Copied from Esquire Magazine, June 2005, page 130
THE YIPS
The Cure: The Wishbone

What a piece of work is the scratch golfer, so fluid and graceful in his swing, a humming dynamo with the driver, a veritable surgeon upon the green. Unless he has the dreaded yips. Then this paragon of micro-muscle control will twitch and jerk and tic like a dissected frog with whom the electrode-wielding gods of golf are no longer pleased.

The yips is not identical to choking, though performance anxiety is soon horribly involved in the mind-body stew of the yipper, who loses control of the delicate wrist flexors and extensors microseconds before putter meets ball. Call it a psychoneuromuscular problem, then, or an "acquired deterioration in the function of motor pathways . . .exacerbated when a threshold of high stress and physiologic arousal is exceeded," in the words of Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine Center researchers.

After nearly a decade substudy of the mysterious affliction, the Mayo Clinic has uncovered some cruel yip stats: The average age of onset is fory-five; the mean handicap is 4.5; and yippers, preyips, log about seventy-five rounds per annum. In other words, they're highly skilled, deeply committed, and totally screwed. Which pretty much describes Gary W. Carter's predicament when the yips struck. But instead of unloading his clubs on eBay, Carter, a business prof at the University of Minnesota, sharpened some pencils and took to the drawing board.

"I couldn't make a three-foot putt," Carter says. "I had to do something or else give up the game, so I started experimenting with duct tape and molding material." The professor's creation, the newly patented Wishbone putter grip, is wide enough to grab with both hands parallel rather than staggered, palms together and pointing down, palms pressing toward each other as if in prayer.

Carter's Wishbone may mean more than just wishful thinking. "It makes huge sense biomechanically," enthuses Aynsley Smith, lead researcher of the Mayo study. "It really enforces a full pendulum swing." While the wrist-elimination tactic is as old—and as tragic looking—as the belly and broomstick putters, the slip-on USGA approved Wishbone (expected to be available this summer for $30; wishbonegrip.com) would resurrect yippers' present favorite conventional putters, which, with palms together, they'd gently power with their unaffected pectoral muscles. At least from 3 feet they might have a prayer.

— Bucky McMahon