yips

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yips (uncountable)

1. (informal) A nervous condition which prevents a sportsperson from playing properly; especially a condition which causes a golfer to miss an easy putt, or a tennis player to serve a double fault.

   Synonym: wobbles

   • 1962 May 4, Life, volume 52, number 18, →ISSN, page 3:

     His office is a baseball park and he is a pitcher for the N.Y. Mets—a job guaranteed to give anyone a good case of after-hours yips.

   • 1970, Newsweek, volume 76, page 13:

     Bracing as all this may be to the President, it gives his security and logistical forces the yips.

   • 1992, Carol Mann, The 19th Hole: Favorite Golf Stories, Longmeadow Press, →ISBN, page 123:

     Golfers may be surprised to learn that the yips, in one form or another, occur in a wide variety of other sports and even in other non-athletic walks of life and work.

   • 2013 May 13, William Fotheringham, The Guardian:

     Defining precisely why a professional cyclist might lose his touch on descents is as difficult as explaining a golfer's yips or a striker's sudden inability to find the net. It happens rarely, most famously in the early 1990s; the double world champion Gianni Bugno suffered from it and only rediscovered his "flow" after being made to listen to Mozart to calm his nerves.

   • 2017 April 18, Rick Ankiel, The Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch that Changed My Life, PublicAffairs, →ISBN:

• dartitis
• performance anxiety

yips

1. plural of yip

yips

1. third-person singular simple present indicative of yip

• John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner, editors (1989), “yips”, in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, →ISBN.

• I spy, I-spy, Ypsi