I knew I had a problem. I had known for a while, honestly. I just kept showing up to rounds, yipping it around the greens, and telling myself I'd figure it out eventually. Eventually became a long time coming.
So I finally went online and looked for someone local. Found a PGA pro at a nearby muni, booked a session, and when I reached out to explain what was going on, I didn't call it the yips. I said I had "issues with chipping." In golf, that's usually enough to get the conversation started without having to go into the full embarrassing details. Looking back, the fact that I couldn't even bring myself to say the word "yips" was its own red flag, a blocker I didn't fully understand until much later. But at the time, "chipping problem" felt like the honest and appropriately vague description of what was happening to me.
We met on a quiet afternoon at the practice green. Nobody else around. I'd get into why that mattered a lot more than I realized at the time in a future post, but for now let's just say the privacy felt like a good thing. I hit a few chips for him to watch. A stub here, a skull there, one that came off reasonably solid. Nothing spectacular, but also nothing like the full meltdowns I was having on the course. Just a guy hitting some mediocre chips on a practice green on a Tuesday afternoon.
He told me my technique was basically fine, then walked me through the fundamentals. Weight forward, ball slightly back, abbreviated stroke that feels almost like a putting motion. Standard stuff, but delivered clearly and with some individual tweaks based on what he was seeing. And as he stood there watching and coaching me through it, I was hitting them well. Not perfectly, but solidly and consistently.
I left feeling like the problem was solved.
That's such a specific kind of confidence that only comes from your very first lesson on something. You go in broken, someone with credentials explains the right way to do it, you feel the immediate improvement during the session, and your brain concludes that the problem is behind you. It's almost logical. The issue was that I was doing it wrong, now I know how to do it right, therefore I will do it right going forward. Case closed.
What I didn't fully appreciate yet is that some muni pros, through no fault of their own, are running a volume business. They see a lot of clients, a lot of them beginners, and they've gotten very good at making people feel helped within an hour. That's not a knock on the guy. He was genuinely trying to help me. But there are really two different kinds of golf lessons, and at this point I had no idea the distinction even existed.
The first kind is what I got. Reinforce the basics, make some targeted adjustments, clean up the most obvious problems, send the student home feeling better about their game. It works for a lot of people. If your chipping is mediocre because you've picked up some bad habits or never really learned the fundamentals, an hour with a good pro can genuinely turn things around.
The second kind is harder to sell and harder to sit through. It's the kind where a coach tears your technique down to the studs and rebuilds it from scratch. You leave feeling completely alien to your own swing. Things feel worse before they feel better, and "better" is weeks of grinding practice away, with more lessons to follow. But what you end up with on the other side is a technique that holds up under pressure, because it's built on a correct foundation rather than a collection of adjustments layered on top of a flawed base. When you're standing over a chip with something on the line, your brain under stress will revert to whatever is most deeply ingrained. Quick fixes don't survive that reversion. Rebuilt fundamentals do. That's the only thing that actually works long term for someone with a real problem, and it's almost impossible to know you need it until you've already tried everything else.
He gave me the first kind, and at the time I had no way of knowing the difference.
My next round, I was yipping it just as bad as before. Maybe worse, because now I had something to compare it to. During the lesson I had felt what it was like to chip without that horrible anxious tension running through my hands and arms. I knew what solid contact felt like. And then I got on the course and lost it completely.
What made it so much harder was the new layer of dread sitting on top of everything. Before the lesson, I had an excuse. I had never worked with a coach, I had some technical flaws, there was a clear reason things were going sideways. But now I had spent real money on this, my first actual dollars toward solving the problem, probably somewhere around a hundred bucks, and it had done nothing. Zero effect on the course. The yips were still there, waiting for me on every chip shot, completely unbothered by the fact that I had hired a professional to make them go away.
That question crept in and stuck around: what if this isn't a technique problem at all? What if something is actually, fundamentally wrong with me? The feeling wasn't quite panic, but it was the first real sense of doom around the whole thing. Like maybe I had a problem that didn't have a solution.
I didn't know it yet, but that first hundred dollars was just the beginning. By the time I was done looking for answers, I'd spend many times that. More lessons, more approaches, more people telling me they could fix it. This was just the beginning.
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