Chipping Yips

Every villain has an origin story. So do the yips. Mine started over two decades ago in a friendly round my uncle. He was a certified golf addict. Lifetime player, never that good, mid-90s on a good day. But he loved the game with everything he had, and when I was a teenager, he introduced me to it from soup to nuts. The grip, the stance, how to read a green, etiquette. He gave me the whole education. Within months, I was beating him. He was proud. Genuinely. He told me I had a lot of potential, and the way he said it, I believed him. I had a good run through my teens, got competitive, played seriously. Life was good on the course. Then college came, and with it, less time and less golf.   The Look At some point during college, I was back in my hometown and reunited with my uncle over a casual round the local muni he trained me up on. Just the two of us. Nothing on the line. I remember the hole clearly. Simple, flat chip maybe a few yards off the green from the fringe. Nothing comp...

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...