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"DUBAI -- It\u2019s not a subject any golfer wants to talk about, but Ernie Els has never been just any golfer. Speaking of the well-publicized putting yips that bedeviled his play throughout 2015 &amp;#8211; videos of the four-time major champion twitching tiny putts wide of the hole have more than once gone viral over the last 12 months &amp;#8211; Els was in a remarkably positive mood as he prepared for this week\u2019s Dubai Desert Classic, a tournament he has won three times and where he is a remarkable 172 under par for 52 rounds played over the Majlis course.\nFacebookPinterest\u201CI had a really tough time last year,\u201D admitted the 46-year-old South African. \u201CI\u2019ve had some bad years but that was probably the worst. It was all on the greens and it was getting into my head. In the first round of the South African Open last month I was missing from 18-inches or even a foot. So I had to try something different.\u201D\nThat difference has come in a switch to a cross-handed grip on the club that has been his nemesis. And improvement has not been slow in coming. Last week at the Qatar Masters, Els had a 100-percent success rate from inside five feet.\n\u201CI feel a lot more comfortable now,\u201D he continued. \u201CMy scores haven\u2019t yet really shown it yet [he finished T-29 last week in Qatar], but I feel like things are coming around. I should have done something earlier, of course, but we sportsmen are quite hard-headed people. A lot of my friends and my father were telling me to make a change, and I was like, \u2018No, no.\u2019\n\u201CEventually though, I had to do something. So I went with the new grip in the second round of the SA Open. Right away it started to feel a bit more stable. Now it\u2019s feeling very normal. I\u2019m looking forward to this year, especially the U.S. Open at Oakmont where I won in 1994. I\u2019d love to make a bit of noise this year as much as I can.\u201D\n\nWATCH: GOLF DIGEST VIDEOS\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.golfdigest.com/story/ernie-els-may-have-found-fix-for-yippy-putting-stroke>