Definition of "yips"

His office is a baseball park and he is a pitcher for the N.Y. Mets—a job guaranteed to give anyone a good case of after-hours yips.

1962 May 4, Life, volume 52, number 18, page 3

Bracing as all this may be to the President, it gives his security and logistical forces the yips.

1970, Newsweek, volume 76, page 13

Golfers may be surprised to learn that the yips, in one form or another, occur in a wide variety of other sports and even in other non-athletic walks of life and work.

1992, Carol Mann, The 19th Hole: Favorite Golf Stories, Longmeadow Press, page 123

Defining precisely why a professional cyclist might lose his touch on descents is as difficult as explaining a golfer's yips or a striker's sudden inability to find the net. It happens rarely, most famously in the early 1990s; the double world champion Gianni Bugno suffered from it and only rediscovered his "flow" after being made to listen to Mozart to calm his nerves.

2013 May 13, William Fotheringham, The Guardian