The yips claim another victim

: Apr 09

I have been thinking about the yips these last two days. You know the yips, that disease that causes us to miss short putts with annoying frequency and then infects all other aspects of our game. When we have the yips, we line up our two footers only half expecting to make them and then fulfill the baser half of our expectations. And the day before, we didn't even bother to line ‘em up.
I watched the Memphis University Tigers lose the NCAA national basketball championship on Monday night because of the yips. They had the

"Between my brain and my hands, [the putt] didn't get the message."

game in the bag with about two minutes to go. But then they turned into Scott Hoch at the Masters two decades ago. Hoch, you may recall, was one two-foot putt away from a title that would have changed his life. On the first hole of a playoff with Nick Faldo, Hoch hit perhaps the worst short putt in the history of pressure golf, giving the steely Brit all the opportunity he needed. Hoch carried his burden to the next hole where he missed the green and his only good chance at the green jacket.
   A foul shot (or free throw) in basketball is like a short putt in golf, with nothing but air between player and hole, no distractions other than the beating of the heart and the customary loud fans, but still close to automatic for the best players when there is no pressure. On Monday, having defied the critics by making nearly 70% of their shots from the charity stripe during the five previous tournament games, Memphis hit just one of their final five free throws in the last two minutes of regulation. The first guy short-armed his shot, and then he did it again, and then the next guy did the same.
    And, of course, as Nick Faldo did 19 years ago this week, Memphis' opponent, Kansas, smelled blood in the water. The game's outcome was decided before the overtime began.
    Of his missed two-footer in 1989, Hoch could have been speaking for Memphis and the rest of us when he said: ''Between my brain and my hands, it [the putt] didn't get the message. It got crisscrossed.''
   We know Scott. We know.