The Yips, Wall Street Journal

Front page November 1 2023

Discusses match pressures and performance anxiety in a golf contest. Excellent article about things very few really recognize.

Sports Psychology is VERY real and an important factor that l deal with.

Practice is almost perfect, but drive 3 hours, get through administration, set up, and try to meet expectations in a sport where you are interrupted every 10 minutes. That’s a different beast. 

No warm up, no training day, no preliminaries…. I see a consistent difference between the first nmc and the second or third in those formats. Outdoor matches will see troubles in the first SF or so.


What l need to do is get there earlier, avoid/reduce the social aspects ( which I love by the way) and get into warm up exercises and dry fire. Remembering that feel, that grip, the calm is hard.

There are reasons that make it difficult to do that but it’s another story

bruce martindale wrote:Front page November 1 2023

Discusses match pressures and performance anxiety in a golf contest. Excellent article about things very few really recognize.

Sports Psychology is VERY real and an important factor that l deal with.

Practice is almost perfect, but drive 3 hours, get through administration, set up, and try to meet expectations in a sport where you are interrupted every 10 minutes. That’s a different beast. 

No warm up, no training day, no preliminaries…. I see a consistent difference between the first nmc and the second or third in those formats. Outdoor matches will see troubles in the first SF or so.


What l need to do is get there earlier, avoid/reduce the social aspects ( which I love by the way) and get into warm up exercises and dry fire. Remembering that feel, that grip, the calm is hard.

There are reasons that make it difficult to do that but it’s another story

I always thought that the mental aspect was very important for Expert competitors and up. Below that point, refining the basic fundamentals was most important. It has always been very interesting how so many of the top competitors would joke around during target changing, etc. and become laser focused as soon as they picked up the pistol. I never could get the "switch" to turn on and off like that.