I once stared at a putt from a meter away for three seconds, not knowing how to play it. The line wasn’t difficult. It was straight and flat—a child could have sunk it. But when I went to take the putter back, my hand did something different from what my mind had told it to do. A twitch. The straight line turned into a crooked one.
Golfers call this the yips. People who’ve never experienced it usually think it’s an excuse—a mental thing that you could simply train yourself out of if you just wanted to. I used to think that way myself for a long time. Until it happened to me. Then you realize that, in that moment, your body is more honest than your own will would like it to be.
Interestingly, the yips aren’t as easily explained as I thought. In sports medicine, part of it is described as a type of focal dystonia—a disorder of fine motor control in which, of all things, the very movement you’ve repeated most frequently and with the greatest control fails you. For musicians, this happens with individual fingers. For dart players, it’s the release. Golfers are affected when putting—probably because hardly any movement in sports is performed as often and under as much scrutiny as that one.
The rest, I believe, is actually in the mind—but not in the way you might think. Not as fear alone, but as too much attention on something that should actually happen automatically. The more often a short putt goes wide, the more the movement slips from being automatic into conscious awareness, and everything we suddenly try to control consciously starts to falter. Some call this “choking,” but that doesn’t quite capture it for me. Choking is a slip-up under pressure—a one-time thing, over and done with. The yips often stick around.
I don’t paint golf scenes—I find myself saying that almost too often these days. I paint the moment right before it. And the yips are probably the purest form of that moment that the sport has to offer, because in that instant, the mind becomes louder than the hand, and a practiced stroke suddenly becomes a matter of negotiation. *THE FINAL PUT* emerged from a moment like that. I didn’t want to show a beautiful putt. I wanted to capture that held breath, when nothing has been decided yet. When even two meters suddenly seem too far away. The ball in the picture lies motionless there, much like my hand seemed motionless just before it twitched—before it was no longer so.
I’m not a sports psychologist, and I’m not going to offer advice here that I wouldn’t take seriously myself. What has helped me personally at times: changing my grip, altering my routine, shifting my gaze. It has rarely fixed anything—rather, it has interrupted it—and sometimes that’s enough. Disrupt a movement until your mind stops fixating on it.
Further reading on the research: “The Yips in Golf: A Continuum Between a Focal Dystonia and Choking,” Sports Medicine (2003).
