By then, Foley and his wife, Kate, had moved to Orlando, Fla., to work at the Core Golf Academy, a private school with a golf-driven curriculum. Shortly after the move, Foley got the call. “I was sitting behind the wheel of my car when Stephen rang me up with an offer,” he recalled. “He told me he’d give me three days to see what I could do. I was in such a state of shock I almost swerved into a ditch.”
Ames had been suffering from back problems and with Foley’s help, he revamped his swing to make it less taxing on his spine. The pain disappeared; his game was rejuvenated and Foley had caught his first big fish. Those three days turned into a permanent position and after Ames won the 2007 Children’s Miracle Network Classic, Foley began attracting more clients.
Foley works with Craig Davies, a chiropractor and fitness trainer in Orlando. He said his approach to the golf swing is highly empirical. He taught Ames to swing in a way that maximized club-head speed without stressing the hips and back. Justin Rose told Maclean’s that since working with Foley his nagging back pain has also disappeared. “I think that has a lot to do with the way I move through the golf ball now. I finish very much on my left side now. I feel very tall after I hit the shot and I think that’s taken a lot of the pressure off my back.”
Rose said there are elements of the “stack-and-tilt” swing in Foley’s teaching. Hailed as a revolution by its creators, Andy Plummer and Mike Bennett, the stack-and-tilt method has a golfer’s head aligned directly above the ball at address. But that’s where the similarities to Foley’s technique end. “The difference is Sean believes in distributing the weight during the backswing,” Rose said. Foley described his approach more broadly: it’s about biomechanics and maximizing weight training and nutrition to create a swing that minimizes effort while maximizing the torque of the legs, hips and arms.
In any case, his coaching is about more than science. Foley said sometimes a player forgets how well he plays. “It’s my job to convince them they’re better than they think they are.” He talked about setbacks, and how players handle pressure. “It speaks volumes about their golf game. Sometimes things are going to go wrong in the game or in your personal life. The important thing is to get back to equilibrium,” he said. “Take Tiger Woods, for example. He hasn’t forgotten how to win, he just has too much on his mind right now.”
It’s an old saw that golf is a metaphor for life, but Foley takes it further than most. A voracious reader, he’s been known to quote everyone from Carl Jung to Confucius during practice sessions. But, he confessed, “Sometimes my best coaching sessions are when I keep my mouth shut because I can I see that a player is right where they need to be.”
Rose, who jumped to Foley’s camp last year, told Maclean’s Foley’s philosophy was one of the things that attracted him. He said he trusted Foley in a way he no longer believed in his former coach, Nick Bradley. “The changes I made with Sean felt instinctive, more natural, more childlike,” he explained. “The very sensations that my previous coach was hoping to rid me of.” He said Foley’s approach has paid dividends in his game.
And in a way, Rose has returned the favour. It’s not just the rumours linking Foley to Tiger that are driving Foley’s stock higher. Rose was victorious in July at the AT&T National, less than a month after winning the Memorial, a tournament hosted by Jack Nicklaus, where he’d fired an impressive six under 66 in the final round to secure his first victory on the PGA Tour in 162 starts. He credited Foley with advising him how to lower the trajectory of his golf ball, something that helped with the windy conditions that wreaked havoc on other players during the final round. “The changes I made with Sean Foley have enabled me to be a much better wind player,” he said in a post-win interview with reporters.
Foley, like many coaches, travels from tournament to tournament with his players, paying his own way. His clients compete with one another, but that’s never a problem. It’s a friendly group, and often all four practice together with Foley. But his brand of hands-on instruction, increasingly the norm on the PGA Tour, isn’t universally embraced. Commenting on ESPN during the U.S. Open in June, 55-year-old Curtis Strange, a golfing icon whose career peaked in the ’80s and early ’90s, said contemporary players are too dependent on their coaches and have sacrificed touch and feel in their quest for mechanical perfection. “In my day,” Strange said, “I saw a swing instructor once in the spring. But I didn’t have him with me all the time.” Strange isn’t alone in that view; fellow commentator and retired player Andy North has made similar remarks.
But the results of Foley’s coaching style are hard to argue with. The question now is, what about that rumour linking Foley to Tiger? For the moment, the current number one player in the world seems determined to work on his game alone. When the subject of Woods came up, Foley said he wasn’t comfortable discussing it. But one has to wonder if it won’t be long before a top-ranked player who’s fighting demons on and off the golf course turns to someone like Foley to help free up his game.
Coaching in the big leagues has its downsides. There’s the busy travel schedule, which doesn’t allow Foley as much time with his wife and their toddler Quinn as he’d like. During one chat with Maclean’s, Foley found himself stranded for an entire day at the Detroit airport after missing a connecting flight. “It’s a writeoff,” he said. At such times he falls back on his own advice. “A few years back this sort of delay would have caused a complete meltdown. But I’ve learned to make do with what life offers.” He talked about Karl Marlantes’s novel about the Vietnam War, Matterhorn. “I’ve read nearly 400 pages today,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the missed connection, that would never have happened.”
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