Bernhard Langer nearly quit golf decades ago. Beating the yips rejuvenated his career

Los Angeles Times

07-04-2025

AUGUSTA, Ga. — The yips — the sudden inability to make even short putts — have ended careers of professional golfers.
For Bernhard Langer, they brought him to his knees.
'Those were the hardest times in my life, in my golfing life, I should say,' said Langer, 67, who this week will play in his 41st and final Masters. 'I've had the yips on four different occasions. It seems like every seven years for some reason, just not lately, thank goodness.'
The depths for him came in 1989 at the Buick Invitational in Detroit, after his first of two Masters victories, when he missed the cut despite hitting 17 greens in regulation on Thursday and 16 on Friday. His putting was so shaky, though, that he was a forehead-slapping 11 over par.
'I went back to my hotel and literally got on my knees,' he said. 'I was already a believer at the time, and said a prayer like, 'God, if you want me done with this game, I'm ready to give it up. Just show me what you want me to do and I'll pack it up, no more golf.'
A friend was praying with him and said, 'I don't think he's done with you yet.'
Not by a mile. Not only would Langer go on to win at Augusta National again in 1993, but he went on to become the greatest senior player in history, with 12 senior major championships and at least one victory in each of his 18 years on the senior tour.
The native of Germany considers those two green jackets to be the pinnacle of his success, and his voice trembled with emotion Monday after watching a Masters highlight video of himself in the media center auditorium.
'It's been an incredible journey for a young man being born in a village of 800 people in an area where golf was nothing, to make it here,' he said. 'To get an invitation to play the Masters [the] first time around when it was extremely difficult for a European or international players to get an invitation, and then to win the first Masters on the third go-around was just a dream come true. It's just incredible.'
Langer, as in-shape and youthful as a player half his age, missed the Masters last year after suffering a torn Achilles tendon while playing pickleball in Boca Raton, Fla., where he lives.
Four years ago, when the Masters was moved to November amid the COVID pandemic, Langer, then 63, became the oldest player ever to make the cut. It might not look it, but age is catching up to him.
'The course is just getting too long and I'm getting shorter and shorter,' he said. 'I'm hitting hybrids where the other kids are hitting 9 irons and 8 irons, maybe even wedges. So I knew I wasn't going to be in contention anymore.
'A few years back, I asked the chairman of the club, 'Is there a time limit? Do we time out when we're 60?' He said, 'No, you will know when it's time to quit. It's totally up to you.''
That day has come.
'It's time to quit,' he said. 'I'm just not competitive on this course anymore. We're playing at, what, 7,500-plus yards, and I'm used to playing courses around 7,100. I can still compete there, but not at this distance.'
Either of those distances pales in comparison to the distance Langer has come from his youth in tiny Anhausen, Germany, a farming village where his father was a bricklayer and motorcycle courier.
Golf was an exotic and obscure pursuit for a German kid at the time, and Langer said there were only 100 or so courses in the country at the time. His older brother was a caddie at a course about eight miles from the family home, and Langer followed in his footsteps. As a youngster, Bernhard would ride his bike to the course, and spend days lugging golf bags that were almost as tall as he was.
'I would say I fell in love with money first,' he said. 'As a caddie, I was earning money as a 9-year-old. That was pretty cool.'
In a 2019 essay for Golf Digest, Langer recalled waiting for work with other caddies in a small shed, sitting on a bench and staring for hours at a swing sequence of Jack Nicklaus.
'For years, I didn't know who Jack, Arnold Palmer or Ben Hogan even were,' he wrote. 'There was almost no golf on TV, no golf books and a very small number of golf magazines. Golf was such a small sport.'
It didn't take along, however, for him to develop a love of the game that at least rivaled his love for the money that lined his pockets.
'We were able to practice a little bit and chip and putt and hit balls on the range if there were no members to caddie for,' he said. 'We couldn't afford golf clubs, but one of the members discarded some of his old sticks. They actually had bamboo shafts. It was a 2 wood, 3 iron, a 7 iron and a putter with a bent shaft. So I always say that's where my putting problems came from.'
He can laugh about that now. But at various points throughout his career, his putting issues have been career threatening. Most famous was his missed, do-or-die 6-footer in the 1991 Ryder Cup at Kiawah Island. He burned the right edge, halving his match with Hale Irwin and giving the United States a narrow victory. That broke a streak in which the Europeans had won in 1985 and '87 and tied in '89.
'It was devastating because I let my teammates down,' Langer wrote in his Golf Digest essay. 'The next week was the German Masters, a tournament I helped found. On the final hole, I faced a 15-footer to get into a playoff. Two voices were in my head. One said, 'You missed a six-footer last week; what makes you think you can make a 15-footer now?' The other voice said, 'The past is irrelevant; you will make this putt.'
'The second voice must have been louder, because I made the putt and then defeated Rodger Davis in the playoff. Since that time, I've managed to quiet the first voice.'
Langer, who has tried virtually every putting style throughout his career, was able to quiet that voice. But, as he'll likely be reminded often during his final Masters appearance, his success speaks loud enough for everyone to hear.