No Soup(er Bowl) For You

I'm just posting this so I won't get fined....

Hey, for the record, we were posting on the yips while the rest of these guys were still in onesies...  Who knew that Thursday's yipfest would be the high point of his week.  First up, Gary Van Sickle performs a public service by providing us some conversation starters:

The category is, Things You Say After Watching Tiger Woods Struggle (and Fail) to Break 80 While He Shoots His Worst Pro Round Ever on a Rainy Friday Morning at the Waste Management Phoenix Open

Well, there goes the Vardon Trophy… 

Aww, the Presidents Cup team can win without Tiger, anyway… 

Yippy ki-yay… 

Operator, get me the number for 9-1-1... 

Tiger may be related to Aaron Baddeley’s brother, Chip Baddeley… 

Do these new wedges make me look chunky?... 

How many more reps can you have in just one round?... 

Pardon the jokes, this is actually no laughing matter. Tiger Woods, as stated previously, appears to have caught the chipping yips.

Appears, Gary?  But contestants, please remember to phrase your answer in the form of a question.  Gary gets to the nub of the matter later in his piece:

The $64 million dollar question came next. Tiger, do you feel like the chipping is mental? That’s polite talk for the y-word. The questioner knew it, Tiger knew it. “It is mental to an extent because the physical pattern is different,” he answered. “So obviously, the trust is not quite there. Yeah, it’s mental to an extent but I need to physically get the club in a better spot.”

I'll refer at this point to noted biometric expert Yogi Berra, who famously noted that "Hitting Chipping is 90% mental, with the other 50% being physical.  To no one's surprise the talking heads are all over the place, contradicting themselves in the course of a single sentence (see, Oberholser, Aaron).

Matthew Ruddy's Anatomy of a Short-Game Collapse has some thoughts on the matter, none more trenchant than this at the end of the piece:

As the same teacher said, either Tiger doesn't know exactly why his chipping has

deserted him, a troublesome thought. Or he does, and it's happening anyway.

That has to be terrifying for the guy who has almost always been able to summon whatever shot he's needed.

John Strege also has some reactions, none of them sunny and upbeat:

Arron Oberholser flatly called them the yips. “I hate to say it, but I think the greatest

player that I’ve ever seen has the yips,” he said on Thursday. “Whether that’s because of a release pattern or whether it’s not enough reps, it’s flat out the disease. He’s got the yips.”

Brandel Chamblee called it “the worst I've ever seen a tour pro around the greens and it is a long way from there to playing competitive golf again.”

My Oberholser dig above relates to his appearance seated next to Tiger-pal Notah Begay, on Golf Central after the conclusion of the broadcast.  Aaron said that Tiger should fire Chris Como and a la Hogan find the answer in the dirt, and before employing a single period said he should go crawling back to Butch.  Notah tipped in the rebound in noting that he can't have it both ways....

I've got some more silly commentary to poke fun at below, but one more naysayer first.  Rocco Mediate appeared on David Feherty's live broadcast and didn't make any friends among Swing-guru-Americans:

Speaking on a live edition of David Feherty on Thursday night, Rocco posed the question: "For some reason the best short game that was ever alive in the entire history of the world is gone. Why is that?"

Rocco had a couple thoughts on how Tiger could get back to his best, but his main criticism involved Woods' newly installed swing coach, Chris Como, who Mediate suggested was ill-qualified for the job. Mediate instead thought Woods should enlist the help of somebody who played the game professionally, like Lee Trevino.

There's video at that link that's worth watching, as Rocco is quite the performer.  It's hard to find an optimist these days, but Darren Clarke took time out from his Ryder Cup captaincy campaign to share this:

"It would be wrong to read any more into how Tiger played in Phoenix other than to say that any time you make major swing changes in your game you are going to have to crawl before you walk," Clarke said in this Reuters story by Bernie McGuire. “He’ll be fine. He’s too good a player not to be.”

That's what we all think...errr...maybe thought.  I found this Shackelford take on it very interesting as he dissents from some of the prevailing wisdom:

I certainly do not want to pile on Woods, as a I've experienced yip syndromes in far less public fashion in two areas of my game. However, seeing one of golf's top five all time scramblers lose his scramble ability takes this case of the yips to a level that is far different. Rarely if ever has golf seen a player's strength become his nemesis. For whatever reason--most likely the bizarro demons that come with multiple injuries--the short game yips have infiltrated even a player of Tiger's immense scrambling ability. The weird wedge shots first happened (noticeably) at Torrey Pines last year, but few thought of this as a case of the yips because the rye rough was silly and by Sunday when it was happening regularly during a 79, Woods was out of the tournament, presumably bored as much as anything. Or so we thought. 

It's hard to see any upside in taking a yippy wedge game to Torrey Pines next week. You'll see in the roundup some suggestions that more "reps" is the answer, but we yippers know that experiencing even more more yip in front of peers or fans just makes things worse, not better. Tiger patted himself on the back for fighting through his 82 Friday and in a strange way anyone who has been inflicted knows what he means. But the big picture suggests entering high-profile tournaments while still haunted by injury-induced flinchy thoughts will not serve Tiger Woods well.

Egads, Geoff, two areas of your game?  And you're still a youngster...Good luck with that.

Geoff to me is saying two very interesting things, that the problem goes back longer than we think

Doesn't this say it all?

and that reps may not be the answer.  On the former, I find that mirrors my thoughts on Tiger's putting, which at best has been highly inconsistent (IMHO) for much longer than people realize.  His second point is truly scary for Tiger, especially if the source isn't his injuries.  

But clearly the stakes have been raised for next week at Torrey, and for golf fans it'll be Must see-TV.

So I'm watching Morning Drive yesterday after the coverage of the Euro event and as Tiger is warming up for his second round.  Mark Rolfing declares himself an expert on the yips, informing us that there are mental and physical yips, and that fortunately Tiger has the mental yips because they're easier to fix.  Ummm...Mark, you seem a pleasant fellow and you do good work for the Hawaiian Tourist Board, but WTF?  

My post on the yips linked above was related to this David Owen New Yorker article on the subject, which is now available in its entirety here.  It's well worth a read, especially for those snowbound in the Northeast, though each individual needs to assess the risk of contagion.  There's a reason many folks don't like the word spoken aloud...

But it's quite obvious from David's work that Rolfing is out of his depth.  here's a sample of how the condition has been described:

It was coined around the middle of the last century by the Scottish golfer Tommy Armour, a sufferer, who defined it as “a brain spasm that impairs the short game.”

What's fascinating is how little we understand it, as it seems somewhat related to pressure and is extremely task-specific.  But, contra-Rolfing, it obviously has both physical and mental manifestations and the linkages remain mysterious.  There's also a huge visual influence, as one of the fascinating factoids in Owen's long article is that no one has ever heard of a blind golfer yipping.  In fact, most of the yipsters discussed use some sort of visual focus to allow themselves to perform.

So we should acknowledge that we're not even sure that he has the yips, or what that might mean.  But he's quite the mess in every aspect of his game, and we've rarely seen an elite athlete lose it so stunningly (there was a Mike Tyson-Buster Douglass analogy made, but those guys actually get hit).  We don't know how this movie ends, but if I were Chris Como I'd have trouble concentrating over the loud ticking of the clock.