There is a regrettable incident involving a dog, a pigeon and a free kick. A soccer player loses his mojo. His coaches try to name the problem.
“I think we know already what it is,” Coach Beard says on the second-season premiere of “Ted Lasso,” the Apple TV+ comedy series about a British football team’s folksy American coach. He writes the words down on a piece of paper.
THE YIPS.
“What are the yips?” someone asks.
After a lot of shushing — it’s bad luck in pro sports, apparently, to even say those sometimes career-ending words aloud — Coach Beard explains: “It’s when, just out of nowhere, an athlete suddenly can’t do the basic fundamentals of their sport.