FOLLOWING A T-79 FINISH AT THE AT&T Byron Nelson in May 2023, only his fifth made cut in 13 tournaments, Lucas Glover had dropped to 147 in the World Golf Ranking. For the six- time PGA Tour winner and 2009 US Open champ, his spirit wasn’t at rock bottom – but it was close. Glover, 44, wasn’t finding much joy in golf, and his decade-long struggle with the putting yips left him battling just to play on the weekends. “Too hard-headed and stubborn to give up,” Glover says he kept tell- ing himself that if he beat the yips, he would get his game back. But to do that, something drastic had to be done. He had already spent thousands on train- ing aids and tried nearly every style of putter, grip and stroke imaginable. He even won the 2021 John Deere Classic by putting inside of six feet with his eyes closed. Realising that nothing else seemed to cure the affliction, including marathon practice sessions, he finally turned to a longer putter. “No one has made more three-footers in practice over the past 10 years,” says Glover, who has missed 77 putts from three feet and in since the start of the 2020-’21 season. “But you can’t simu- late the feeling (of the yips) in practice.” Inspired by Adam Scott’s success with a 45-inch (114cm) putter, Glover learned how to use a similar one by watching YouTube videos of Scott’s technique. The split-hands grip and bent-over posture made it much easier to isolate the shoulders. The sweeping, broomstick-like motion of the longer club greatly reduced the twitchy, in- voluntary hand-and-wrist tension that cursed his putting. “It was a complete new motor skill and brain function,” Glover says.
last year, Glover finished in the top six five times and won in back-to-back weeks at the Wyndham Championship and FedEx St Jude Championship. Glover was top 15 in strokes gained/put- ting in both wins, which catapulted him to 30th in the World Ranking. “It’s just an entirely different mind-set,” Glover says. “It’s fun to practice putting again.” Even better, the improvement seems contagious. Working with South Flor- ida-based swing coach Jason Baile, one of Golf Digest’s 50 Best Teachers in America, Glover has found ways to boost nearly every facet of his game. Here, they want to share some of the things you can take from his restoration to start playing more to your potential. As a finishing touch, Kuhn has a little advice to help fix your putting if your stroke has got a little jittery.
Around the same time of the switch, Glover met Jason Kuhn, a former Navy SEAL turned performance coach. His specialty is helping others overcome the yips, which Kuhn experienced on the baseball mound in college, once throwing six wild pitches in a single inning. “Jason’s message to me was, ‘You’re the furthest thing from being mentally weak. You came to work every day and competed,’ ” Glover says. “He said, ‘I’m going to give you a way to beat this, and since you’ve gone through it already, you’re going to be better for it.’ Boy, did I need to hear that.” The combination of the putter and Kuhn’s guidance helped produce one of the most remarkable in-season turn- arounds in PGA Tour history. In a six- week stretch between July and August
86 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
JUNE 2024
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator