ERIN, Wis. — Ask Yani Tseng for the low point on her journey through yips, injured hips and all kinds of grips and she’ll struggle to pinpoint a single moment.
“It was a lot of crying,” she said Wednesday. “It’s a really long story.”
Long enough that most of the golf world lost track of Tseng, the five-time major winner playing her first U.S. Women’s Open in nine years. Her last victory came in 2012. The last cut she made in America was in 2018. But she’s in the news — why?
Because for about a decade she got chewed up and spit out by the game, and has emerged on what appears to be The Other Side, only after making what her coach dubbed “the mother of all changes.” That is, simply switching from putting right-handed to putting left-handed.
GOLF IS A GAME DESIGNED for the most competitive souls, and perhaps for the most deranged, too, given a fraction of an inch of hip rotation can lead to chaos … or perfection. Chasing that P-word drives golf’s greatest players to create robotic swings at juiced-up speeds and asks them to try doing things humans weren’t designed to do — like think a certain way or, sometimes, not think at all.
Thinking, knowing, trusting, fearing, feeling, believing. This sport is a nest of mental wires that wrap around our physical muscles. Try as we might to keep them neat and orderly, they often get tangled. Some get so messy, Tseng’s coach Brady Riggs says, that it becomes too late to unwind them.
“The fact is this affliction, which we know as the yips, isn’t really technical,” Riggs told GOLF.com. “Basically you just can’t not be conscious of the club face as you’re making contact — and your overriding desire to control the face causes it to wiggle. It’s horrifying. There’s nothing — like I can’t say, Oh, try to do this and that’ll fix it. When it gets to that point, it’s sort of an unrecoverable spin.”
That’s the version of Tseng that Riggs found when they began working together this time last year. There were many versions of her who came before that, filling up museum exhibits and decorated her robust Wikipedia page. There was the Tseng who carded more rounds in the 60s than not in 2011. Or the Tseng who won five majors in a four-year span, becoming the youngest male or female golfer to climb that high. She even scraped together solid years in the mid-2010s when a wonky putter first started to rear its head. It was only after getting right from a multi-year back injury and multiple hip surgeries that Tseng realized her battle was more mental than anything. She proceeded for years through yips warfare, literally aiming away from hole locations because she was more comfortable hitting 20-foot putts than standing over a 5-footer. As Riggs would eventually diagnose, she couldn’t keep her head still during the putting stroke, tilting it slightly away from target, struggling to start the ball on line. They’d grind her into some form of comfort during practice, but her hands would wobble in competition.
Tseng even soldiered through Vipassana training — a 10-day meditation retreat where patients aren’t just forbidden from using their phones, they’re encouraged to not speak at all — before breaking down in tears. Hence the “long story.” And why she’s carrying an exuberant smile across rural Wisconsin all week. Just playing a U.S. Open is crossing a checkpoint.
“I don’t know where [my] passion comes from,” she said. “But every time I fell down, I feel like I need to get back up, I need to do this. I don’t know who I’m proving to, but maybe I want to prove it to myself. I want to see what I can do.”
The arc of Tseng’s left-handed putting journey is a lot longer than she lets on. It was last August, right before the AIG Women’s Open in St. Andrews, when Riggs told her, ‘I’m going to give you one more tournament, but if it still feels wiggly, I’m going to do something drastic to you.’
Tseng didn’t realize what was coming, but Riggs felt they had righted most of her full-swing issues, getting her back to fading the ball instead of hitting draws. Putting was the last boxed still unchecked. When she missed the cut in Scotland and didn’t have another event scheduled for months, Riggs told her it was time to go ask Callaway for the lefty sister of her righty gamer. “She kinda looked at me like, huh?,” he said.
An hour into the experiment, Tseng sent Riggs a simple message: I’m having so much fun putting.
“All of that rewiring that we would try to do technically would get undone as soon as she had pressure,” Riggs said. “But left-handed, she didn’t have anything to unwire.”
Her lefty stroke was natural and worry-free, Riggs said, “like a kid again.” But Tseng had fallen so far from relevance that this shape-shifting move was a mostly silent, toiling one. Simply lining up the putter was difficult. Mastering the proper pace continues to be a battle. But importantly, as she said, “I’m not scared of the five-footers anymore.”
Only her 100,000 social media followers — many based in her home country of Taiwan — were clued in on the change in November. On Instagram and Facebook, Tseng thanked the organizers of the “Sampo Ladies Open Xiu Ju CUP Senior Ladies Professional,” a mouthful of a tournament with a modest $220,000 purse that had given her a sponsor’s exemption. She published a carousel of eight grainy photos followed by a video of her rolling in a 10-footer. A few comments beneath the post ruminated on what they were watching:
“Why putting left handed?” from Derek Pennington.
“Left hand push putter is really nice, Yani come back to the peak,” from Kevin Huang.
And then, from CJ Huang, “Yesterday I went to Nan Yi [Country Club] and said Yani is back!”
That week she carded her first under-par round in four years. (Four years!) It was her first top 10 since 2018. But it happened on an island in East Asia in the middle of the night in America. No one seemed to notice.
Tseng didn’t make an LPGA Tour start until last month’s Chevron Championship, where she was in the field as a past champion. Thanks to sheer luck or the sick minds of the Golf Gods, she was grouped with the early leader, soft-launching her experiment onto the national stage. Broadcasters found it befuddling. Social media found it fascinating, at least until she missed the cut and receded from the public conscience once again. Some players didn’t know which side of her they should stand on. She reads putts from a right-hander’s perspective and then makes a move at it lefty. That’s a sympotom of a tormented mind, no?
Maybe. But maybe it was the first act of some new play. Riggs knows none of it compares to 15 months ago, when Tseng was playing a Taiwan LPGA event at her home course, shooting a first-round 85 in front of some of her biggest fans in the world. “They basically didn’t let her play the second round,” Riggs said. “I mean, think about how humiliating that would be.”
It’s unclear what exactly went down that week, but Tseng was never listed as a WD. At the very bottom of the leaderboard she was the only name with a one-round score. She had second thoughts about even returning to that tournament this year. She’s had second thoughts about continuing to pursue this sport at all. But something about that lefty putter feels right. A few months later, she stood over a five-footer in a playoff to book her ticket to Erin Hills. It was her 37th hole of the day and her legs were shaking but her putter face was square and she brushed it in with a smooth stroke. Like it used to look a long time ago, just mirrored.
“I think every time I practiced, every little step, little progress, gave me hope,” Tseng said. “That hope is kind of what carries me to be where I am now.”
She arrived to Erin Hills early and giddy, taking a Sunday spin around this a monster of a course with one of the favorites, Lydia Ko, and one of the only pros in the field who she befriended years ago, when she was at her peak. Tseng posted a picture of them on Instagram with a captain in Taiwanese explaining that, despite it all, she continues falling deeper and deeper in love with this wretched sport.
On Wednesday, Tseng was set to tell us all about this journey at her first press conference in half a decade. But first, she had to wait for two teenage amateurs to finish theirs. Half her age and largely unburdened by golf’s brutish side, they were asked what they knew about Tseng and her career.
One said she was “a GOAT.” The other called Tseng a great example of punching back at the sport when it slaps you around. Both felt true. The same golfer, seen from two different sides.
