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Bacon cured my Yips!!!

June 11, 2006; Source: AnyoneForTee
Anyone for Tee to patent traditonal English breakfast as remedy for golfer’s nightmare!

INTERNATIONAL. The traditional English breakfast is the unlikely inspiration for a fail-safe cure for the Yips, discovered accidentally by Anyone For Tee co-publisher Martin Moodie.

The Kiwi publisher (right), who last holed out in fewer than four putts in April 1999, has been suffering an apparently incurable case of the yips for years.

His plight is worsened by the fact that he also suffers horribly from the chipping yips. A round at his local pitch and putt took 17 hours last weekend – and that was only because he gave up after the second hole.

The yips are a psycho-neuromuscular problem that often occurs in golf (especially during chipping or putting) when the golfer experiences freezing, jerking, or a tremor prior to attempting a stroke. The ailment is estimated to afflict at least 3 million golfers worldwide.

But help may be at hand. While out practicing with his five year sold Ali on an artificial putting green on the patio - and noting that there was mush room for improvment - Moodie remembered the action he had used to flip his traditional full English breakfast that morning.

"Flippin' 'egg, I thought! I have never yipped an egg or a piece of bacon in my life," he told Anyone For Tee, with deadpan [should that be 'frying pan'? - Ed] face. "It dawned on me that if I could turn yips into flips my life would change forever.

"Even in my rasher moments why wasn’t I jerking my bacon flips?" he continued. "And why was I able to catch my fried egg clean every time before flipping it? I’d never even made a hash of my browns!

"The answer lay in my technique. I take my egg slice back like a Chinese table tennis master does with his bat to impart slice or back-spin. In fact if you like a real slice of bacon then a table tennis bat also works perfectly in the kitchen though the odour can later be off-putting to fellow players."

Remembering his favourite childhood television programme Flipper about a lovable dolphin, Moodie suddenly had a new porpoise to his game. Inspired, he headed straight to the patio putting green to try out his new cure. "It’s delicious," he said, after eating the bacon sandwich with just a touch of French mustard and two eggs served Texas scrambled just the way he likes them. He then set to work on fine tuning his radical new putting technique.

"I’d been grinding away on would-be cures for years, now I know I should have simply been rinding away," he said of the bacon inspiration. "I'm feeling much more chipper. And I don't mean yip-chipper.

Moodie tests his new 'Anti-Yip Flip', egged on by his clearly bemused son

Editor's note: Young Ali Moodie was last seen in these pages when four, giving his father a much-needed, but poorly heeded, chipping lesson here.

"At first things didn’t go to plan," Moodie explained. "That was probably because I started by using an egg slice rather than a putter, which affected my power. And initially I putted with an egg, hard-boiled of course, but even then I nearly cracked it – my putting not the egg.

"Despite its oval shape I was truly eggs-cited to discover I was getting closer to the hole than with my formal conventional putting technique. So I knew if I could remove that particular yolk from my game I would be nearly there."

Moodie tries it with the putter. This attempt narrowly missed his son, breaking the window in the door behind, but Moodie soon got a feel for strength.

On a bacon-hot London summer's day and with Ali egging him on, Moodie graduated to a conventional ball and putter but retained the same technique, taking the putter back on a quick low curve and gently whisking or slicing under the ball, all the time keeping his head down and eye on the egg... [don't you mean 'ball'? - Ed].

"Yes it was high whisk stuff," said Moodie "but the results were amazing. For the first time since he was 11 months old I beat my son Ali in match play conditions on the putting green. And this time I didn’t force him to play blindfolded with a set of barbeque tongs as a putter, as I normally do.

"I realised if I could beat a five-year old so convincingly – a sudden death play-off after 18 holes when I threatened him with no sweets for a month if he holed that tricky uphill left to right nine-incher to beat me at the last (see right) – I could take on the world. And now I will."

FOOTNOTE: Anyone For Tee has gained exclusive footage of the ‘cure all’ bacon & eggs breakthrough, and submitted an application for an international patent (A37L 3/26 B1A) in all golf-playing countries and those where egg production is common.

With typical, unassuming modesty, Moodie has asked that the new anti-Yip technique be known as "The Moodie Method of Putting Eggshellence". He expects to publish a book describing both the method and his recipe for Texas scrambled eggs©, with a foreword by Delia Smith, in time for Christmas. The book will include a CD of the song 'Like a Rind-a-Day Fryboy' with which Martin celebrated his discovery.

We have also approached three of the game’s top connoisseurs of full English breakfasts – Colin Montgomery, Craig Stadler and John Daly – to partake in a winner-eats-all putting showdown against Anyone For Tee.

The Bacon Buttie Quality (BBQ) Putting Showdown has been officially sanctioned by the PGA (Pork & Gammon Association). The winner will get to eat all four breakfasts that will be cooked for the occasion, while the losers will go home empty-stomached. "For eaters of this calibre, the prospect of losing is unthinkable," said a PGA spokesman. "And should Colin defeat his American challengers and scoff the lot, he would of course forever after be known as the 'Full Monty'".

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