Lucas Glover Beat His Putting Demons and Now He's Beating Everyone
OLYMPIA FIELDS, Ill. — There is no nice way to say it: Lucas Glover had the yips.
Among the harsher words you can hear in golf—"shank" ranks up there as well—the yips are no laughing matter. It is often described as a neurological disorder, one that can lead to spasms in the arms and wrists during putting.
For much of the past decade, Glover faced those kind of demons on the greens and saw his game suffer through it.
"I had no control over my faculties sometimes," Glover said. “I could just lose all feelings over a 10-inch putt. It was frustrating. I fought it for a long time."
It is a tribute to Glover’s other skills in hitting a golf ball that he managed to survive in the game while going through so much grief just to get the ball in the hole.
A two-week run of success that has seen Glover, 43, win the Wyndham Championship and then the FedEx St. Jude Championship to move from out of nowhere to fourth in the FedEx Cup standings has led to him telling the story a few times.
But earlier this year, Glover ordered a long putter and started practicing with it. At the Rocket Mortgage Classic last month, he switched to a broomstick-style putter by L.A.B. Golf that Adam Scott uses. Even the same make and model. Then he went to work and saw almost immediate success.
"Making all your tap-ins is nice," he said.
And Glover wasn’t kidding.
The easiest way to quantify it is this: Glover missed 24 putts from 3 feet and in (out of 887) in 2020-21. A year later, he missed 27 from that distance. This year, prior to his win in Greensboro, N.C., he had missed 26 and was ranked 180th on the PGA Tour in strokes-gained putting.
With the new putter, he taught himself a split-handed grip in which his left hand is away from his chest holding the top of the club while his right hand is farther down the shaft. (In 2016, anchored putting strokes were banned as part of the Rules of Golf by the USGA and R&A.)
"I’d always been a streaky putter," Glover said Wednesday at Olympia Fields Country Club, where he begins play in the 50-player BMW Championship on Thursday. “When I putted well, I played well. When I putted poorly, I played OK.
“But the nervy, yippy stuff didn’t start for three or four years until after the U.S. Open (that he won in 2009). Did I make them all? No. But it wasn’t because of the yips. It was always probably the weakest part of my game but not to the extent that it has been the last 10 years and had been the last 10 years."
Glover’s turnaround began the week after the Memorial Tournament when he tied for 20th at the RBC Canadian Open. Earlier that week, he missed out a playoff spot in a U.S. Open qualifier when he missed a short putt on the final green—although he said it was not due to his previous woes.
He missed the cut at the Travelers Championship, but Glover then tied for fourth at the Rocket Mortgage and tied for sixth at the John Deere. He missed the cut at the 3M Open by a shot but said "I putted well, I just didn’t make any."
Then came the victory at the Wyndham followed by his playoff win Sunday over Patrick Cantlay.
Prior to the Wyndham, Glover was 112th in FedEx Cup points and need no worse than a two-way tie for second in order to advance to the 70-player playoffs that began last week in Memphis. His win moved him to 49th. Then with another win—and points quadrupled during the playoffs—Glover jumped all the way to fourth.
He’s now a lock for next week’s Tour Championship in Atlanta and is in position to win the FedEx Cup.
Glover’s story is one of perseverance. As frustrating as his putting problems were, he said he was a good kind of stubborn. He kept working at it.
"A lot of experimentation for sure with a lot of things," he said. "Before this, the most success I had was with the up-the-arm kind of arm lock that (Matt) Kuchar kind of brought out. I'd pretty much tried everything. If you could come up with it in your head, I probably did, two times, legitimately.
“Then if something didn't work, I'd just go back and grab a short one and I'd (say) I'll just out-practice this thing, and I just couldn't do it."
Glover said the new stroke with the split-hand grip is "a completely different motor skill. When you struggle as long as I have, it just happened to be the answer."
Now Glover is in the mix to win the FedEx Cup and his name is being mentioned as a possible pick for the U.S. Ryder Cup Team.
"I can honestly say I never thought I wouldn't win again," Glover said. “I didn't think it would be two in a row. I didn't know if it would be a FedEx event. But I never thought I wouldn't win again.
“I've always said, if it gets to that point, it is probably time to hang them up. But I just knew if I could figure this putting thing out that I'd be right back where I wanted to be."