Troy Merritt details ‘absolute battle’ with yips

GULLANE, Scotland – Troy Merritt would have told you the yips were a myth. Sure, Bernhard Langer was said to have had them, and the baseball players Steve Blass, Chuck Knoblauch and others who suddenly couldn’t throw, but it all seemed very woo-woo.

Then, standing over a short putt at the RBC Heritage at Hilton Head last season, a sudden surge – of what he’s still not sure – convulsed Merritt’s hands and raced up his arms as if there were a joy buzzer in his putter. He is still dealing with the fallout over a year later.

“I hit a putt from 4 feet below the hole on 17 on Friday, and it felt like I got electrocuted,” he said from the Genesis Scottish Open last week, where he was one of the last to get into the field and missed the cut. “It made me jump, I missed it badly, and ever since then, every now and then, I have a real bad yip stroke. I don’t know if it’s physical or mental or both. After it happens so many times it’s hard to get it out of your head. It’s just an absolute battle.”

Outside the FedExCup top 125 and in danger of losing his PGA TOUR card, the 37-year-old Merritt now brings that battle to this week’s Barracuda Championship at Reno-Tahoe, where he’s a two-time runner-up. A classic journeyman, he has two career PGA TOUR victories and finished 56th in the FedExCup in his best season, in 2015. He plays a volume game, meaning he needs to stay on TOUR week-in, week-out to make a living. And he’s normally a very good putter. Last season he bounced back after Hilton Head and was 43rd in Strokes Gained: Putting.

Alas, while Merritt tied for third at the World Wide Technology Championship at Mayakoba in November, starting the new PGA TOUR season in style, the yips, dormant but never dead, came for him in 2023. He missed 14 of 16 cuts to start the year and was 182nd in SG: Putting as he teed it up at the Renaissance Club on the Scottish coast last week.

This, despite T17 finishes at the Rocket Mortgage Classic and John Deere Classic the previous two weeks. That’s when Merritt began to go public with his condition, posting on social media.

“I’ve been on the TOUR for 12 years because I can make short putts,” he said in Scotland. “And when you can’t make short putts, you miss a lot of cuts, and it seeps into your long game because you’re trying harder to hit the ball close so you can two-putt with a tap-in.

“I’ve always been a very aggressive putter,” he continued, “running putts 3, 4, 5 feet by because you know you’re going to make it coming back. Now, when you can’t make it from a foot and a half, you’re trying to dead-weight all the time. It’s not the way I play.”

In the novel, “The Art of Fielding,” the protagonist, shortstop Henry Skrimshander, suddenly loses the ability to throw to first base. His sleep suffers, he stops eating, and his life basically unravels. It hasn’t gotten that bad for Merritt, but as his putter betrayed him, he talked to his coach and his caddie and started searching high and low for a solution.

“You start thinking about it,” he said. “I tried different putters, different stances, hands forward, hands back, ball forward, ball back. I didn’t change my grip ever. I tried the claw once and arm-lock once and I couldn’t even hold onto the club. I did a couple left-hand-low at Bay Hill on the short ones, and then I yipped one, so that wasn’t it.”

As with others, Merritt has had no trouble performing in private. He says the last three times he played his home club with friends back in Boise, Idaho, he shot 10 under, 7 under and 7 under. But there is no brighter spotlight than the PGA TOUR, where he’s struggled to find a solution.

Although it’s human nature to slow things down, that can in fact cause the yips, experts say. Their contention: An overly deliberate, paint-by-numbers approach can stifle skills that under pressure must be expressed as unconscious action. Merritt agrees.

“The more I try to think about things, even on the full swing, it’s always gone the wrong way,” he said. “I’m a very simple player. For the last few weeks, I’ve just gone back to simple: Set up like you know how, smooth takeaway, nice and slow, no hands on the way through, and keep your head down. On the practice green it works fine, making almost all the putts, but you can’t simulate tournament golf. You have to be able to be able to do it and build confidence out on the golf course during the tournament, which is a very hard thing to do on the PGA TOUR.”

He’s back to his original grip, in which two fingers overlap, and his original putter, a Yes Black Molly that was by his side for his two TOUR wins. Only recently has he begun to play well again. His opening-round 71 in Scotland featured a 237-yard driver off the deck, into a stiff wind, to just outside 12 1/2 feet from the pin. He missed the putt.

Still, with Merritt having arrived too late for a practice round, it wasn’t a bad start, marred only by a triple bogey on 18, where he got stuck in a pot bunker. He shot a second-round 72 in spitting rain to miss the cut, then jetted home to attend to a sick child before heading to the Barracuda.

“I’m outside the top 125 and chasing and trying to trust this process,” he said. “It’s got to work.”