustration if you don’t know the real odds.

“You start worrying and blaming yourself, and that’s where the yips start. Once the mind really believes you’re going to screw up, it makes it happen.”

Some people just putt better than others. The generally accepted list of great putters is a short one: Brad Faxon, Mark O’Meara, Ben Crenshaw, Loren Roberts, Lee Janzen, Jim Furyk, Phil Mickelson, a few others.

O’Meara said you can’t cover up bad putting.

“You look at the putting statistics and they don’t lie . . . they tell the truth,” O’Meara said.

There’s no shame in admitting you have a problem, O’Meara said. Denial is bad, of course, but when every putt you hit seems to avoid the hole at all costs, you can’t very well cover it up. If there is an antidote for the yips, it’s there between your eyes.

“The speed is off, you don’t see the line, you’ve got the yips,” O’Meara said. “What you need to do is step back and breathe. It’s not a life-and-death situation. Just roll the ball.

“When you get older, all the negative things in your life start building up. A lot of times, it’s technique, but a lot of times it’s mental. Your mind is like a computer. Too much information coming out of there and it gets in your way.”

So maybe the best way to get over the yips is to trick your mind. Parnevik sometimes places two clubs on the green on either side of the hole pointing toward it like a funnel. No matter where he hits it, the ball is always going to go in.

Miller has gone different routes. He says he was the first tour player to try a long-handled putter (in the 1982 L.A. Open), he has putted cross-handed and left-handed and put his weight back and put his weight forward.

He told Golf World that he once used the so-called “I don’t care” approach to trick himself into nonchalance and the “let’s pretend” approach imagining he’s one of his kids or the putt is actually his second.

Said Miller: “I call these W.O.O.D. strokes because they Work Only One Day.”

*

“Tommy Bolt’s putter spent more time in the air than Lindbergh.”

--Jimmy Demaret

So when things go badly on the greens, how do players react?

Some suffer in silence, like Tom Watson. Others send their putters airborne, which Tiger Woods has done on more than one occasion. He is hardly alone in this conduct. Even such legends as Bobby Jones, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus were club throwers at one time in their glorious careers.

Woods said he just can’t help himself when he tosses his putter toward his bag.

“Honestly, I think anyone who plays the game, they are their own worst critic,” he said.

Then call them victims of their own great expectations.

“Only two things are going to happen on a putt: Make or miss. And obviously you are not going to try to miss the putt,” Woods said. “If you make the putt, that’s great. If you miss, you are disappointed.

“And that’s the outlook I have always had. I always want to make every putt and I’m kind of disappointed if I don’t.”

Kind of disappointed? Watson has been wrestling with the yips for years. He has taken advice from everybody except Dr. Ruth and Dr. Laura. Watson’s problem isn’t the long putts, it’s the short ones of five feet and closer.

“Bad momentum” is what Watson calls it.

“You really focus in on the hole when you’re putting well, but when you’re not, then you start thinking, ‘I don’t want to miss it here’ and ‘I don’t want to get it there’ and ‘I’ve got to get it close’ and ‘If I don’t get it close, then I’m gonna miss the putt,’ all of that,” Watson said.

“That works on your mind. That works on your confidence.”

Last year, Watson finished fourth at the Masters and tied for 10th at the British Open, so imagine what would happen to his confidence if his putts were to fall on a consistent basis.

At 48 and with only one victory since 1987, Watson has set the bar high and difficult to clear.

“I just want to go out and prove to myself that I can make the putts under pressure when I have to,” he said. “If I get on a roll, who knows what will happen?”

*

“The yips, oh, they’re really something.”

--Byron Nelson

They’re something Woods tries not to know too much about, but unlike Wadkins, at least he’ll discuss them.

“How would I get rid of the yips? Probably practice,” he said. “I don’t know. The yips, I guess they’re spurred on probably by mechanics. Then, all of a sudden, it starts getting into your head.”

Time and again, we are reminded that’s the worst place for them. Nelson said he heard about the yips for the first time in the early 1930s and doesn’t think they’ve changed all that much.

“They’ve been around forever,” Nelson said.

And their future looks secure. The yips are going nowhere slowly, no matter all the precautions taken to try to get rid of them--putters with inserts, mental exercises, long putters, coaching, videos, books, magazine instruction, better greens, better balls.

Nelson said that maybe the best thing to do is, well, just play your way through the yips.

“You know, when someone is putting well, they’ve got a feeling,” he said. “There’s positive feeling. The best putters don’t look like they hit the putts, they just roll the ball. O’Meara, Mickelson, they do have days when they don’t make them all, but they burn the hole a lot. Just watch them roll the ball.”

And what about bad putting?

“Oh, goodness, the yips, they’re just mental. You don’t have any rhythm. The yips have affected a lot of players, and some come back and some don’t.”

There are a lot of bad things that can happen on the golf course, but all of them pale in comparison to the ugliest words of them all.

“The yips, it’s the worst thing that can happen to you in golf,” Nelson said. “You never know when it’s going to happen to you.”

Sounds pretty awful, all right. Maybe Wadkins had the correct approach after all. Just avoid the subject entirely, stay in bed, cover up and stick your head under your pillow. The yips can’t find you there . . . can they?