Dr. Julia Ogden (rarely called Mrs. Murdoch) is at the tee (a pile of dirt) and tries out golf by sending the ball well downrange and well placed. She does it more than once, and Murdoch and the champion are annoyed by her skill. She says there is nothing to it – empty your mind. The champion tries it and it works. Murdoch finds it doesn’t work for him and small wonder, since he is logical, deductive, and rational – or take your pick. His mind is ever at work.
This is a not bad episode though I had never heard of the “yips” before. From the episode I gathered it was a muscular lapse corrected by mental activity or the lack of same. Perhaps its ill effects were confined to golf. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, has as a definition – “a state of nervous tension affecting an athlete (as a golfer) in the performance of a crucial action < had a bad case of the ˜ on short putts >”. The dictionary entry relates it is of unknown origin from 1962.
Nice and neat. Then it gets messy since Internet sources say it is a loss of fine motor skills. Comes on suddenly, no cure. Usually it strikes those with years of experience. A correction in technique may help or they are lost to the sport. It, via Internet sources, has sudden movements when muscular control is most needed. The sources list those engaging in golf, snooker, cricket, bowling, and for baseball pitchers as having had the yips.
Wikipedia credits the term, “yips,” to Tommy Armour (1896-1968) who won some big tournaments in 1927, 1930, and 1931. He was a Scot and served in the Black Watch as a machine-gunner in WWI. He was in the Tank Corps when he was gassed – mustard – and the docs put metal plates in his head and left arm. He regained sight in his right eye. He did well as an amateur in France and then in the US. He went pro in 1924. He also won the Canadian Open three times. In 1927 he had the misfortune to win an Archaeopteryx, meaning he went 15 or more over par on one hole. He got a 23 on a par 5 hole. I don’t play golf, but I realize how much that must have hurt. Hard to be light-hearted about it. This regrettable feat came one week after the US Open win in 1927. He retired from full-time pro golf in 1935. He stopped participation in pro golf tournaments because of the yips. Had his plates anything to do with it? For a long time his coauthored book (1953) on playing the best golf all the time was the biggest seller about golf. In any event he is the one credited by Wikipedia with popularizing the term “yips”.
As for yips as it is now defined, it is a biochemical approach in regard to playing a sport with an aging brain. Neurological difficulties could lead to or be the yips. I have heard of golfers Ben Hogan and Sam Snead, and they are said to have been affected by the yips. In 2015 it was suggested that the yips had got to Tiger Woods. I have also heard of him. Also, in 2014, it was said Woods had the putting yips and the driver yips. Others cited were having great success, then their game , of cricket, came apart. So maybe “yips” gets mentioned in cricket. I have never seen nor heard a cricket match.
In baseball yips is demonstrated by suddenly not being able to place the ball accurately, such as in pitching (Steve Blass gave his name to Steve Blass Syndrome/Disease) though second basemen can develop it and Mackey Sasser, a catcher, could not throw back to the pitcher unless he tapped his glove first. I saw him unable to throw to the pitcher, and he had to start a relay to the third baseman first. A few called it “Sasseritis”. No one said anything about “yips”. There was mention of mental difficulties.
Others have been affected in basketball, tennis, and football (placekickers). In my decades of listening to coverage of baseball and football and to a much lesser extent for tennis, basketball, and anything else sportive, I have never heard “yips” in the present or from the past.
Outside sports, can novelists or journalists get the yips? In both cases is this writer’s block? So it is the same across many genres, only with a different name? Do philosophers get the yips and can it go on for years as for athletes? Thus we read “yiptic” chapters and wonder how the author became so obtuse or suddenly has such clarity (maybe it is for the good in some instances?). Let’s not forget chess champions who at times make inexplicable moves in tournament after tournament.
Too many pursuits and if each to its own yips? Would that serve us well? Rather not, one needs to clarify what is doing a sport badly and what is having the yips. One examination of yips occurring in bowlers found it was like a severe form of choking (assuming the “choke” is not the common sports term when one can do “it” but lapses into not being able to do it when the game or career is on the line. Usually this implies no physical impairment but “a lack of concentration “or, more specifically, a lack of conviction that it can be done, it is a response to “everyone” expecting success. So much is “riding on it” and a mental pressure on the performer is relieved by not doing it. Some players "psych themselves out".
Certainly there is a psychology for baseball and some baseball players are well aware of the yips but it isn’t talked about –such is an unwritten rule – and they put it in the mental domain. A domain it is that includes “head cases” such as a pitcher with super speed to the plate and delivered with marvelous control. But he could not get the ball over to first base (a la Jon Lester). Some do it in practice without what is going on all the time in a real game. Get them away from being judged, but some docs think knowing the cause of yips would do no good. You know what causes your yips, then what? Knowing about it is not lending a cure. You must deal with anxiety.
If it is not yips, it is “a slump” or “choking” or “a lull” and so on. Often it involves, as noted, doing OK in practice, but not actual play. Now this is expanding on and on. Not all this expansion in explanation is by specific physical components of the body, rather it is a multiple mental element, very diverse. There may be a trauma that is physical or mental. Nevertheless, they find a mental component in relation to the physical trauma. The body “remembers” and a similar experience triggers an involuntary reenactment.
The aforementioned Sasser threw fine in the bull pen and to second base but he had to pump his arm three to four times before his release to the pitcher. Fans and writers belittled him. Fans would chant “One, Two, Three” as he pumped before release. The night before a game he would go into a panic. Amidst all this he was involved in a collision at home plate. After that, his hitting, which had been OK even during his throwing difficulties, went bad.
Some say the difficulty (not called yips) is a culmination of years of trauma and relaxation, concentration, imagery, positive thinking and thought stopping do not help. Sasser had a long history of injuries from high school, college, and on to the pros. Also, he had profound non-sport upsets. All contributed to his throwing “yips”. So now this is a third definition of yips - not the physical, not the mental but the physical trauma to mental to physical.
Sasser had a rheumatoid father who had to flip the baseball underhand to Sasser. The father medicated himself with alcohol. At seven years old, he saw his five year old brother race past him and his sister into a crosswalk and get slammed by a car that threw his brother one hundred feet. The brother lived but was never the same physically or mentally and Sasser blamed himself for not preventing it. Also his father’s friend and business partner was murdered, and the killer had been waiting for Sasser to leave the store and then the shooter entered. His father was lost in life thereafter. At ten years of age Sasser fell from a tree and required stitches. At twelve he had a cyst surgically removed from a knee and at seventeen tore ligaments in that knee. In high school, at quarterback, he took many hits, and it was the same in semi-pro football. In 1984 he hurt his knee again by sliding into base. In 1985 he was run over at the plate and got hit in the head and was dazed and out of it. In 1987 in the cold of Calgary he got a foul tip under this protection he wore as catcher but he stayed in the game and found he could not pull his right arm back and away from his body to cock before throwing. So he tucked his arm close to his side and flipped the ball from his fingers. Then he could not readily return the ball to the pitcher. A coach berated him in public and said Sasser would be fined when he hesitated. In 1990, when he had his best year statistically, there was another hard collision at the plate. Sometimes, in baseball, what happened to Sasser is baseball. What is happening in baseball cannot be predicated on antecedents. To force it to be so leads to problems. One woman, who hates baseball, knows of him because she likes his name. Others appreciate him because he contributed to victories on the diamond. Such activity still goes on since he has coached college ball for many years.
For a causative account of yips from the physical side, there are BBC Sport and the Mayo Clinic. The BBC calls yips as usually associated with golf and is a freezing or involuntary movement of the hands when attempting shots. The condition was originally thought to be psychological, but now it may have a physical basis. The Mayo clinic thinks it involuntary wrist spasms most commonly in golf putting. Once it was thought to be always linked with anxiety. Trying harder led to choking, to performance anxiety equaling failure. It is also said the yips suddenly start to interfere with a task once done mindlessly for decades. It could be of the psychological, of the neurological, or fallout from injuries and trauma. In all cases, anxiety for it can keep it alive.
Too many yips for me, rather it is too much pressure, not enough grace. Loading on thought after thought whereas getting on with it is to be preferred or the possibility exists for psychological self-interference. Without this psychological component, it isn’t yips. Pure yips, the preferred form, does not involve physicality. I had a case of the yips when I was ten years old. I remember the room and the lighting. I was reading something, probably a book. Then I could no longer read. There I was at ten trying to account for what had happened to me. I did recognize that at around five years old I was looking at a printed page and knew that I would be able to read it after suitable schooling. I was seeing marks on the page and did not know they would become letters and these letters would be words. The words spoken could also be written. But there I was at ten and I lost the ability, not the knowledge, of reading. What to do? Knowing it was the yips as I have so defined it decades later, would hardly have done me any good then. I did not panic. I had no authentic reaction since no other like reaction could be known for what had never before occurred. It was what had happened, that was that, I would live as I had been at five years old. Minutes ticked. Something less than an hour went by. I stayed where I was with the book unseen nearby. I picked up the book again, I took a look, and I could read.
I have been successful at it ever since. Though from time to time, writing a word a great deal or, in reading excessively, a word comes to appear strange. Is that how it is pronounced? Is that how it is spelled? Seems strange to me. I then need conformation that it is indeed a word I have known for many years but I needed assurance in order to keep it as part of my knowledge. Such an occurrence has beset me at all ages, times, and places. The recognition returns. There was no pain of trauma or anxiety or muscular disorder. I was questioning, as myself, why I had I accepted what I was told to be true. Push it enough and I would be illiterate. I would be out of the “sport” as it had eventuated for some. If you doubt reality enough, taking it suddenly to a different plane entirely, you have got not the not-reality but nothing. Overindulgence in drugs, sex, religion, politics, food and drink, and “the good life” will lose from you what you received, and you go into an area of no return. Knowing reality isn’t effortless, try too hard, as perhaps in a case of the yips, and you may lose it for good. Being relentless with yourself is stupid.