Yoda in golf spikes

Sean Foley might be rewriting the manual on PGA Tour golf instruction

By Ted McIntyre

He’s chilling in Orlando’s International Airport, decked out in sandals, a tattered Bob Marley shirt and seven-year-old Diesel jeans—hip-hop music coursing through oversized headphones—and you can’t help but think it’s a good thing Sean Foley wasn’t born a thousand years ago, because he would surely have been burnt at the stake as a heretic.

In a world of slickly marketed, often self-promoted and typically conservatively quoted golf swing gurus, the 35-year-old Burlington, Ontario native unabashedly preaches his own gospel. And there’s a congregation of some of the best ball strikers in men’s and women’s golf worshipping at his altar. They include amateur stars like Jennifer Kirby, Nicole Vandermade, Graham Baillargeon and Brogan McKinnon, and PGA Tour professionals such as Sean O’Hair, Hunter Mahan, Stephen Ames, Justin Rose, Greg Owen and Chris Baryla. What they all see in Foley is a man who knows the golf swing like Isaac Newton knew math. But there’s way more to it than that. Where most are content to heal your swing, Foley will also heal your soul, and then maybe knock back a Heineken Light with you afterward.

   
Players like Sean O’Hair (left) and Stephen Ames have become two of the PGA Tour’s best ball-strikers since working with Foley. Ames’ corrected swing even cured his recurring back issues.

“He didn’t just fix my swing, he fixed my life,” says 27-year-old Jessica Shepley, the defending Canadian PGA Women’s champion who’s been with Foley for four years. “I’m very fortunate to have him in my life, not just as a coach but as a friend and a mentor. I kind of lost my way when I got out of school. I have a great support group around me—a wonderful family and friends—but I wasn’t really believing in what they had to say to me. Sean gave me the tools to get my life back on track and to live the way I wanted to. And he’s done it for more than me. He takes a personal interest in all his students, helping them figure out who they are outside of golf, which, more often than not, translates into a more solid golfer.

“Sometimes you need a pat on the back, and sometimes you need to be snapped back into reality,” says Shepley. “But despite all the lessons I’ve had with him, I still walk away every time with a renewed belief that I’m on the right track, and with more confidence than I arrived with. People who see him for the first time can’t believe one person can be that inspirational and that a golf lesson can be that much fun.”

Foley also walks the walk, says PGA Tour player Parker McLachlin, who’s in the midst of a complete swing overhaul with Foley. “One of the things that sets Sean apart is his vision of how he wants his own life to work out. And he makes that happen every single day,” says McLachlin. “He may be the hardest working coach on Tour. His days are sun-up ’til sundown. He earns every bit of respect and praise he has out here. And he’s continually evolving, finding new sources of inspiration that can help him grow as an individual and a teacher. In my opinion, he’s rewriting the manual of how PGA Tour swing coaches go about teaching their players. A lot of teachers try to put band-aids on things, but Sean has a vision of where your swing is going and what it’s going to look like when he’s finished with you. And a lot of the time we spend together is not just talking about the golf; it’s talking about life and priorities in life.”

Three-time Tour winner Sean O’Hair is another witness for the defence. In the press conference after winning the Quail Hollow Championship last year, the ball-striking wizard noted, “Sean’s completely changed my swing, but to tell you the truth, he’s changed my life. I’ll never be (again) where I was before.”

International Management Group’s Ben Walter texted Foley immediately afterward, telling the Orlando-based swing guru that he’d been in every news conference for a dog’s age, but had never heard anything like that.

“I made a good bit of money off of Sean winning that tournament, but to tell you the truth, reading Ben’s message…that just feels better,” says Foley, who stands a fire-hydrant-solid 5-7, with a rosy-cheeked complexion that reflects a life on the range.

“You know, I think we’ve all been designed to go out and help one another,” he says, “but along the way we kind of lose the plot.”

Foley can be deep like that. “One year for his birthday I sent him a picture of his face cropped onto the Dali Lama’s body,” relates Brantford-born Nicole Vandermade, the statuesque 20-year-old University of Texas sophomore who led the Longhorns in stroke average in her freshman year. “We started calling him Sean-y Lama, and the Lama name just kind of stuck, because he’s more than a golf coach—he’s like family. He’s there whenever I need him. The memory that sticks out most was a few years ago, when I played in the Canadian Amateur as a member of the Canadian National Team, and shot 97-95-89. I was devastated. I hadn’t shot anything like that since I was 12. I called him, crying, and he put it all in perspective, telling me that you’re not a bad person if you play bad golf, that golf isn’t who you are—it’s something that you do. The next week I almost won the Canadian Junior.”

Foley with his wife, Kate, and son, Quinn.

Few know Foley’s many layers like former Nationwide Tour player Brian McCann, who has probably shared a thousand rounds and five times as many pints since the twosome were in their early teens. “No one denies his knowledge,” says McCann. “It doesn’t matter what method of golf swing or what the new teaching aid on the Golf Channel is, he knows all of that. The thing that separates Sean from others is how good he is with people—interrelating with them, building relationships. He’s funny and he has a great aura about him.

“And he’s the most well-read person I’ve ever met,” adds McCann, who’s pretty confident that if Foley were female, he could speed-date with Gandhi, Einstein, G. Gordon Liddy and Ben Hogan in one sitting, and they’d all call him back the next night.

The latest feedings of Foley’s voracious appetite for knowledge include Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon; Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life by Wayne Dyer; The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra; and a work on Taoism “and his almost paradoxical form of philosophy by Dao De Jing,” relates Foley, who’s also still stoked about Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, about the NFL safety who went to Afghanistan to join the U.S. Army Rangers. “It talks about the historical aspect of Afghanistan—how long they’ve been kicking people’s asses,” he says. “That and the CIA.”

It’s an eclectic mix of readings. In an interview three years earlier, Foley had just polished off The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. “It explains how the mind works in terms of synapses and neurons,” he noted excitedly at the time. “I try to stay ahead of the curve.”

No kidding. Whereas some of his peers claim to think outside the box, Foley’s outside the room, down the hall, through the exit and over on the far side of town somewhere. It’s not that he’s a mad scientist—his principles are based on biomechanics and he works hand-in-glove with travelling partner Dr. Craig Davies, who’s among the top trainers and physical therapists on the PGA Tour—it’s just that Foley’s somewhat atypical in both his work ethic and depth-of-knowledge approach, not to mention his brutal honesty, which can rub a lot of people the wrong way.

“I’m completely, extremely socially and ethically liberal, and a bit of a radical,” he concedes just hours after addressing a gathering of fellow professionals at the Ontario PGA Education Conference in Toronto in mid-February—a few of whom he has serious respect for; another few of whom, he’s quite confident, don’t know a three-iron from a tire iron. While not universally loved, Foley was entertaining as usual. He’s been raising the eyebrows of his peers for the better part of his professional life. He remembers sitting at Glen Abbey a decade ago along with about a dozen instructors. A university graduate with two years of U.S. golf teaching under his belt, he was driving a forklift at night until the golf season kicked into gear. Asked what his goals were, he informed the more seasoned Glen Abbey instructors that he was going to teach five players in the top 50 in the world within the next decade.

“I heard people giggling,” he recalls, “and there was this look of ‘Who the f&*% does this guy think he is?’ But I never felt like ‘I’ll show you’—I’m never really that interested in showing anyone, to be honest. It’s just that I’ve been talking about doing this since I was 13. That means I’ve now been envisioning it, dreaming of it and creating it for 22 years. So I’m not shocked at all that it’s happened. If you ask Bill Gates ‘Are you shocked by your success?’ he’ll say no. He might be shocked that he’s worth like $8 billion, but not that his products and his vision worked. Some say that sounds arrogant, but many people judge others by their own mediocrity.”

McCann’s familiar with that singular focus—he’s seen it since he and Foley were at a select junior camp under legendary teaching pro Ben Kern at The National Golf Club in Woodbridge. “I was there because I wanted to play on the PGA Tour,” remembers McCann. “But Sean wasn’t—he wanted to coach on the PGA Tour. You ask hockey players when they’re kids what they want to do, and they all say, ‘I wanna play in the NHL.’ Who the f*&% says ‘I want to be the best coach in the world’? No one. I remember being in university and we played against his Tennessee team maybe twice. We’re all warming up on the driving range and Sean’s there helping two guys on my team with their swing. That just doesn’t happen.”

“I used to watch Butch Harmon and Nick Faldo and David Leadbetter, and they were heroes in my eyes,” Foley says. “I always loved to watch a ball fly through the air and I wanted to learn how to do it better. So my focus wasn’t always on scoring, it was understanding ‘why.’ I read everything I could get my hands on. I thought it was cool that these world-class players had coaches helping them organize their swings and being there to support them.”

Foley has followed their path, but not their style.

“From a technique standpoint, a lot of instructors believe in one thing,” says McCann, who remembers playing against Southern Methodist University in college and how every one of their Hank Haney-taught team members swung the club exactly the same, regardless of size and body type. “Much of that is marketing, so that they can say ‘This my technique,’ and get their name out there. Sean also has a vision of what the swing should be, but he understands that bodies and biomechanics are different. He also tends to work on the one area of most importance—the biggest fault in your swing, which is another reason his players don’t all look the same. If you look at his students, Ames doesn’t swing it the same way O’Hair swings it, or the same way Hunter swings it. And yet each is one of the best ball-strikers in golf. The drills will often look similar because it’s a feeling he’s trying to incorporate. But he adapts, based on his knowledge of how you can hit the ball more solidly and more accurately.”

O’Hair vouches for the results. Last spring he spoke to PGATour.com of his previous swing coach and childhood friend, Steve Dahlby. “It just got to a point where it was way too inconsistent,” O’Hair said. “And so I just wanted to give this guy Sean Foley a try and the guy is amazing. I’ve learned more about my golf swing in the past half-year than I have my entire life. I’ve completely changed my swing—my setup, my backswing, my downswing. I’m putting more consistently than I ever have. My pitching has improved. My chipping has improved. Everything has improved. Normally when you change your golf swing, you struggle for a certain period of time. I’ve improved.”

A year later O’Hair is still a true believer. “Where’s he’s probably helped me most is the mental outlook of perception and prioritizing my life. He’s actually made golf not as important as it used to be, and I think that’s helped my golf game, but it’s mostly helped my personal life.

“I’ve been through a lot of coaches, but Sean is definitely someone who can take me to the next level,” contends O’Hair, who hit it so pure last year at Quail Hollow that he won without making a single putt over 10 feet. “I don’t think it’ll ever be a situation where I don’t feel I can improve with Sean, because he’s constantly learning. And that’s his personality—he’s not ever going to get lazy when it comes to getting more knowledge or finding new things.”

The detractors point to the number of quality players Foley has inherited mid-stream, but virtually all have improved where history suggests there is little room to do so. The PGA Tour stats of Foley’s contingent bear that out, as do results like Jennifer’s Kirby’s historic 2009 run—winning every major event she entered, from the Toronto Star Amateur to each of the Ontario and Canadian Junior and Amateur championships—after a final tune-up with Foley for four days in Orlando.

And what does he charge for this level of expertise? Often nothing. Whereas Foley takes a commission on his Tour players’ earnings (he prefers to let their results dictate his compensation), he often has amateurs and aspiring pros stay for free at his Orlando home with his wife Kate and two-year-old son Quinn. “The fact is, it’s when they don’t have money that I often need to really spend time with them,” Foley explains. “If I’m charging them $500 an hour like so many of these pros are doing, then four hours is going to cost them $2,000. So now they have to really work at making the cut!”

Officially, Foley’s fee is $125 an hour—a fraction of his big-name competition’s cost—but he’s recently decided to do away with private lessons so that he can better focus his teaching energies on Tour, while clearing his off-weeks for personal time. From posts as director of the ClubLink Academy at Glen Abbey, to national coach for the Canadian Junior Golf Association, to moving to the golf instruction mecca of Orlando to helping found the Core Golf Junior Academy at Orange County National four years ago, Foley has paid his dues to be on golf’s greatest stage. And yet he does not see this as his end goal, rather, as merely a process.

“If I can stay on the road for 10 years, and things continue to go as they are, which I fully expect them to do, and my guys do well, then if I want to open up an academy at that point, there will be a waiting list,” says Foley. “But I also hope to be in a financial position where I could spend the rest of my life dedicating myself to inner-city kids and people less fortunate, because that feeling of seeing those kids I’ve worked with for years do well is so inspirational. Imagine being able to do that every day and feel that same way!”

His first priorities, however, remain Quinn and Kate, the latter of whom plays a full-time support role in Foley’s career. “Kate’s my best friend, and there’s no better feeling than coming through the door and seeing Quinn just bolt at me. I want to watch him grow up,” says Foley, who, in order to see his son before coming to Toronto for the CPGA seminar, flew first class from San Jose to San Francisco to Phoenix to Chicago to Orlando. “My flight was like $2,750. I only saw him for three hours, but it was worth it.”

Foley believes he can work with his gifted pupils for as long as he decides before calling it quits. O’Hair, for one, isn’t going anywhere, and Foley’s current disciples could fill a book with inspirational stories. But common sense and history suggest that modern professional golfers—even Foley’s enlightened flock—are too fickle to bleat to the same tune forever. Many of his player relationships will most likely fray and eventually dissolve. In golf, nobody marries forever.

But Foley’s bonds are tighter than most and his brand of wisdom so scarce that even were that to come to pass, one can’t help but imagine Tour Bedouins wandering the instructional desert years from now, peeking into dark caves and scaling sheer cliffs through a driving snowstorm to knock on a monastery door and ask if Lama might come out to the range for an hour to watch them swing.