Chipping Yips

There are words a golfer must never say out loud. Not "I'm playing great." Not "This is my year." Definitely not "Watch this." But the most dangerous words of all — the ones the golf gods punish swiftly and without mercy — are these: "I've figured it out." Go ahead. Say them. See what happens. I told you in my last post that I've come out the other side. And I meant it. Twenty-five years of war with the chipping yips, and I've finally found something that works. I play with confidence now. I score. I chip freely. But I'd be lying if I left it there. What I've built is more like a house of cards than a fortress. A hard-won, functional house of cards — but it requires tending. Things drift. Life gets in the way. And every now and then I have to go back around and reset. That's just the reality of it.   It's a Lot of Things Holding Together at Once What got me here wasn't one thing. It was a constellation — techni...

Let me paint you a picture. It's a golf trip with the boys. The kind you plan for months, the kind where everyone's trash-talking in the group chat for weeks leading up. We're on a beautiful course. The weather is perfect. I've been striping it all day — driver, irons, the whole bag. I'm in my element. And then I miss a green. No big deal, right? Everyone misses greens. Except for me, in that moment, standing over a simple chip shot from just off the fringe, forty feet from the pin, plenty of green to work with, something happens that I can't explain and can't stop. As I take the club back, a fraction of a second before the downswing begins, my body is hijacked. There's no other word for it. Like an alien takes over. I feel nothing in my hands. My wrists fire violently, involuntarily — a full-body twitch that I had no hand in — and the club buries itself into the ground a foot behind the ball. The ball moves maybe three inches. My buddies say nothing. Th...