No matter how much I improve, golf just doesn’t get any easier. The 2009 season was one of my best, as I finished the year with a handicap index of 10. But getting there was hell.
    I battled the yips for the first three months of the season. The yips is a condition in which you find yourself unable to make short putts; very short putts. It’s a dreadful spiral that starts with a fear of missing putts, causing you to putt defensively until soon, without knowing it, you’re turning your head at impact to watch the ball roll toward the hole. This head movement inevitably causes the ball to veer off your intended line and miss the target, thus compounding the original problem.
   The good news is that when the Club Championship came around in August, I had overcome the yips and was playing some of the best golf of my life. The details of how I did it don't really matter. Suffice it to say I accepted the fact that I was going to miss a lot of putts as I worked through the yips, yet I resolved to putt with confidence anyway. Confidence is such a critical element of good putting that even false confidence can be useful.
    In my first championship match I shot 77 and won handily. I lost my second match, despite shooting 80 and forcing a playoff, but no matter. I was so proud of having found the strength to beat the yips, and to have played (and putted) so well under tournament pressure, that I accepted defeat with more stoicism than I ever thought I could muster.
    By the end of the year I’d come to understand that in golf’s difficulty itself there is a certain kind of beauty. The game never backs off. No matter how good you get, golf will relentlessly expose your weaknesses. It's a different game every time you play, and if that unpredictability provides an endless challenge, it also presents endless opportunities. Succeeding once is not enough, nor is succeeding 100 times. You may get to a level at which you think you’re finally as good as you can be when, suddenly, you can’t make a 14-inch putt. Then you have to start all over again, and the best you can hope for is that each new victory will be as sweet as the last.