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 complicated. The kind of shot I had hit a thousand times.
I stubbed it a few feet.
I can still see the look on his face. Big eyes. Dropped jaw. Pure shock. "What was that??"
Like he genuinely could not understand how someone with my game could produce something like that. Like he was watching a pianist forget how to play a C chord.
I expressed the same shock right back. Which was half-true. I was confused, embarrassed, and scared all at once. But I laughed it off. Made some excuse about how I hadn't played much and how touch around the greens is the first thing to go when you take time off.
He accepted it and we moved on and finished the round.
But I knew. Somewhere underneath the excuse and the laugh, I knew it was something worse. And that knowledge scared me in a way I wasn't ready to sit with. So I didn't.
The Second Look
Denial is a powerful thing. No way a natural like me had the yips. Besides, back then we weren't "Google first" when it came to problems. There were no forums, no YouTube rabbit holes, no Reddit threads full of strangers sharing the exact same symptoms. If it wasn't in Golf Digest, it basically didn't exist. And the only thing Golf Digest occasionally wrote about was the putting yips. I didn't even know chipping yips were a thing. I thought "the yips" meant putting problems. My problem didn't have a name, which made it easier to pretend it wasn't real.
As mentioned before, I played much less frequently came college. Maybe once very few months. But what I did do with my friend was go to the range. We went to the range together a lot, the kind of regular crew that bangs balls, shoots the shit, and has a great time. I enjoyed those range sessions. Just like when I was a junior, I reveled in the compliments about the silkiness of my swing and the bombs it garnered.
But the crew eventually wanted to take the range play to the course, so I had to accept. And the first time we actually played a round together, it happened again.
I remember the look on my friend's face. Not words this time. Just a laugh and a flash of shock. The "What??" face. Because he had watched me stripe it on the range for months, and now he was watching me straight up miss the ball on a tiny chip.
The contrast was that stark. That was humiliating.
I said nothing. I moved on, and kept denying.
New York. New Life. Same Problem Waiting.
I gave up golf for college. Just stopped. Didn't want to deal with it, didn't have time, told myself I'd come back to it later when things settled down.
Then came grad school and then the grind in New York. I landed at a top-tier Wall Street boutique bank and got to work. The hours were brutal and the pressure was real, but I loved it. I was good at it. I was on the fast track to partnership, working on billion dollar problems, and building a voice in corporate board rooms. The climb was steep and I was climbing.
Golf wasn't part of that chapter. I was too busy, too focused, and honestly, too willing to use both as cover. The yips stayed in a drawer somewhere, unexamined. New York had no room for them and I had no desire to look.
Eventually I moved to California to live the dream. And when I got there, I wanted golf back in my life. I wanted a fresh start.
My clubs were over a decade old—unforgiving blades from my junior golf days. I wanted to recommit properly, so I went through a full Titleist fitting, top to bottom of the bag. It was exciting. New chapters deserve new equipment.
When we got to the wedges, I casually mentioned to the fitter that I wanted something forgiving. Said I'd chunk from time to time. Kept it light. He played it equally cool, no alarm, just a professional nod and a suggestion: Vokey wedges, more bounce, wider sole. The K grind. Classic prescription for someone who tends to dig.
I walked out thinking I was fixed. Clean slate. Fresh start. New clubs, new chapter, problem solved.
The Coping Strategies
It was not solved.
The yips were right there waiting for me on the first course I played after shelling out a couple grand on a brand new set of clubs. It's such a terrible feeling, especially after spending all that cash.
What followed was a long, slow education in the art of hiding it. I got good at finding excuses to chip when nobody was watching. I'd putt from way off the green whenever I could get away with it. Sometimes I'd just punch it up quickly and move on before anyone had time to process what they'd seen. You develop a whole toolkit of workarounds when you're not ready to face the real thing.
I buried myself in work again. 80-hour weeks made it easy to stay away from the course, and the hours gave me a clean alibi. I wasn't avoiding golf because I was broken. I was avoiding golf because I was busy. There's a difference. I told myself that. And I lied to myself, telling me that I didn’t care that much about playing.
At some point I confided with someone at work, of all places, but he was someone I mentored professionally and who became a good friend over the years there. We had done a lot of good deals over the years and had fun doing it. He was into golf and kept egging me to play. So I had to tell him. I told him I had mental issues around chipping. He looked at me and said: "You're one of the smartest people I know. It seems like you should have no problem working this out."
He meant it as encouragement. It landed differently.
Because if I was one of the smartest people in our profession, and I couldn't execute a 20-yard chip due to a mental block, what did that say about my brain? That thought scared me more than the yips themselves. So I kept avoiding. Kept refusing to feel it, acknowledge it, accept it.
I would later learn that acceptance is actually the beginning of everything. But that lesson was still years away.
The Crossroads
A later job change into the corporate client side brought two things I hadn't had in a long time: better work-life balance, and a coworker who was a serious former college player. Golf crept back in. And with it, the yips, right on schedule, patient as ever.
That's when something shifted.
I looked at my life and took stock. Ivy League undergrad and grad school. Top-tier Wall Street firm. Quick run up to partnership. Elevated to the C-suite. Personal life was great. Partner and family were wonderful. Everything had gone more or less according to plan. I had built what I set out to build.
And yet my favorite pastime, the game I learned as a kid, was marred with a hideous, grotesque mark I couldn't escape.
I thought about who I was. The kinds of problems I solved professionally. The billion dollar deals. The high pressure negotiations with everything on the line. I had never backed down from any of it. I was not going to let a 20-yard chip shot beat me.
No way in hell.
I decided I would bring everything I had. Money. Time. Energy. Every resource, every bit of focus. Whatever it took. I had conquered harder things. I would conquer this. I committed fully to winning and would beat this damn thing with sheer brute force.
Funny thing about that. I'll get to it.
But first, I had to understand what I was actually dealing with. Not the excuses, not the workarounds, not the denial. The thing itself. What the yips actually feel like when you stop running and finally turn around to look at them.
That's next.
— Nick
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