How to Cure the Yips

Johnny Miller had them. So did Tom Watson, Lee Trevino and Nick Faldo.

They almost brought an end to Bernhard Langer. They prompted Ben Hogan to give up the game.

For those who've never dealt with them, they're hard to describe.

But as Justice William Brennan said about pornography, you'll know them when you see them.

Or when you feel them: Twitches. Spasms. Involuntary twinges in the forearms or wrists that make even simple putts stray wildly off line.

We're talking, of course, about the yips, the grim specter shadowing the sunniest of layouts, a curse that many golfers dare not speak aloud.

Most research on the yips (and there's been lots of it, right up through the rarified ranks of the Mayo Clinic) has painted them as a psychological problem, a glitch in the matrix of our state of mind.

How else to explain an ailment that only afflicts experienced golfers, that shows up without warning but often appears when something important is on the line? (Those beginners you see with putting problems? They don't have the yips; they're just bad.)

Surely, all signs point to the psyche. But not so, says Bob Prichard, who looks at the yips the other way around.

It's All in the Swing

A self-taught and self-described "sports engineer" from Tiburon, Calif., Prichard, 63, is not a golfer but has spent his adult life studying the swing. He runs Somax Sports, a company devoted to improving performance by measuring the mechanics of athletic movements.

Since 1970, when Somax was established, Prichard has helped baseball pitchers boost the zip on their fastball; basketball players increase their free-throw percentage; swimmers trim precious seconds off their times. He's also worked with golfers like U.S. Women's Open champion Se Ri Pak, and PGA Tour standout David Frost, long a top player on the world stage.

In his study of great golfers throughout the years, Prichard noticed that many of the game's finest had something in common: they kept their spine angles constant through the swing. Swinging that way, Prichard says, requires a kind of athletic compensation.