Lucas Glover spoke at length about his long struggle with the yips after his emotional Wyndham Championship victory, admitting that his “brain was just fried” by the debilitating putting ‘disease’.
His words should offer encouragement to club golfers around the world who struggle with an awkward putting stroke and miss lots of putts from close range.
Glover said, “100 per cent, 100 per cent,” when asked whether he had been struggling with the yips, although in a new long putter he now seems to have developed a better stroke and is holing out with greater confidence.
“I was going to try the long one and if that didn't feel good, I was going to try left-handed. That's how far down the road I was,” said Glover, who ranked 15th in the field at the Wyndham Championship for Strokes Gained putting.
His comments will amaze a lot of people, especially given what he has achieved in the game.
However, despite racking up five PGA Tour victories, the 2009 US Open champion insists that he’s been struggling with the yips for a decade, when he remembers four-putting the fifth green at Colonial “like random out of nowhere”.
“Ten years of dealing with it and not understanding it and not realizing or not comprehending how it could happen, that I could just lose all feelings over a 10-inch putt, it was frustrating,” said Glover, who has also experimented in the past with an arm lock technique.
What he said next should give golfers hope of finding a cure for the yips, although not everyone has access to one of the game’s finest ever putters, Brad Faxon.
The Tour veteran and TV analyst recommended trying a long putter, so Glover got one with Adam Scott’s specs, a fellow Major winner who has also had his struggles with the flat stick.
“I don't want to know anything else and I'll teach myself how to do this,” Glover said. “Spent a couple days in the garage, figured out how to stand.
“Took it to the practice green and spent about 10 days working on it. Took it to Memorial and putted nice. My misses weren't that crazy, awful, yippy stroke, they were just misses. And that's OK.”
Glover said the process of teaching himself became “fun”.
He added: “It's just basically a whole new motor skill, a whole new brain function because it's so different, so out there from what I was doing.
“That's what was going to happen left-handed as well, just something completely new that I never had been taught, never been over-taught.”
The new Wyndham champion also admitted that talking about his putting problems has helped, although when it comes to the science behind the stroke, that’s something he’s not keen on getting bogged down by.
“Tommy [Tom Lamb, his caddie] said, I don't think you need to think too much about this other than this thing's resurrected a lot of people's careers.
“I told him what I feel and he tells me what he sees. I didn't want any outside input on it, I don't want to know the loft and the lie and the facing.
“I don't want to know that. I just want to know what it feels like and what it looks like to him.”
